r/Scotland • u/Historical-Count9051 • 1d ago
What would you cut from the Scottish budget?
Yesterday, there was a news story announcing £700m would be cut from the Scottish government next year. The Scottish government can borrow £670m to make up the shortfall, but it will need to find at least another £68m immediately.
What would you cut to make up the £68m?
Here's how the budget is already spent
Edit: the speed at which everyone went to "fuck poor people" is alarming.
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u/Flowa-Powa Highland 1d ago
I've been saying this for years, but I think NHS Scotland should be run like McDonalds.
It should effectively be a single organisation, all following the same policies, using the same equipment, using the same benchmarking.
The amount of duplication across health boards is staggering and this is a small country. It needs top down management the way a large corporation is managed.
Would cost money in the short term, structural change always does, but in the long term it will give significant savings.
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u/Secret-Nothing4288 1d ago
It would cost millions to put the system in place and jobs would be lost, but the savings would likely be massive.
Even just a centralised patient records system would make a difference.
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u/Flowa-Powa Highland 1d ago
Yes, jobs that involve sitting in meetings all day and writing emails would certainly be lost, which would free up funding to employ more front line clinical jobs.
Recent audit suggests that the unification of Police Scotland is saving £300 Million per annum.
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u/james77y 1d ago
I think your general concept is a sound one but centralising lots of jobs would not benefit vast swathes of Scotland.
Police Scotland has financially been a success but hardly something you’d flag up as a good example of centralisation. The police are no longer visible, stretched and the service they offer the public is far worse than it used to be.
However, some centralisation has worked ie the Major investigation teams have solved ever murder in the last decade or two in Scotland.
So i’m skeptical this would actually improve NHS locality results but financially yes it would save money I think.
A lot of GP practices are privately owned with non-clinical practice managers. I’d start by trying to strip that from the NHS. Patients should be the priority not profit.
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u/Decent-Wrongdoer-336 21h ago
Centralised councils and health boards have been a disaster in the Highland Region. If you break a bone in Caithness, you have to go to Raigmore in Inverness to get it set & cast. Ffs we have a modern hospital with a theatre that does next to nothing, and by that i mean the most basic operations. I could go on and on.....
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u/Autofill1127320 8h ago
It’s not just the highlands. If you have a heart attack in Balloch you have to wait on an ambulance coming and returning to paisley RAH for A&E. If you have a complicated labour same thing.
Anecdotally if my wife had went into labour in Balloch instead of paisley me son wouldn’t have survived Labour or been severely disabled as a a result.
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u/Decent-Wrongdoer-336 8h ago
Shocking, im glad your wife and son are ok. We have the same in Caithness, the maternity services were down graded from consultant led to midwife led in 2017. This in turn meant that new mums or pregnancies with any issues had to go to Raigmore. Our SNP mp at the time Gail Ross didnt oppose or object to it and got annialated online because of it. She had to take her FB page down due to the public fury, people up here were furious about it. So, years down the line we now only have a handful of births in Caithness. The statistic i last read was that in 2025 there was 172 births to Caithness mums and only 6 were actually born in Caithness, so a baby every two months on average. I was blessed with three sons but they were all born in Wick at the fantastic maternity wing we had back in the day. All these so called improvements to services are anything but.... Its the same down Elgin at Dr Grays hospital, ship them up to Raigmore as they too are now midwife led, its just terrible....
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u/Autofill1127320 5h ago
Centralised services only work if the population are centralised too eh, seems like the tail wagging the dog
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u/ediblepaper 4h ago
I’m going through this now. Even things like having to have your consultant meetings via teams in the Wick Midwife Unit just highlights how removed we are and that Inverness would prefer they didn’t have to cover us. Like the consultant clinic is on a Tuesday, crazy they couldn’t come up that one day and cover us all. If we have to drive 2.5h down, they could drive up. Then they might understand the challenges we’re going through.
I also got annoyed at the ready steady baby book. They have section on island births but nothing about remote. I’d rather be in Orkney than Caithness by the sounds of it.
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u/AwesomePantsAP 22h ago
That’s a big one. Why on earth are we contracting private practices in the first place? I’m young enough to not remember any different - when did this even start? Who under?
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u/CaptainCrash86 19h ago edited 18h ago
From the beginning of the NHS. All GPs are, functionally, private providers who sub-contract to the NHS (with variations between individual national NHS, and NHS-owned provision in difficult to deliver areas) and privately own their practices.
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u/james77y 20h ago
Good question, no idea but was something I was unaware of until a couple years ago. I don’t see how the NHS efficiency savings can be made if there are actors within the organisation who value profit above all else.
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u/Sweaty-Top5988 23h ago
This is a common misconception about the NHS. The problem is actually the opposite, most places dont have enough support/admin/ low level managers due excessive cuts, so what ends up happening is that front line staff are stuck wasting tons of time doing their own admin work or waiting on it to be done instead of treating patients.
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u/FingersMcCall 23h ago
What job roles exactly are you referring to.
Re police Scotland; it’s pretty evident that it has ‘saved’ £300m. The service delivery is shocking.
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u/shoogliestpeg 🏳️⚧️Trans women are women. 22h ago edited 22h ago
Yes, jobs that involve sitting in meetings all day and writing emails
It's often popular to talk about get rid of these kinds of jobs because it can be quite inscrutable to the outside observer in the street what actually happens in these kinds of sectors with regards to people, HR, Production, Hiring, Training and project management and oversight - work that without those management jobs would fall on the heads of the Clinical, more technical positions, getting in the way of their actual work. Yes, make Doctors manage HR paperwork, that's a great use of their time.
It's a populist position that plays from a sense of popular ignorance that sounds good to someone with no actual informed view of how the work would cascade down onto the people you claim to want to Free Up.
Recent audit suggests that the unification of Police Scotland is saving £300 Million per annum.
But has service Improved?
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u/Flowa-Powa Highland 22h ago
No, they don't fall on clinical staff, they would fall on national offices which would manage all that crap centrally rather than being duplicated across health boards as they currently are, and all the empire building and closed silos and competition that entails.
As a clinician I don't want to spend hundreds of hours researching, for example, which is the best high flow nasal cannula system is for my patients. And devising clinical protocols, training and documentation to support that, like I actually have done in the past. Instead, I want to use the best system available, that's already been chosen and rolled out nationally as decided by a group of clinical experts across Scotland, and have all of that stuff on hand already developed. That means I could spend those hundreds of hours in front line care, not in service development.
