From the magazine Michael Simmons

How the SNP wasted £110 million on PR and spin

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons
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EXPLORE THE ISSUE 08 March 2025
issue 08 March 2025

Michael Simmons has narrated this article for you to listen to.

No country in the UK receives more public money per head than Scotland. An extra £2,200 is spent on every person living there than in England – and £1,900 more than the UK average. Yet public services north of the border are falling apart.

Take education. Scotland spends more per pupil than anywhere else – £1,848 per head compared with £1,543 in England. Yet standards have plummeted while those in England have improved. The latest Pisa rankings show Scottish pupils to be a year behind their English counterparts, despite a testing bias in favour of Scottish children.

When it comes to economic affairs, some £2,228 per head is spent on growth initiatives, welfare and subsidy in Scotland, compared with £1,805 in England. That includes an additional £124 per head on economic development. But Scotland lags behind the rest of the UK on ten out of the 13 productivity indicators tracked by CBI Scotland academics. Business investment as a share of GDP remains lower than the UK average.

Since the devolution referendum in 1997, Scotland has had some of the highest health spending in the UK. But life expectancy is stagnating, and people in Scotland die two years earlier than those in England. The Scottish NHS is in a state of ‘permanent crisis’, according to the British Medical Association. Drug deaths are the highest in Europe: nearly three times the rate in England. Rehab services have had their funding cut while the government experiments with ‘safe’ consumption rooms.

The country fares little better when it comes to industry. Take the scandal, which began in 2015, when a £97 million ferry contract was awarded to an industrialist who was friendly with Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon; the bill has now ballooned to more than £450 million and only one of the vessels is in service.

Scottish public spending is also wasteful. Russell Findlay’s Scottish Conservatives have kept a tally, with a particular focus on contracts for diversity, equality and inclusion schemes and training. In January, for example, Museums Galleries Scotland sought a provider for ‘anti-ableism workshops’.

It seems that even Scotland’s officials want out. The Scottish Daily Mail reports some 241 government employees, including seven of the highest-paid, are registered as living elsewhere in Britain, avoiding higher Scottish tax rates (there are six tax bands compared with the UK’s three; the top earners are charged a 48 per cent tax rate).

In the past decade, the
Scottish government has spent £110 million on PR

Then there is the Scottish government’s expenditure on spin doctors, which has doubled to over £4 million since the SNP came to power in 2011. BBC Scotland employs 34 journalists; the SNP government has more than 50 press officers on the public payroll.

In the past decade, the Scottish government has spent £110 million on PR, £61 million on external consultants, £5.6 million on overseas travel and £3.7 million on hospitality and entertainment. In the same period, the number of Scottish government staff earning more than £150,000 has tripled.

Earlier this year, it was reported that the Scottish government had racked up more than £10 million in recent legal costs. It has also spent hundreds of thousands resisting Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, particularly regarding an ethics report into Sturgeon’s handling of the Salmond investigation. Despite advice suggesting it will lose ‘in ten seconds’, it continues to fight FOI requests.

Increasingly Scotland has become a ‘secret society’, one government source tells me, where transparency is avoided at any cost. An FOI request by the Mail on Sunday shows that £73,024 of taxpayer cash was spent on external legal fees at the Court of Session (Scotland’s highest court) in an attempt to block the full release of the ethics report into Sturgeon, fighting the Information Commissioner’s ruling.

The pattern is the same across multiple cases. The government spent £62,000 in legal fees opposing the women’s rights group For Women Scot, while another intriguing government spending record reveals a £1.2 million bill in a mysterious case of ‘REDACTED vs REDACTED’.

What’s behind all this expensive secrecy? The answer, it seems, lies with John Swinney, now the First Minister, previously Sturgeon’s deputy. Throughout her premiership, and the entire Salmond fallout, Swinney controlled what was and wasn’t released. He chose to keep much hidden – and now his government is doing the same with the ethics report. One senior nationalist thinks they know why: ‘Swinney comes out of the report worse than anybody… It’s unbelievably shameful that an SNP government would work in that way.’

‘It’s leasehold.’

The control-freakery seeps into the charity sector. In Scotland, 45 per cent of charities’ funding comes from government contracts and grants (in England it is just 30 per cent). This has led to a belief that charities have become politicised in order to survive. ‘[There is a] danger that the third sector becomes the third arm of the Scottish state rather than acting independently,’ the former SNP cabinet minister Alex Neil tells me. ‘Look at the number of third sector organisations almost totally dependent on their funding from the Scottish government – that’s not a healthy situation to be in. It’s very difficult to tell the difference between what is a quango and what is acting as a third sector body.’ He warns: ‘There is a real danger the government becomes corrupt.’

Audit Scotland, which signs off government accounts, is meant to act as a bulwark against all this. Yes, it has produced valuable reports pointing to failures and scandals, from ferries to the census, but it has its critics, too. Neil says he is ‘very sceptical’. A large proportion of the work done for the auditor-general is outsourced to large accounting companies with ‘a bit of an old boys’ network operating there’.

The SNP’s record in government is clear: they spend more and deliver less. The problem isn’t just inefficiency – it’s the prioritising of control over competence. As the spending spirals, it’s becoming impossible to ignore the real cost of the SNP’s rule.

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