Finance Secretary Kate Forbes prepares to set out her spending plans for the next few years at Holyrood.
"Difficult decisions" is a finance secretary's warning that some public services will find this an uncomfortable experience.
The problem is that being generous, where resources are constrained, comes at a cost to lower priorities.It could, given the powers or if Scotland were independent, but let's not pretend borrowing could be an infinite source of income for the Scottish government, that it could be achieved without risk and cost, or there would be no need to make choices. More significant: for now, it's not allowed to.Image caption,That's true too.
That got quite a lot of media attention at the end of last week. It won't have surprised Kate Forbes or her colleagues in St Andrew's House, because they published the same figure last December in the last Medium-Term Financial Strategy, page 31. If you don't usually budget in billions, the IFS helpfully points out that £3.5bn is more than Holyrood's entire spend on police, fire, courts and prison this year. Or more than all the spend on higher education and student support.Of that three and a half billion, the IFS calculates that around £1bn is because welfare benefits are more generous than the rest of the UK, but the funds that flow from Westminster don't take account of that.
So the £3.5bn figure may turn out to be too high on Covid health costs. But on the other hand, it may under-estimate the cost of long-term demographic change in the demand for social care, allied to a promise to set up a National Care Service, with significantly better pay for care workers, both public and private.
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