Alan Trench
speaker
12 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2014
last heard Sep 2014
Alan Trench’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Scottish case is an odd one because convergence should have been happening for Scotland, given the sustained increases in public spending that have taken place throughout the decades.
And it didn't.
Part of the explanation for that is to do with the population numbers that are used and the fact that Scotland's population has declined quite significantly since the 1970s.
But the population numbers haven't always been uprated often enough.
And even during the noughties, when its population was declining by about 0.3 percent per year.
That appears to have been enough during a four-year spending review period to mean that you prevented convergence occurring.
You could not do it without an extraordinary amount of political pain.
You'd be taking something in the order of £4.5 billion away from the Scottish budget if you were to go to a Scottish needs-related figure.
But if you were to add that money to public spending across the rest of the UK, the benefit would be negligible.
Scots would feel a huge amount of pain, but people in England would feel no perceptible benefit at all.
So politically, it's never been particularly attractive...
to table reforming the formula.
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