With the SNP leader three short of a majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only way he can get his budget through is if MSPs either vote for it or sit on their hands.
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On Tuesday, Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar confirmed his MSPs would abstain. He claimed other opposition parties had already agreed to either vote for or abstain from the budget.
The party leader went on to say he could even back the budget, but only if it included a commitment to lift the two-child cap by April this year.
In her budget last December, Finance Secretary Shona Robison told MSPs that the limit would be effectively “scrapped” in 2026.
She allocated funding to develop the systems necessary to deliver the change, but will need to find a substantial amount of money to mitigate the cap brought in by the Cameron government in 2015.
The Scottish Fiscal Commission estimates that mitigating the limit – which prevents households claiming child tax credit or universal credit for a third or subsequent child – will cost £155 million in 2026-27, rising to £198m in 2029-30.
Speaking to the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland, Mr Swinney said he would “love it more than anything else” to lift the cap in April this year.
“Because it would help me on my agenda of eradicating child poverty, but I’ve got to put in place the practical steps to make that possible, which involves dialogue with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the Department of Work and Pensions.
“We’ll do it as fast as we can and what I’ve said is that if we can do it earlier than April 2026, we will do so.
“But I can’t mislead people by the suggestion that I can do something quicker.
“And Anas Sarwar knows this can’t be done by April of this year. He knows that.
“That’s why this is a kind of false argument that he’s putting forward, that suddenly, having dodged the question for weeks, that he’s now going to abstain on the budget, is now going to say, oh, well, only if you can lift the two-child limit, which the Labour government in London will not lift in April, he’ll support the budget.”
“[He] knows full well that that practically cannot be done.”
The BBC later reported that there could be some form of compromise, where Labour could back the budget if the SNP could backdate the mitigation payments to April 2025.
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Mr Swinney said he was taking nothing for granted, but was far more confident about getting the budget passed: “I welcome very much the conversations we’ve had with other political parties.
“I take nothing for granted because I’ve sat in Parliament and heard the presiding officer read out voting numbers, which resulted in one of my budgets not passing in the past.
“So I really will wait until I hear the presiding officer say the budget has passed, but I am more confident about that, I am also confident because we have had good, substantive engagement with other political parties.
“And I want to make it clear this morning that notwithstanding what the Labour leader said yesterday, I want to continue those discussions, and I want to try to find the basis of getting as much agreement as possible around the government’s budget provisions so that we can make progress on behalf of all of the people of Scotland.”