Reform UK Scotland leader Malcolm Offord plans huge savings by cutting spending on 'ideological green nonsense'

Tax cuts and sweeping changes to Scotland’s taxation system are achievable through cutting “ideological spending”, the leader of Reform UK in Scotland has said.

In an interview with STV’s Scotland Tonight programme, Lord Malcolm Offord said his party planned to achieve £4bn of tax cuts by the end of the next Holyrood parliamentary term and had identified several areas of expenditure that could be scaled back.

Earlier on Monday, Offord indicated his party would cut the number of income tax bands in Scotland from six to three, bringing the system into line with arrangements in the rest of the UK.

Discussing his plans with STV’s political editor, Colin Mackay, he claimed that making tax cuts of £4bn was possible through targeted cuts to other areas of government expenditure.

He said: “So the £2bn that we will invest, we will take that from the existing Scottish Budget, and we’ve identified where we can take that from.

“We’ve identified that there’s £9bn that we can take from a combination of environmental protection. There is economic development, and there’s quangos, £6.6bn of quangos that we can take money from.”

Pressed on which parts of the budget linked to environmental protection his party would cut, Offord insisted there was a level of “ideological” spending that had to be tackled.

He said: “There’s an ideological chopping list, amounting to about a billion pounds that we can cut, of ideological green nonsense that needs to be cut out of the budget; that’s one billion.”

Responding to the party’s announced tax plans, the Fraser of Allander Institute said that it was “simply implausible” for the proposed tax cuts to be implemented without frontline spending being cut.

Offord said: “We will not be cutting frontline services, we will be cutting waste and cutting ideological spending.

“We’ll be cutting taxpayers’ money being wasted. If you look at the civil service, it’s gone from 21,000 people in 2020, pre-Covid, to 29,000 people.

“The number of quangos we have is 23,000 people. The overlap between the civil service and quangos is massive.

“The cut that we’re looking for is approximately 1.5% of the total budget of Scotland.”

Party leadership

Offord was also pressed on his anointment as the leader of Reform UK in Scotland.

It was put to him that he would be the only party leader in the Holyrood election campaign not to have been democratically elected to their position.

“We’re a new party, Colin, we’ve just arrived,” he said.

“We’ve got 15 weeks til the election, we’re not going to spend 15 weeks having a leadership contest, instead we’re going to spend the next 15 weeks putting our vision in front of the Scottish people.”

What impact would Reform’s proposals have?

Joao Sousa, deputy director of the Fraser of Allander Institute said: “While we don’t have full details of the costings presented by Reform UK, the magnitudes presented seem around what we would expect – around £2bn for equivalising rates and thresholds with the rest of the UK and cutting them by 1p, and another £1.8bn to get them to 3p below rUK rates.

“This is a significant sum of money, and given the constraints on the Scottish Government’s day-to-day budget, would mean cuts to spending of a similar magnitude.

“It’s also worth noting that the Scottish Government and Fiscal Commission already forecast a multi-billion spending gap by the end of the decade, even without this £3.7bn less in funding.

“No detail has been made available regarding the cuts that would be necessary as a result of this policy to comply with borrowing limits, or in which areas they might fall.

“It seems implausible that these would not have an effect on the level of public services provided. We would hope that detailed proposals for these cuts would be made available before the election.”