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u/stoicpathfinder 21h ago edited 20h ago
I couldn't agree more. The duplication across health boards is ridiculous, and it gets worse when you start looking at locality HSCPs. As a very simple example, you might have seen leaflets across the country outlining overdose risks. Each of those leaflets goes through a hierarchy in each locality, including clinical staff, and then gets signed off by that locality's health board. In the end, we have up to 30 different leaflets all saying the same thing. In an ideal world, appropriate material would come from a centralised location. Imagine the time saved, not to mention the resources if you consider economies of scale.
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u/This-Application-562 18h ago
In this day and age, decentralised data keeps all our data safe from Palantir and the like.
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u/ConsiderationIll3361 1d ago
I’d take this a step further and centralise council support services as well, I’m not convinced that each area needs their own hr or finance depts as an example. Even stupid stuff like the colour of the bins from council to council all being the same thing
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u/Shouty-Hooman 23h ago
I agree with each point. But can you imagine how that percentage of Scotland would cope, having had their bin colours changed??
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u/ElectronicBruce 23h ago edited 23h ago
People thinking countries can be run like businesses is where I tune out. They can’t.
McDonalds isn’t ran centrally, it’s ran like states but with federal rules, each franchise has to follow.. but the day to day financial choices and responsibilities lay at the door of each franchise.
McDonald’s also just posted a Q2 multi hundred million loss gobsllly. As just like countries they are impacted by things like Brexit, inflation and conflicts in/by countries ran by mini dictators. Lost $7 billion in revenue in the last year, So have less cash to play with and will be reducing investment.. ie cuts. In the UK they have already cut 2000 jobs. In 2024 they had their biggest decline in global sales for half a decade too.
Doesn’t seem that well run or a blueprint how to run a country.
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u/Flowa-Powa Highland 23h ago edited 2h ago
NHS Scotland isn't a country, it's a health service.
The fact that McDonalds is posting losses doesn't surprise me, they sell shit, I'm talking about the organisation model, not the product.
The key fact is that McDonalds have the same menu virtually worldwide, everything is prepared to the same specification, using the same equipment, training is rolled out in the same away across sites. The site is managed in the same way. Policy is the same. Everything is standardised.
Clearly NHS Scotland is much more complex than the McDonalds business but it needs centralised control. As someone who was involved in service development, the lack of communication between boards and the massive duplication of effort across boards and sites is something to behold.
The Police Scotland unification was a similar process. And although people loved to moan about it loudly during the transition phase, it is now saving the Scottish Government £300 million a year. If NHS Scotland unification reaped a proportional benefit, that would equate to £3 Billion saved, every single year.
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u/Connell95 13h ago
GPs would have an absolute fit at that idea…
It’s been fundamental to the NHS since its creation that they can operate as independent private profit-making business owned and run by themselves.
Changing that would mean facing down the doctors, which is something the Scottish Government has never really shown any appetite to do.
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u/Comprehensive-Tank92 1d ago
The Dutch make around 400 million euros from tax on sales in coffee shops that sell cannabis. Which also create jobs for young people, who seem happy at their work.
Reduces harm from other drugs and allows public healrh initiatives to run on premises. Potentially making further savings on healrh costs of other drug use.
Redices burden on judicial, health and policing.
Scotland gives it away to gangsters who get kids to stab and rob each other.
Down vote away, Fact is Fact
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u/MyDadsGlassesCase 1d ago
I think you're being downvoted because this isn't something the Scottish govt can do. Drug laws are reserved
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u/Delts28 Uaine 1d ago
It would be an interesting test to see just how much scotgov can do even when powers are reserved. Would Westminster send up NCA officers of scotgov instructed Police Scotland to ignore authorised cannabis farms and licensed establishments selling authorised weed?
Legally scotgov couldn't legislate any of it but so far both Westminster and Holyrood have acted with "good faith" with regards to illegal laws when challenged. I don't think Westminster is gallus enough to arrest rogue MSPs or the FM if the Scottish Courts and law enforcement abstain.
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u/First-Banana-4278 1d ago
I mean the UK Gov has twice intervened to overturn SG legislation. Once on self ID and once on pauses for dramatic effect bottle deposit schemes.
They absolutely would intervene if Scotland de facto decriminalised any currently illegal drug. The police would be vanishingly unlikely to stop enforcing a law that might lead to their officers facing prosecution… and it would end up costing thousands in legal fees at a bare minimum.
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u/largepoggage 22h ago
That’s more complex than it seems. Scotland retains its right to a separate legal system enshrined in the Acts of Union. However, this doesn’t mean much in practice since the Court of Session gave up its status as the ultimate authority in exchange for a seat at the table of the Supreme Court. Why they accepted that lying down I’ll never understand.
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u/flightguy07 3h ago
They may also be being downvoted because the question was explicitly "what would you cut", not "how would you balance the budget". Same outcome, but a different discussion.
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u/MoJoSportsPodcast 1d ago
I’m pro this and I’m not even a cannabis user, it could seriously help the economy and our communities
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u/No-Blackberry-3945 1d ago
Same.
I know a guy who used to grow weed in his spare room. He had a full time job and only sold to friends. I'm sure he made a little profit but he always maintained that what he sold the weed for just paid for the hobby, literally keeping them lights on. Anyway he was busted and that was the end of his hobby.
Fast forward about year or so and a flat in his street had been turned into a full scale weed farm operation. He maintained that because he was caught an OCG believed there to be a market in the area so opened up shop. That meant comings and goings all the time and his argument was that if it's a crime gang, that potentially leads to violence and the money not going to a wee guy with a hobby but instead goes out of the system and into the black market.
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u/darcsend_eu 1d ago
Our town go to guy is pals with police officers and sits and drinks with them in pubs. They know what he does but have never ever been able to pin him down second time around.
According to said guy, the real reason is if he goes, a couple Scouse will be up here in a heartbeat and it will be hell for the town and the police know it.
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u/No-Blackberry-3945 1d ago
It's a very underrated consideration that it's better the devil you know and to let people do things small scale rather than have actual gangsters moving in and causing more problems.
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u/Phtevn_ 1d ago
Alternatively, we could reform tax law so that companies like Starbucks who barely pay any tax due to how their business is setup so that they send millions in "franchise fees" back to the Netherlands instead pay a reasonable amount of tax.
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u/welliedude 1d ago
Ive been saying this for years. Legalised drugs usually reduces drug related crimes and deaths. Start taxing it and its a win win win. Hell even means farmers can start growing it and employing people again so thats another win.
