SNP the ones now squandering Scotland's energy wealth amid desperate budget

Shona Robison has been forced to sell off the family silverware to balance the books this year - but has left the Scottish Government open to the same accusations it has throw at Westminster over squandering Scotland’s energy potential.

The finance secretary was not in an envious position. Up to £1 billion of pressures have been put on her budget in this financial year, largely due to above-inflation pay deals Ms Robison has insisted have not been fully-funded by the UK government.

Read more: Where the axe will fall - the Scottish Government is slashing spending in all these areas

In fact, she admitted her deep cuts may not even be necessary if Labour does fully-fund the pay deals - but it will be too late to reverse the damage.

The row over how SNP ministers got into this mess will continue, but two worrying solutions will be used to balance the books. And that’s before we get to next year’s budget, which Keir Starmer has already warned will be “painful”.

Ms Robison has announced £500m of eye-watering cuts to public services. These include some already-announced decisions such as reinstating peak rail fares and matching the UK cut to winter fuel payments.

But a total of £188.4m have been cut across government - the breakdown of which were not announced in Ms Robison’s Holyrood statement, instead including in a letter to a Holyrood committee. Not the most transparent way to deliver £115.8m of cuts to health and social care.

But on top of that, Ms Robison has been forced to allocate every penny of what was left of the £756m leasing revenue for the ScotWind project to cover her budget deficit - the £460m that was remaining could be used entirely to plug the Scottish Government’s budget black hole.

I reported last month that Scotland risks losing up to £16bn of manufacturing investment promised by energy companies to take place in Scotland as part of the ScotWind leases - due to a lack of infrastructure and facilities for the work to be carried out.

Now, Ms Robison has been forced to potentially use up the entire £756m of revenue the flagship policy has tallied up for the government. 

Ms Robison confirmed that £96m had already been drawn from the fund, as well as £200m at the start of the budget “mainly for health”, just leaving the £460m that is now at risk of being gobbled up by budget pressures.

She added that she expects an additional £54m to be made available from the next phase of the ScotWind project, but there’s no guessing how long that might last.

This funding was earmarked to accelerate Scotland’s journey to net zero, already on shaky ground and not helped by Ms Robison announcing £23.4m of cuts to her government’s net zero and energy department.

This from a government that has, for decades, shouted at the UK government for squandering Scotland’s oil and failing to capitalise on the rewards of that soon-to-be-defunct fossil fuel.

Back in 2011, then-first minister Alex Salmond claimed Scotland could be the “Saudi Arabia of renewables”, but nothing now seems further from the truth. Scotland is set to give up all it had reaped from the ScotWind leasing of the seabed to cover its over-spending. 

Not only that, but without a new funding deal from Westminster, SNP ministers are running out of options to cover their tracks to balance their budgets.