Shona Robison’s big fiscal announcement this week should have been the Scottish government’s plans to mitigate the deeply unpopular winter fuel payment cut imposed by UK Labour. The nationalists went early on revealing the scheme, however, doing so a week before the budget after being pushed by some smart manoeuvring from Scottish Labour.
Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader, had stated he would mitigate the winter fuel payment cut should he become First Minister in Holyrood’s 2026 elections. This position puts him in opposition to his Westminster boss, but Sarwar needs to demonstrate to Scottish voters he can use devolution to prioritise Scottish interests, no matter what Keir Starmer might be up to. Labour then tabled two amendments to the draft legislation needed to allow Scotland’s benefits agency, Social Security Scotland, to administer the payment.
Anyone stopping to look closely at these amendments might note the changes would make the payment more expensive and more complicated to administer. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to force the nationalists to act on keeping Scots pensioners warm in winter or to be condemned for their inaction – so they acted. You could sense the fag-packet urgency of the thing by its details. Scottish Labour had been pushing the SNP to spend a £41 million funding pot from Westminster on mitigating the winter fuel payment this year.
But it isn’t merely a case of handing out cash. Legislation has to be drafted and approved to allow it; systems put in place to pay it out. Instead, the £41 million was split into parts: £20 million each for a warm homes scheme and the Scottish Welfare Fund, then £1m for, er, social landlords to help residents sustain their tenancies.
‘Not sure how that helps exactly,’ an SNP insider said. Other than that it simply makes the numbers add up. Behind the scenes, it was ‘pure The Thick of It’ another insider told me. You can imagine the Malcolm Tucker-esque screaming for ideas. Make an announcement, any announcement, as long as it totals £41 million.
With the would-be centrepiece of this week’s budget announcement gone, what else might be up the finance secretary’s sleeve? To the surprise of many, Robison revealed her government would also mitigate the two-child benefit cap. The Conservative policy of limiting families to benefit entitlement for only their first two children has been a politically toxic one in Scotland. Polling shows a majority of Scots support the two-child cap, but the SNP has campaigned long and hard to end it. They have used the cap, and the associated ‘rape clause’ to call the Tories cruel and out of touch.
The nationalists then revived their campaigning during the general election to call for Labour to end the cap, attempting to frame Keir Starmer as a man unbothered by the plight of impoverished children. While that clearly had little impact for the UK party, it was a stick with which to beat Scottish Labour.
The media coverage was exactly as the SNP had hoped it to be – they were abolishing the two-child cap and bringing the political fight to Labour. The SNP has performed a neat trick here: they have no clear plan to mitigate the cap. Rather, they have a plan to find a plan to mitigate the cap. The budget spending pledge is for £3 million to ‘develop the systems’ to be used to award the benefit. By the time they do that, they may no longer be in power.
John Swinney has previously stated that the Scottish government has no power to mitigate the two-child cap. Now, suddenly, it does. If it was possible all along for the SNP to move sooner, then it is impossible to defend the allegation that the party allowed families to suffer for longer than was necessary for nothing but the sake of political point scoring.
Regardless, Sarwar is now above a trap door on the SNP’s stage. Labour is vanishingly unlikely to support the SNP’s budget and will have to vote down a budget that will feed hungry children. The SNP will say it is stopping Labour from freezing Scotland’s pensioners and starving its children. Labour will point to the fact that the SNP can only do this because of additional funding presented to Scotland this year by the Chancellor.
So far, so predictable. What’s interesting is the urgency behind the scenes to move on these two policy pledges. They were last minute and they were rushed.
Yet what does this urgency say? During Labour’s sweep to power, Anas Sarwar had a spring in his step. The narrative north of the border was that his party would be propelled to power in 2026 and he was already styling himself as Scotland’s new First Minister.
The SNP, under the no-nonsense pairing of John Swinney and his deputy Kate Forbes, has clearly decided it is not going to allow Sarwar into Bute House without a fight. They have moved steadily away from the culture wars obsession of the last administration and are focusing on tangible issues voters care about.
These two fiscal counter-attacks from Swinney’s government show his steel and determination
These manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres show the run up to 2026 is going to be more interesting than first thought – but the SNP will need more than mere tricks to see off Labour’s challenge.
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