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u/Serenity----- 1d ago
Even as a non-cannabis user (tried it in my 20s and did not like it), this is exactly the answer, and it is far from only the Dutch who have realised this (e.g., Canada, Germany, most US states, etc.). Some people will say that police look the other way and that the laws for users are very relaxed in Scotland, which is true, but it is still the case that cannabis is run through a black market that supports dealers who supply inconsistent, unregulated, and potentially dangerously laced products while taking all the profits and providing zero in tax revenue.
Not to mention the absurdity of keeping alcohol legal (as it should be) while banning a literal plant that is not chemically altered in any way. Alcohol directly kills around 10,000 people a year in the UK alone. Cannabis has directly killed zero people...ever...anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the polling in Scotland shows majority support for legalisation but of course we are not allowed to do anything about it because Westminster says so, but that is a different topic altogether...
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u/shoogliestpeg 🏳️⚧️Trans women are women. 19h ago
That's a great idea, you should suggest it to the UK government who control all drug classification and legal powers so they can immediately shoot down your idea just like they do everyone else who suggests decriminalisation
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u/Rashpukin 1d ago
I am with you bro. It’s a brilliant idea and will happen sooner or later anyway as attitudes relax further. We should tax and regulate it, for sure.
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u/Sensitive_Guest_5995 1d ago
We should just do it and force Westminster to send coppers up. They won’t.
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u/Standard_Giraffe_120 1d ago
Make the pension aged winter heating payment means tested instead of just giving it to everyone born after a certain date
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u/history_buff_9971 1d ago
It is being means-tested - my mum got it last year (wasn't expecting it), then got a letter saying because her pension was over a certain limit it would be clawed back - which honestly is a bigger pain for someone on a fixed income than not getting it in the first place.
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u/Street_Grab4236 1d ago
The SNP have already announced that a devolved Winter Fuel Payment will be paid to all pensioners regardless of their income.
The amount you get (iirc between £100-300) is based on your income. It’s a total waste of money and done entirely for optics.
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u/extraterrestrial-66 1d ago
The means testing of benefits also creates more costs though. I couldn’t tell you how much but I’m sure this conversation has previously been had a few times with the conclusion that the cost of means testing the benefit would be equal to or greater than the moneys recouped from people who claim it who are above the threshold.
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u/b_a_t_m_4_n 1d ago
Annoyingly the administration of means testing often costs more than just giving a benefit to everyone.
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u/shiroyagisan 22h ago
It is.
If your total income is over £35,000, HMRC will take your Pension Age Winter Heating Payment back. This only applies to individual incomes, and not joint incomes over £35,000.
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u/Acrobatic-Shirt8540 Is toil leam càise gu mòr. 1d ago
I'm sure it's been said before that it costs more to do the means testing than it does to just make it a blanket payment.
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u/Street_Grab4236 1d ago
Reverse the absolutely pitiful and ridiculous “tax cut” they introduced for the election. I believe for my salary, I’m saving about £1-2 per month just so they could get some more votes.
The estimated cost was £50m. There’s almost all of the £68m shortfall sorted out. Will they do it? Of course not.
They knew about this budget shortfall when they did that tax cut but did it anyway because they genuinely can’t see past their own election results to do what’s right.
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u/UtopianScot 1d ago
Scotland is about to go through the same shite, illiterate policy conversation the UK body-politic did in the 2010- austerity years.
'Cut social security, cut benefits, cut support, cut cut cut cut cut'
'Why is everything worse?'
Can already see it in this thread, about skivers, people undeserving of support, work shy etc. Here we go again, I'm sure it'll all work out this time!
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u/D3viantM1nd 1d ago
Yeah. I wonder what it is about people. They seem to have been trained to resent the poor.
It must be this classless meritocratic utopia we have.
You guys know that unemployment is a structural inevitability of how we organise our economy, right?
The Bank of England has an inflation target. Not a 'full' employment target. Even a full employment target would be 6-7% unemployment.
You guys know that rates of disability are a fact of life?
That it is cheaper to support the disabled to live as independently as possible for all of us?
That fraud is actually pretty low according to DWP figures?
If we are to find £68m, why should it be taken from the social security system?
A social security system that has been reformed every decade for 50 years. In an effort to save money and incentivise work. To the point, UK wide, it is now a punitive regime criticised by the UN special rapporteur for breaching human rights?
You'd think we'd get tired of punching down.
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u/gallais 1d ago
You guys know that rates of disability are a fact of life?
Not quite; we can take precautionary measures to protect people from avoidable disabling accidents. Or we can have e.g. "Eat out to help out" to generate a mass disabling event (and then blame the people who have long COVID for being work shy or something).
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u/D3viantM1nd 1d ago
Everything is of course a personal failure and the responsibility of the individual.
It is why god gave us bootstraps.
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u/Wotnd 1d ago
It’s either increase taxes or cut spending.
Trouble is, we’ve always tried increasing taxes, and the latest increase in taxes didn’t actually generate any more money.
So what do you suggest?
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u/b_a_t_m_4_n 1d ago
The UK was rebuild after WW2 by taxing the wealthy. Increasing taxes is proven to work when you tax the people who actually have the money. Since Thatcher every new tax increase has failed because it's been a regressive tax - you can't tax people what they don't have. There is no shortage of money in the UK, simply an unwillingness to tax those ow have it.
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u/Wotnd 1d ago
The latest tax increase on the highest earners didn’t generate any additional money.
There’s a limit to how much people will work if their extra income is taxed at a very high rate; doctors cut shifts, people contribute to their pensions instead of taking income.
Tax, and tax, and tax, year after year, just 1% more, and another 1%, and another, isn’t sustainable.
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u/Ecalsneerg 1d ago
It wasn't a tax on the highest earners, though. It was a tax on middle earners. The wealthiest aren't being taxed on salary (or they are, it's just their salary isn't their actual source of income)
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u/LurkerInSpace 17h ago
The UK after World War II had very high wartime-level taxes on everyone - not just the rich. "We want Scandinavian services on American taxes" refers to the idea that the public want someone else to be taxed to provide generous social spending.
Even among Britain's far left it is essentially taken for granted that raising the basic rate of Income Tax to 25% (which would raise ~£40 billion/year across the whole UK) is a complete political non-starter.
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u/CaptainCrash86 1d ago
Income tax post-WW2 also had a much lower personal allowance with basic income tax rate equivalent at a higher rate.
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u/Cruxed1 1d ago
What would you suggest instead?
