Where exactly is Scottish spending per capita higher than for the UK as a whole.
What might explain such shifts from health to social protection? In education, maybe the slower growth in school population in Scotland, also the higher spend on higher education to compensate for not introducing tuition fees? In social protection, perhaps the steady build up of devolved benefit payments?
Of course this is devolution in practice. Choose your own priorities and fund accordingly. Indeed it could be argued that higher spending on things like child benefit payments may be more effective, as a preventative health measure, than more spending on the NHS.
But is health really the public service that most Scots would want, or expect, to have the lowest priority in terms of being ’overfunded’ vs the UK? And to such an extent that it is effectively being funded to a level below the UK average? That seems very unlikely, but that is what is happening.
It is also worth noting that this analysis is not entirely new. GERS is published every year and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) published a very thorough ‘Healthcare spending, staffing and activity (in Scotland)’ paper in early 2024. But somehow the wider political world in Scotland has not picked up on it.
At face value, this does seem like another area where the Scottish Government is not being adequately held to account for its decisions. Doing so might throw up some difficult questions but at least there would be a more informed debate over what Scottish spending priorities really are.