Salmond sets out post-independence childcare plans

29 Aug 14
First Minister Alex Salmond has today set out more details on the Scottish National Party’s promise of a major expansion in childcare provision in an independent Scotland, but admitted that the policy would not be initially self-financing.

By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 13 August 2014

First Minister Alex Salmond has today set out more details on the Scottish National Party’s promise of a major expansion in childcare provision in an independent Scotland, but admitted that the policy would not be initially self-financing.

It came at the end of an encouraging week for the Yes campaign ahead of the independence referendum on 18 September, as the first full poll since Salmond’s bruising Monday night TV debate with No leader Alistair Darling showed the Yes side halving the No lead from 12 points to six, with 11% of voters still undecided. Salmond was widely held to have won the debate.

The No campaign has suffered a string of setbacks this week. A TV advert aimed at women was ridiculed on social media as patronising and sexist, while an open letter from 130 No-supporting business leaders was answered by 200 business supporters of independence. In addition, former Labour First Minister Lord McConnell predicted that tax reforms promised by the pro-Union parties would see the Barnett Formula on spending, which No campaign leaders have pledged to retain, ‘wither on the vine’.

Salmond today visited a soft-play centre in Edinburgh to say that the SNP would deliver 1,140 hours of free childcare annually to all three- and four-year-olds and vulnerable two-year-olds by the end of the first parliament in an independent Scotland. The offer is worth £4,832 per child for some 240,000 children.

When the policy was first outlined, it was criticised by Scottish Parliament statisticians for appearing to suggest that the £600m costs would be fully offset by the inflow of revenues to an independent Scottish exchequer from freeing up 104,000 people, mostly mothers, to join the workforce. This is more than the number of people who are economically inactive in any given year.

Pressed on the matter in a BBC interview yesterday, Salmond acknowledged the anticipated gains were calculated over a full parliament, and that the policy would take two parliaments to deliver full fiscal benefits. In the interim, he said, costs would be offset by other independence-driven savings, on areas like defence and scrapping the married couple’s tax allowance.

Responding to the comments, Scottish Labour’s equalities spokeswoman Jackie Baillie said: ‘Women in Scotland won’t be fooled by this attempt to win votes.  Alex Salmond has the power to improve childcare today, but wants to use it as a referendum bribe.’

Prime Minister David Cameron, who is also in Scotland, faced criticism at a CBI dinner in Glasgow last night over Europe. 

Cameron told the CBI, whose Scottish arm tried abortively earlier this year to register as part of the No campaign, that the UK was ‘the greatest merger in history’ and urged them to back the ‘openness’ of the Union.

But his speech was overshadowed by CBI president Sir Mike Rake, the BT chairman, who powerfully attacked Cameron’s promised in/out EU referendum, telling the prime minister that ‘the ambiguity has already, and is increasingly, causing real concern for business regarding their future investment’.

The Scottish independence No campaign has attempted to cast doubts over an independent Scotland’s continued membership of the EU, but Salmond said today there was an increasing risk of Scotland, if it remained in the UK, being ‘dragged out of the EU against our will’.

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