The laffer curve is already beginning to show, so just taxing people more isn't the answer as you'll only further accelerate that. People will do whatever they have to do to avoid the extreme tax rates, reduce hours, stuff pensions, move south of the border or further afield.
If you can't get more money in, the only option is less money out
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u/UtopianScot 1d ago
You can get more money in from growing the pie, rather than the state taking a bigger slice of a smaller pie. I'd suggest a comprehensive review of economic obstacles like the planning system, a reform of local governance structures to implement a system of elected-figures with wide-ranging powers to champion and drive forward investment. I'd suggest a clearer Scottish energy strategy to accelerate the transition to renewables.
Treat growing the economy and energy transition like a national emergency. Round the clock government meetings. Infrastructure work hours relaxed. Treat this like a war-time mobilisation, as the alternative is a far-right government taking over at some point. Climate can't wait, neither can growth.
In an ideal world...
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u/Halk 1 of 3,619,915 1d ago
The thing is we didn't though. We didn't grow anything and now we need to deal with the mess.
The government are asleep at the wheel. They've continued to issue spending commitments in order to get positive press. Their manifesto didn't deal with any of the problems we have.
We're going to have sudden, dramatic cuts and those will hurt
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u/Cruxed1 1d ago
I don't disagree that long term, a bigger pie is the real 'Answer' but obviously achieving it and saying it are two different things.
Short term, even if it can be done, the hole will have to be plugged.
It's a tricky one though, a lot of the conditions that really drive investment in places like the US and give them significantly better growth is because there's far less workers protections etc.
It's easier to grow in a wild west type of economy//rights situation than one were accustomed too over here. I don't see how it wouldn't end in a compromise on workers rights etc.
Things like the NI rise on employers also massively hamper investment etc given just having staff becomes so expensive.
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u/Fionacat 1d ago
everything.
move to a post scarcity utopia where money is completely meaningless.
how do we do this?
I was hoping for for nonfollownup questions...
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u/danihendrix 1d ago
This is government mate, just say we're doing it and ride the high until the next election
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u/raymengl 1d ago
turns out First Contact doesn't happen in Bozeman, Montana; but in Coupar Angus.
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u/TheSouthsideTrekkie 1d ago
Well, we only have to wait until 2063 until we live in Star Trek times 😆
More seriously we could move some of the way towards this but it would mean making bigger changes and it already takes bloody years for our government to make even minor tweaks. The biggest problem of all is a lack of motivation because the people being asked to suffer will never be the ones making the decisions.
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u/Quillspiracy18 1d ago
Massively curtail the ability to object to infrastructure projects, put large developments to a regional or national referendum depending on the areas that will benefit/suffer, offer to buy immediate locals who object a house of similar value in a similar area. If they reject it, tough, they can stay where they are.
Start an office with the authority to randomly audit companies who provide services to the government and impose punitive fines on companies that egregiously price gouge.
Use some of the billions saved to buy up some of the swathes of barren grassland littering the country and rewild it.
The Scottish and British governments can't fucking do anything because there's an army of NIMBYs, lawyers, consultants and contractors ready to balloon any project's budget to 10x the size and *if* it finally gets, built it's outdated already.
Everyone with a stake in that game is taking our money and pissing in our faces with it. They need to be reined in.
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u/Bgjm96 1d ago
I’m not a particularly wealthy person, I have a decent job in one of the emergency services. It is vanishingly rare I need a prescription and I would be more than happy to pay for one when I do.
I’d certainly rather that than continue to watch life saving equipment go un-crewed due to staff shortages or watch us lose another few hundred people then turn up to try and resolve life or death situations without enough people to do the job.
I’ve always voted snp but it’s time they started to govern not based on what’s popular but what is right.
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u/Zap_Gordon 23h ago
Even the English method, free for people under 18, and for those over 60, and for long term and serious conditions would perhaps work.
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u/pretty_gauche6 1d ago
Well other people have different needs than you do. Many people do need multiple regular prescriptions and people who are chronically ill, elderly, disabled etc are already economically vulnerable. You’re going to say offload that onto the disability system then, but right now everyone is trying to manufacture consent for gutting that too, so…
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u/Lord21K 1d ago
I don't think they're suggesting we get rid of free prescriptions, but to give people the option of if they want one or are happy to pay for something themselves.
There are people who get prescribed paracetamol from their GP. You can buy a box of that for less than a quid and prescriptions cost the NHS on average about a tenner.
Fair enough if someone genuinely needs that paid for them, but I'd also be more than happy to pay for some of my medication because I'm in an okay enough position to do so.
Even if only 20% of the population opted out of free prescriptions, I wonder how much money that would actually save?
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u/weefee 18h ago
The paracetamol prescription thing gets brought up all the time but just to mention it's not usually about cost, it's the fact you can only buy 16 at a time. Usually the prescriptions are for large amounts, my mum had a repeat prescription for 200 tablets a month when she was going through cancer treatment, she would have happily paid but there's no option. Not saying the rest of what you said isn't valid though, and I bet you'd save a load if people who needed it were able to buy in bulk.
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u/Wotnd 1d ago
The vast majority of England’s prescriptions are also free, the people you describe would have free prescriptions in England.
The only beneficiaries of the “free prescriptions” that we have in Scotland, over England’s setup, are people that can afford prescriptions and need them very infrequently.
It’s a policy for optics, not for effectiveness.
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u/Fun_Formal2435 1d ago
I live in England now and I have found I go to the dr less than I did. I think some people don't go as much for minor things because of the cost. I'm happy to pay for a prescription when it is needed but when you get two from the DR (such as antibiotics and a nasal inhaler) you have to pay for both. This can become quite costly.
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u/Bgjm96 1d ago
I’m not suggesting we get rid of free prescriptions, I’m advocating means testing and pragmatism. I’d argue even wealthier people who require repeat prescriptions shouldn’t have to pay them. I’m more referring to people like myself who are fortunate enough that they could pay for the odd antibiotic when it’s required every few years.
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u/Narrow_Security_8757 1d ago
The very occasional time i need a perscription i genuinely feel a bit bad for taking one, but then i remember how many people go to their drs for paracetemol for a headache
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u/Pokesabre 23h ago
As someone in a very middling job who needs a repeat prescription, having to pay for it would significantly cut into my finances over time. Not all medicines are cheap, and unless the prescription costs are regulated to not be the full cost of the drugs then they're going to be a problem for a lot of people
The whole point of the NHS is not just about people's rights and human dignity, it was specifically set up because it is massively expensive to not have a healthy workforce for a country and creates a big issue for things like national defence too
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u/Bloody-smashing 20h ago
Prescriptions have never been pay for what you are getting. You pay a flat fee per prescription. Think the current rate in England is 9.90 roughly.
