DEREK Mackay has urged the Treasury to increase the Scottish Government’s borrowing limits to help it cope with the “significant challenges” of an unusually late UK budget.
The Finance Secretary last night wrote to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rishi Sunak asking him to show greater flexibility in 2020-21.
Chancellor Sajid Javid last week announced the UK budget would be three months late on March 11 because of Brexit and the general election.
The date upset the Scottish budget, which is based on forecasts released with the UK budget.
Scottish ministers normally have these by December, allowing MSPs to pass a Budget Bill in February, which in turn lets Scottish councils set their budgets by in March.
In his letter, Mr Mackay said he had been left facing “a choice between two highly undesirable outcomes”, publishing the Scottish budget without all the facts available or attempting to do it in “an extraordinarily short time” after the UK budget.
Hinting he would set a Scottish budget before the UK one, he asked for a “flexible approach” on block grant adjustments related to Holyrood taxes and “revised borrowing limits and terms”.
He also asked for more time to fix previous forecast errors and confidential “early insight” into UK policy changes.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel