First Minister pledges to bring policy-making closer to communities

First Minister John Swinney will pledge to bring policy-making closer to communities in a major speech ahead of next week’s Scottish budget.

The speech, in which the first minister is to outline his vision for government, is being delivered in Edinburgh on Wednesday morning.

He is set to call for greater collaboration and consensus-building across both politics and wider society in order to tackle mounting problems.

Swinney will warn the issues Scotland faces now are “complex, pervasive and entrenched”, but conversations often focus on “surface solutions” due to the challenge of finding consensus.

He will say: “Too often – and particularly in politics – discussions and the public discourse are dominated by surface solutions, because they are the few that can gain consensus.

“The temptation then arises to throw money and strategies at a problem, or simply to find someone to blame for it, because the hard work of finding true consensus, of peer reviewing ideas in good faith, can feel unrealistic in our increasingly polarised reality.

“We must maintain enough hope and energy to work together, to understand the root causes and the complexity of problems and to find the right solutions.

“These solutions may not always be quick or easy – but that does not make them any less necessary. This is the approach that people should expect from a Swinney government.”

Finance secretary Shona Robison will deliver the budget next Wednesday, but the minority administration will need to get the support of at least one other party to pass it.

Negotiations have been ongoing for the last few weeks, with opposition MSPs setting out their asks.

While the UK Government’s budget was welcomed by Swinney and Robison as a “step in the right direction” due to an increase to the block grant, there has been a row over the impact of the increase to National Insurance contributions from employers.

It was reported earlier this week that Chancellor Rachel Reeves intended to prove an extra £300m to the Scottish Government to mitigate the impact on the public sector, which employs more than one in five Scots.

But Robison has accused the UK Government of “austerity by the back door”, claiming that she needed more than £500m to fully mitigate the tax increase since the Scottish public sector is comparatively larger than in the rest of the UK.