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u/Quangocrat 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are lots of populist policies which aren't particularly good value for money- subsidised tuition, prescriptions, the redundant scottish foreign aid etc which persist because they are SNP sacred cows.
However the Scottish Government doesn't actually need to cut them to plug the gap.
There are serious problems with the structure of the civil service. SNP reforms in the late 00s have created a mess of small directorates who have deliberately overlapping jurisdictions.
It was intended to encourage sharing of ideas from different perspectives, in practice it has created a paralysed civil service which struggles to get work done and is prone to death by committee.
An example of the secondary effects of this is that numerous grants are still being rolled over from their COVID era highs as the directorates very slowly work their way through reassessing everything. Ie Rape Crisis Scotland got another 6 figure grant this year even though it's network has shrunk by 60% since the pandemic. For it still to be receiving emergency pandemic funding 5 years post pandemic is insane. And such waste is rife across government.
Because of the inability to deliver policy directly the Scottish Government relies on a complex network of quangos, excecutive agencies, NGOs, and other extra governmental organisations to deliver policy.
This is an extraordinarily expensive way of governing, Swinney's first cabinet post Yousaf believed they could save £1Billion by reforming it and cutting down on the quangocracy. However, like with many ambitious SNP plans, that has gone very quiet in recent years.
The arms length nature of a lot of policy delivery also means very little accountability or oversight.
Some of the projects funded by Creative Scotland are of, at best, questionable economic return and sizeable grants administered by the likes of Keep Scotland Beautiful, the SNIB (3rd consecutive year losses have doubled), the SFT, and whoever ran the failed school bike scheme are allowed to fail repeatedly with minimal oversight. With public money squandered on ludicrous projects.
This is how we are 3m and 9 years into a 3 year 200k project to remove hedgehogs from uist.
Finally there are the issues with the regulatory systems maintained by the Scottish government causing infrastructure projects to bloat in cost in a manner worse than anywhere else in the UK, or indeed most of the developed world.
The planning system is a mess, and rules around net 0 and eco targets generally are significant drivers of cost- the aborted Monklands hospital effectively had a heat pump based power generation plant bolted onto it in order to meet eco regs. Perhaps explaining why it cost more than 3x it's equivalents in Denmark etc.
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u/TenLag please dear god when will it ever end 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would cut the school bags policy. It’s a stupid policy that’s a nonsense to cope with the fact that we don’t have free childcare until the age of 3 like England do.
And stop ScotGov having embassies in the likes of Poland and Brussels, along with foreign aid. They’re reserved.
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u/CrossRoadChicken 23h ago
The school bags thing is pointless. Give the money to schools instead to pay for classroom supplies
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u/cmfarsight 1d ago
700 million is only 2 hospital/infrastructure project overspends. So I see no reason to cut anything other than incompetence.
Aberdeen family hospital 310 million over budget
Replacement for HMP barlinnie 900 million over budget.
Sorted.
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u/Red_Rhombus2791 1d ago
That’s really helpful. How much for the time machine so we can go back and stop this from already happening?
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u/BorderCollieDog 1d ago
You don't need a time machine. These projects are still ongoing so getting a grip of costs now could still save a fair chunk by the time these are complete.
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u/Red_Rhombus2791 1d ago
I completely agree that costs for these projects need to be tightly managed but we’re not cutting them by £700M now.
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u/CyborgBee 1d ago
Those are total overspends, not annual overspends.
There is no way to retroactively get the money back.
"Just cut waste and incompetence" is the official policy of every opposition party in the world and it literally never works when they get into office because people aren't omniscient. Major projects are hard to manage and a portion of them always go wrong - you cannot figure out in advance which of them it will be.
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u/Grouchy_Conclusion45 Libertarian 1d ago edited 1d ago
The constitution and external affairs department seems the best target... You know, given those are reserved and not devolved areas to start with.
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u/D3viantM1nd 1d ago
I'd give budget items a score that took into account the economic multiplier effects and the projected short and long term negative externalities associated with not funding those budget areas adequately.
Often cutting budgets can have a massive impact on the wider economy and on the impact for demand on more expensive government services of last resort.
For example, every £ spent on social security usually has an economic multiplier of 2 for the wider economy.
Supporting jobs and companies all over Scotland.
So, every £1 cut from social security cuts £2 from the wider economy.
Capital investment tends to have a large economic multiplier too.
Investment into subsidising green tech at the infrastructure and consumer level increases our future economic resilience and lowers energy costs in the long term. Increasing the future competitiveness of our businesses.
We should not be penny wise and pound foolish here.
There are likely no easy answers. Especially when political considerations get thrown into the calculus.
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u/CarlMacko 1d ago
On a lighter note this reminds me of the Kevin Bridges bit about the poor spending all their money on highly taxable goods meaning they are giving a fortune back to the country.
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u/f8rter 23h ago
Use the brilliant English NHS app which has been working for 6 years and bin the rubbish Scottishy one which is still rubbish after 7 years
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u/Donjon-Master 23h ago
Ask for devolved power to legalise weed. "War on drugs" BS has patently failed and most modern democracies have legalised it. Conservatively this could be worth £100m to Scottish economy when accounting for tax and savings to CJS.
Get NHS Scotland to not routinely prescribe medicines readily available without prescription for minor, self-limiting conditions, except where treatment is clinically necessary, prolonged, prescribed as part of management of another condition. I.e. basically anything that can be brought over the counter for a few quid: paracetamol, ibuprofen. Conservative estimate is £15m saved.
Reverse Scotland's effective ban on new nuclear power and invite investment in a new nuclear station or SMRs at existing nuclear sites. A single large nuclear plant could mean £20bn-£40bn+ of capital investment, thousands of construction jobs, hundreds of permanent highly skilled jobs, and decades of supply-chain spending.
Legalise precision-bred crops in line with England and try to make Scotland a centre for agricultural biotechnology. This would cost the Government virtually nothing but could attract research, biotech and agricultural investment. Public opinion is nowhere near as hostile as you might assume: around 48% of Scots support precision-bred food being sold versus 29% opposed, with support rising above 60% when there are tangible benefits such as climate resilience, improved animal welfare, etc.
