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 devolution 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.
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