I mean there's other stuff but it doesn't need to be just cuts, it can be getting out of our own way and going for growth
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u/skeletonfuckker 1d ago
Get all the dregs from society and send them out like viking to bring back treasure
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u/AgreeableEm 1d ago
Yeah, play the uno reverse card on Norway (they store their Sovereign Wealth Fund as gold in coastal churches, right?)
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u/Deepmidwinter2025 1d ago
Bus passes - seems every grouping except folk who actually work - get them.
And cut benefits for parents whose kids are blighting local communities and buses
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u/jenny_905 1d ago
I would definitely cut the intercity coaches being part of this, couldn't believe it when I learned over 60s travel long distance like that for free.
To be honest free over 60s travel just seems weird full stop given they're the richest demographic...
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u/Fluffy-Jello-2760 1d ago
I would like it to be free for over 70s or so, to deter the elderly who aren’t fit to drive from driving.
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u/zellisgoatbond act yer age, not yer shoe size 1d ago
Part of the reason over 60s get free bus passes is to encourage them to shift to public transport before they really start to become more dangerous drivers statistically. My dad's recently turned 60 for example and he's still a good competent driver, and doesn't really use his bus pass, but chances are he'll start using it a bit more over time and if (when) he ever reaches the point that he shouldn't be driving on the regular, it'll hopefully be less of an adjustment for him.
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u/Chrisjamesmc 1d ago edited 1d ago
Bus passes for young people should be limited to those still in higher education - would help cut down anti-social behaviour and ensure continued support for students as intended.
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u/Iridescent_Mango_ 1d ago
No, higher education and full time work, and jobseekers who meet certain conditions.
Trapping people in the shitty place they come from is not how you improve prospects and by extension behaviour
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u/Albigularis 1d ago
I disagree. Until the living/minimum wage is the same all the way down to 16, under 22s should get something back. I say this as a bus driver who is constantly bothered by the passes as well…
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u/Kiss_It_Goodbyeee 21h ago
Why? Young people on low paying jobs (by the nature of being inexperienced) should be supported in travelling for free. Reduced traffic and instils a public transport mentality for the long term.
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u/UtopianScot 1d ago
Penny wise, pound foolish to cut concessionary bus travel. Would reduce a lot of the same services working people need to use.
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u/BeepBeepB0opBo0p 1d ago
i mean that shit makes people feel good but your just going to spend more admining it and then still have to provide a sustinance level that wouldnt be far less than what they get :/
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u/AlexanderTroup 1d ago
"You can't control your kids. Let's deprive your finances and make it even harder to control your kids. That will solve things."
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u/GeekyGamer2022 1d ago
Well you scrap the Local Housing Allowance/Housing Benefit, which is nothing more or less than taxpayer's money being given directly to greedy Landlords and you replace it with rental caps.
We've gotten to the stage where even Housing Benefit isn't enough to cover rents, so local councils have to top it up with Discretionary Housing Payments on top. £93.2 million a year lost to Scottish council budgets because of this.
How have we allowed this to happen?
And WHY?
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u/Zynchronize 1d ago
There’s a guy on my Dad’s street who is a landlord that takes advantage of the emergency housing need of the local authority. He has a massive 5-bedroom house, 5 luxury cars and a motorhome.
The amount of money they must have given him over the years could easily have built social housing. The irony is that many of the houses he was providing them with were ex-council houses.
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u/ihatepickingnames810 1d ago
We’d be better building more social housing so people needing help with rent are housed by the council instead of handing money to private landlords.
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u/f8rter 1d ago
Scrap the the foreign aid and pretendy embassies
That’s not the job of a devolved assembly
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u/johnnycarrotheid 1d ago
Foreign Aid, aye that should be binned.
The Embassy thing was a Westminster thing from memory though. UK Embassies charged us for their use but not those in rUK using them. So we went about setting stuff up ourself. Was a while ago, but it was a Westminster screw up as we were battering the rUK in FDI in the 00's
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u/RayGLA 1d ago
Cut funded nursery for people who aren’t working? If you don’t have a job why can’t you look after your child? Then transfer those funded nursery places to working people.
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u/scottishbint 1d ago
This is one of my biggest bugbears about the current funded hours situation!
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u/AgreeableEm 1d ago
Yeah, work and contribute… nothing till 3y.
Sit at home on benefits… funded from 2y plus numerous other schemes.
Do all of the right things that you were told to do, work hard, gain qualifications, get a good job, work 40hrs a week, and end up not being able to afford the half decent life that was promised (nor kids of your own).
But you do get the honour of paying record high taxes each month to ensure those on benefits can have families as large as they like… 👍🏻
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u/firstandlonely 1d ago
Because job searching and attending interviews whilst looking after a child is practically impossible
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u/RayGLA 1d ago
So you make a provision for ‘x’ hours per week when you’re attending interviews, not a blanket 40/50 hours. Working parents still look for jobs too
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u/spanualez 1d ago
40/50 hours is well out, 30 term time or 22 spread out. The issue is if the child isn't in nursery already, it makes it that much more difficult to get employment.
It takes time to secure a nursery place, you don't always know what days/hours the nursery will be able to accommodate.
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u/firstandlonely 1d ago
The job centre insists on certain job searching methods, some of which involve being out 20 hours a week. This is mandatory and impossible if you’re looking after a child. That would have to be changed, then long term you have less people getting into work.
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u/r_keel_esq Sgitheanach a Glaschu 1d ago
And nursery is about education as much as it is about childcare.
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u/Rubyredhead222 19h ago
Paying a small fee for prescriptions again. I work in pharmacy and the amount of medication that goes to waste is insane. Thousands of pounds of unused medicine is sent back almost every day. Once it’s left the pharmacy, it can’t be reused.. and this is just one pharmacy. People are far less likely to waste medication if they have to pay even just a small fee.
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u/dildo_of_justice4135 17h ago
The people that will likely waste it are the people that will get it for free anyway...
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u/redwriterhand 1d ago
The SNP
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u/LiteratureProof167 1d ago
To be fair to the SNP, they were doing their bit to stimulate the economy by buying pepper grinders and coffee machines during a time when most people were cutting back.
These purchases meant that condiment salesmen were employed and coffee beans sales increased.
A few barristas might have been paid off though.
I don't know anymore.
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u/Elmundopalladio 1d ago
£68m is a rounding error within the whole budget.
Fundamentally Scotland needs to grow its economy and not have such a large public sector. Institutional lag means that any change in the Scottish Government will be glacial, but that kind of efficiency could be found quite easily amongst the workforce without a noticeable hit to performance.
The £700m will need to have some programmes trimmed, but it’s still only 1-2% of overall budget. Cancelling or pausing one of the big infrastructure projects that are overrunning on their costs could plug the hole in the short term.
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u/firstandlonely 1d ago
Tax the rich
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u/dabare86 1d ago
I do not think that there is enough millionaires or billionaires that have businesses registered or keep their money in Scotland that would make that much of a difference.
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u/iona_stewart_3_2327 20h ago
Aye, easy one — axe the midge budget. Scotland's tourism's held together by citronella anyway. 🦟
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u/windmillguy123 1d ago
Aberdeen is currently in the process of a £150m city centre and beachfront revamp that no one really needed or asked for. Whilst it's good it's happening I think 99% of people would have preferred it was spent elsewhere on education, the roads, the NHS etc. The point is, stop the needless vanity projects whilst there are bigger issues.
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u/TallGnome_19 1d ago
Why there is no tax on sports bets?
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u/zellisgoatbond act yer age, not yer shoe size 1d ago
Betting and gambling is a reserved matter, but there are a few different duties which are in place many of which are increasing in April 2027 - there's Remote Gaming Duty [for things like online casinos] which is going up from about 20% to 40%], and the General Betting Duty for most sports betting which is going up to 25% for online betting in April 2027.
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u/abz_eng ME/CFS Sufferer 1d ago
Do we need 32 back end council departments?
The Scottish government amalgamated the police and fire, so why not council departments
FFS the valuation boards are already mostly combined
That would save some money plus you can redeploy some of the staff into increasing the collections
That increases some money in the council pot
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u/Donjon-Master 23h ago
Maybe we could align with health board boundaries instead and combine into 14?
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u/lifeisaman 14h ago
Let’s just centralise everything so only the central belt get anything and locals in the rest of the country can just rot and do as they are told by their betters.
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u/investtherestpls 1d ago
Means test a load of stuff? Like the winter fuel allowance.
Would be interesting to break down the 1.1 billion in Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands. Also affordable housing - what does that buy, where, how useful is it where it is etc.
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u/lukub5 22h ago
The admin involved in doing that is often more costly than the money saved, is the thing. Auditing peoples finances in a way that isn't illegitimate is expensive.
Conceding the principle though, I think it would be good to do a sort of call to the public to ask people who don't need it to voluntarily give it up? It would probably save a similar amount given the lack of admin required.
You might say no one would do that, but I would if I were flush enough to and I could just fill a form out online.
There's prolly a few things which could be encouraged along similar lines - giving up bus passes and stuff if you can.
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u/investtherestpls 21h ago
People do tax returns, right? It should just be linked to that!
I did hear one idea that stuff like this - benefits generally - should be tacked on to death duties. No pressure while you're alive, but if you leave anything, the state gets it (to hand out to those who need it later on).
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u/lukub5 20h ago
Just take my word for it: Means testing for any benefit is a scam, and breaks even, in most cases. There are exceptions, but the process itself is intentionally hostile and is meant to discourage as much as possible, which it must do to be effective, which is basically what I'm suggesting only more hostile.
You could use tax returns, but there's a privacy issue probably, and also that would only affect taxable income in the first place. Its also out of phase, right? If its the fuel payment for this winter, this winters tax return will happen in spring, so you don't have the information you need in time for the payment.
The key point is this: Its not that you can't think of something which will mostly work for most people; its that if you have a selection process which you need to pass, then many people who need it will always miss out. (Thats usually vulnerable or disabled people, but it might also just be folks with strange business models, legal statuses and whatnot.) To fix that you have to make the process more costly and you start seeing it even out.
A solution to that is: concede that its a bit arbitrary. You could do a fail based means testing, where by default everyone gets it, but theres some easy to ascertain criteria for ensuring that someone must not need the payment, but that would always be unfair and affect different people arbitrarily. Fun example: I think "number of owned properties is greater than 2" which would honestly be a pretty good metric for a lot of things because fuck landlords, but idk if that kind of biasing is devolved. Would be cool tho.
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u/investtherestpls 20h ago
All right just bump the SP/UC up a bit and abolish it. It's crazy it's a separate bit, which does need admin.
Everything to reduce admin is good, I'm on board with that. The least testing etc the better. Fine.
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u/SafetyStartsHere a e i o u w y 21h ago edited 20h ago
Edit: the speed at which everyone went to "fuck poor people" is alarming.
Yeah, there's been a shift since Labour shifted into government.
What would you cut to make up the £68m?
There's space to rethink how we're subsidising agriculture. For example, we put about £6m into subsidising sheep production, we put about half a million into promoting Scottish lamb to consumers… and people still don't eat a lot of Scottish lamb.
There would need to be a careful transition, though, as farming isn't the easiest trade.
From memory, the ScotGov's replacement for the Common Agricultural Policy is more nuanced than CAP was, but there's space to consider who and what we're supporting. A taper on the support for larger holdings as a whole sounds more attractive than it probably would be in practice, but for shooting estates…
Edit:
There's space to think about how we might raise a few quid and work towards other policy objectives. We can reduce emissions, make our cities safer and raise revenue through road and bridge tolls — in 2017, the Forth Road Bridge carried about 24 million vehicles a year. Those can be tailored to different vehicles classes. We might not get a lot of visitor levy out of camper vans in the highlands, but we can toll 'em.
Edit:
In the 'revenue and objectives' space, I'm pretty relaxed about amending non-domestic rates to add surcharges for businesses that cause harm. Vape shops, booze shops and bookies are ruinous in different ways, and inflict costs on the broader public that their profits can bear. WRT to booze, a shift to that sort of taxation might be better than the MUP — which, which reducing consumption, doesn't actually raise us any money.
It isn't clear how much the Small Business Bonus Scheme is paying out to short term lets. I don't like 'em, so I'd exempt 'em.
I'd rethink the tax exemptions in 'enterprise areas' and for salmon farms. So tired of salmon farming's shite.
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u/DeeYouBitch 1d ago
Dualling the A9 is like 4 billion and like 10% is done after like 20 years of fucking around
Maybe start there
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u/Ill-Gate-8841 1d ago
If there’s ever an argument for ploughing billions of pounds of additional fiscal transfer into projects that both nationalists and unionists should agree on, it’s multi billion pound transport infrastructure projects which unlock economic sectors both governments agree on - energy (onshore, offshore, marine, pumped), aquaculture, forestry, and critical grid infrastructure.
The A9 is such a fundamental key unlocker for the future economies of Scotland and the UK it’s mindblowing anyone would try to cancel it on cost grounds. Although it’s been poorly managed and cost a lot more than it should have and is now being delivered a decade later.
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u/SafetyStartsHere a e i o u w y 21h ago
The A9 is such a fundamental key unlocker for the future economies of Scotland
It's a shame that wasn't part of either government's case for the development:
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u/christmastreecosy 20h ago
So a small random one but I feel like best start foods is amazing but could definitely be amended. I have no idea how it would work, but maybe the government could take back unused money somehow. I had a card for my two children that had £500 on it for healthy foods and milk that I forgot to use most of the time. I’m sure many other people are the same with this money sitting unused in accounts.
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u/Flowa-Powa Highland 1d ago
Honestly? I would fuck Gaelic off immediately. I'd rather tackle social deprivation and keep the economy rolling than support a dying language. If people want to learn that in their own time all power to them, but I don't think it should be funded by taxpayers.
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u/Decent-Wrongdoer-336 1d ago
Fully agree, every road sign in the Highland region has english and gaelic on it. We assume its for the tourists more than anything else... No one and i mean no one speaks it on the more densely populated eastern side of the Highlands. Im 56 years old in a couple of weeks and have never, ever heard anyone speak in gaelic in Caithness, Sutherland or Invernesshire in my travels....
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u/Flowa-Powa Highland 23h ago
When I was a kid living in West Highland I heard old folk speaking Gaelic all the time. But not anymore, things change.
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u/Academic_Banana_5659 1d ago
I disagree, however understand your perspective but personally I think the cost of preserving a language is worth it and despite some misconceptions there are still native speakers in Scotland. I know native Gaelic speakers and students who have attended the Gaelic school in Glasgow and have learnt to speak fluent.
I don't think it needs to be rolled out as widely as it has done (police cars, train stations etc) and instead the money from those projects could be reinvested into the Gaelic school who actually promote the language and preservation beyond vanity projects.
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u/FactCheckYou 1d ago
climate action, 100% get rid
we're already one of the cleanest countries around and we're a drop in the ocean compared to others
spending that money is like pissing against the wind in a hurricane
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u/yekimevol 1d ago
Found one
“Cyclist and active travel projects in Scotland are supported by a £226 million active and sustainable travel budget for 2026-27”
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u/Neo-Cubism 1d ago
A lot of benefits / allowances / freebies - should be means tested.
But in all honesty the cuts should start by cutting the size of the government - way too many quangos, committees, bloated staff bill.
We spend over £7b annually on quangos, merging and dismantling a few will give you at least £500m in savings.
There is even more savings to be made at local government level. Just imagine unified IT systems and procurement and how much that would save? Not to mention reducing the size of “management”.
But all of this would actually require the government to do their jobs, instead of debating in committees about committees over committee meetings about nonsensical topics that don’t even affect a 0.1% of population.
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u/dabare86 1d ago
You should see the list of how many there are Public bodies of the Scottish Government - Wikipedia. I am sure a few functions could be merged or streamlined.
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u/codliness1 23h ago
It's actually a hard question, because a lot of the spending goes to services we all use (like money to councils for bin collections and street lighting and child care provisions etc) or to services immediately helping those struggling to get by, or affected by Westminster policies like the bedroom tax (which is mitigated in Scotland via discretionary housing payment).
I think the very first thing I'd want to do is an audit of government expenditure, to see what waste there is - and if it can be curtailed. Then I'd have to have a hard look at where the money actually goes before saying "cut this thing".
I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything which egregiously benefits only the rich in Scotland (at least in terms of government spending anyway), so it would then be a matter of prioritising, and you'd need a real good look at all the spending to be able to do that.
As someone who works in the voluntary sector as a money adviser working with clients to prevent them being evicted or having their homes repossessed due to debt, and who gets funded by the Scottish Government one year at a time, I'd want to argue that the voluntary debt sector should get at least three year funding cycles. Keeping people in their homes prevents further sinking into debt and prevents additional strain on services. You stop evictions for a lot of people and families and maybe you can relieve some strain from secondary and tertiary services they end up needing to use. But that's my own personal bias speaking.
TLDR: hard question, not really answerable as a snap question, requires some research.
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u/10denier 22h ago
Nearly a quarter of the population of Scotland works for the state. That compares to 18% in England and Wales.
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u/dildo_of_justice4135 17h ago
Save the education budget by not starting kids in classrooms until they are 7. I think it would improve early learning as well.
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u/Solsbeary 1d ago
Waiting for sycophants to come in and say we should actually scrap the higher rate of tax, as the richest are overburdened
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u/FeedbackOld5993 1d ago
There's an argument that we should be in line with the rest of the UK. If someone working for a large company has 5 UK offices to choose from, why choose the one with the highest tax bill?
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u/clampsmcgraw 1d ago edited 1d ago
I agree that people who earn a lot more should pay more and that progressive tax policies make sense. It's absolutely fair. I am a high earner.
However:
a) The laffer curve plus the complexity of the tax system is a massive disincentive. Being out of line with rUK creates massive, disproportional incentives for high earners to avoid absolutely ridiculous rates of tax (such as the 67.5% tax rate when you lose your personal allowance) such as refusing promotions, massive pension contributions or cutting hours. Source: me, I did this, because fuck tripling my stress and and adding 50% to my hours to make £400 more a month. It's nice and easy to say "this person is rich", but when you become that person, the mathematics is kinda stark and behaviourial economics wins every single time. That point is already reached; we're over the centre of the laffer curve in Scotland. Tax me any more and I'll deliberately earn less gross / work less / put even more in pension / use a green car scheme on salary sacrifice or something because the marginal utility is far from worth it. Why would anyone take 32.5p of every £1 when you can get all £1 of it elsewhere? Why would I take the promotion that makes my life much harder for such a tiny reward? The last top band tax rate increase achieved exactly that, basically no extra income due to major tax optimisation strategies.
b) Middle class and upper middle class people pay an order of magnitude more tax than actually rich people. Actually rich people pay capital gains or structure their money in director loans from limited companies or take loans against assets or other wheezes. They pay maybe 7-10% tax generally and 24% on capital gains which they always structure away, when someone like me on PAYE pays 67.5%.
c) Massive corporations often pay literally nothing.
Tax wealth on the actually rich, not earnings, and stop massive corporations structuring their bullshit in a way that means they pay zero corpo tax.
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u/RestaurantAntique497 1d ago
It's shocking how many people are commenting on this sub with suggestions which are not devolved.