Exclusive:Inside the Scottish Budget negotiations, as Greens want policies woven into SNP plans

The Greens’ finance spokesperson, Ross Greer, has told The Scotsman the baseline for crunch budget negotiations will be from last year’s budget, the last under the Bute House Agreement - the greenest budget in the history of devolution.

But Mr Greer admitted it would be “politically challenging” for the SNP to agree to what his party will be asking for.

Shona Robison will deliver her draft budget to Holyrood on December 4 - but the SNP is now a minority government, meaning the party will need the support of opposition MSPs to pass its spending proposals for the 2025/26 financial year.

READ MORE: Greens demand tax rises from SNP to back Scottish Budget as former partners 'ready to co-operate again'

The Greens have supported every SNP budget since 2016, as an opposition party until the 2021 election, which led to the party joining forces with the Scottish Government for three years under the Bute House Agreement.

Talks have already started between the Greens and SNP public finance minister Ivan McKee over the budget - largely about process. The talks the SNP will have with numerous parties will get into specifics once Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivers the UK Budget on October 30 - which will give a much better idea of how much funding the Scottish Government will have to work with.

Despite the very-public falling out between the Greens and the SNP, which led to the end of Humza Yousaf’s time as first minister, the mood music between the two now-former coalition partners has warmed up over the past couple of weeks.

The Greens essentially sent Mr Yousaf to the exit door after dramatically announcing on the same day they were unceremoniously kicked out of government that they would support former Scottish Tories leader Douglas Ross’s motion of no confidence in the then-first minister.

But Mr Greer has told The Scotsman that he and his colleagues “don’t bear personally animosity towards any individual in the government or towards the SNP as a whole”.

He said: “I still respect Humza Yousaf - I still think Humza’s a fundamentally good man. He made a catastrophic error of judgement and he faced the consequences of that. He did so with a lot of dignity. He owned his mistake.”

Since John Swinney replaced Mr Yousaf, his Government has done away with a flurry of Green priorities - including the controversial decision to reinstate peak rail fares, nature and active travel funding, weakening an agreed ban on wood burners in new homes - while a pledge for free school meals for primary pupils has been shelved.

Mr Greer has warned there is a lack of trust between the Greens and the SNP, not just from the Bute House Agreement being ripped up, but what has happened since then in terms of policy choices.

He said: “They made a series of decisions we are confident would have not been made if we were still in government. That’s where that trust and confidence issue comes up. 

“It’s not about personalities on their side or on ours - it’s a very simple issue of not being in a position ourselves to protect the areas of the budget that we care about.

“They will be a single party government between now and the next election. They will need to come up with a mechanism to provide us with faith and confidence that they will deliver what we agree.” 

Mr Greer added: “We are in a very different situation to last session where we could agree a budget with a relatively high degree of confidence that it would actually be delivered.

“We also hadn’t gone through this experience of shared government and that ending - and immediately after that ending, our priorities being the first stuff to be axed.”

With the budget date getting closer, Mr Swinney and his SNP ministers have started to cheerlead some of the Green priorities once again.

Out of the blue, Mr Swinney gave his support to a private jet tax, Ms Robison signalled that a cruise ship levy for councils was to continue being pushed forward and Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop U-turned on a previous SNP U-turn and re-committed to a trial for free bus travel for asylum seekers, albeit still subject to funding.

Mr Greer said: “I think they are trying to send a signal that they are open.

“On various areas over the last couple of weeks, they’ve tried to send some positive signals. The flipside of that is the actions that they’ve taken in the six months since we left the government.”

Turning to the budget proposals the Greens will be tabling to Ms Robison, Mr Greer said: “What we are going to put forward is going to be politically challenging for them. But I’ve already made it clear to them there’s a difference between politically challenging, potentially politically possible versus fiscally or legally unfeasible. 

“We’ve done our homework here and everything that we are putting forward, we know is deliverable and we know it’s a question of political will - how far towards us are they willing to go to secure political agreement.”

Mr Greer warned that “unlike in the last three years, our leverage in the budget largely ends at the point at which we vote for it”. 

He said: “When we were in government, we were able to protect, in-year, the areas which we cared about. We won’t have that in-year control, going forward.

“They’re going to need to come forward with proposals that give us faith, whatever we agree, if agreement is possible, that will actually be delivered.

“In a lot of ways, that will actually be more challenging than coming to agreement on the actual tax and spend aspects on this - as hard as that’s going to be. 

“The lack of confidence and the lack of trust is a situation of their creation - it’s a result of the choices they’ve made over the last six months. So they will need to come with a solution for that.”

Last week, the Greens put forward tax proposals, including a rethink on business rates relief, a cruise ship levy, a private jet tax and a carbon land tax - which SNP agreed to look at. The Greens will continue to table more policies around tax, spending and fiscal reform in the coming weeks.

Mr Greer, for example, said that new powers for councils “could be packaged up as a political agreement on the budget that would require separate legislation further down the line”.

But most stark of all for the SNP will be the perspective the Greens are taking to budget negotiations where despite being an opposition party, they will be using the last budget agreed under the Bute House Agreement - the greenest budget in the history of devolution - as a baseline for this year’s talks.

Mr Greer said: “We’re being pretty public about what we want in terms of that shopping list. We’ve already talked about the public health levy, for example - the tax on supermarkets who sell alcohol and tobacco, an asylum seeker bus travel pilot.”

But he added: “We are going to put forward quite a broad range of options. They are not designed to be a house of cards where if the SNP say we cannot do that one, everything else falls apart. We are not designing an escalating series of red lines here. 

“It’s about putting forward a wide range of options that collectively make it very clear what kind of society we want.”

The West of Scotland MSP said: “We are going to put forward options we are pretty confident in the deliverability and affordability in the first place because we’re coming at this from a much more informed perspective - we’ve done our homework here. 

“But overall, this will be a politically challenging package for them. They are in a different space to us on a whole range of policy areas. We are two different parties and the financial situation is pretty catastrophic.”

Mr Greer said the Greens were crucially “trying to make the point of policy coherence”. 

He said: “It’s not the case that they can just produce an SNP budget and then drop a bit of Green spending on top of it. We want the budget to be as coherent as possible.

“We don’t want spending in some areas to be massively increasing emissions while we have to spend in other areas to then decrease those emissions. That’s balancing out your road-building programmes with building insulated homes or retrofitting homes to be more warm and affordable.”

The party’s finance spokesperson stressed that prior to the Bute House Agreement, “we were in a very different political space where, largely, the SNP would produce an SNP budget and we would get to draw up some Green priorities on top of it”, such as free bus travel for under-22s. 

Mr Greer added: “We’re in a different space now. The financial leeway is so narrow that I don’t think they can afford to take that approach, so you need to start off from producing a much more coherent package.

“The starting principle for us in these negotiations is no step back from where we had got to in the last budget of the Bute House Agreement. 

“The final budget of the Bute House Agreement was the greenest budget that we’d ever seen in Scotland - it was £4.7bn on climate and nature spend, that was the budget where we removed peak rail fares.

“We need the overall scale of ambition on climate and on reducing child poverty, in this budget, to be at least equal to the one agreed. That is challenging because the financial situation is so much worse.

“We’re confident a better budget is possible. That will be politically challenging for the SNP because our definition of better is different from theirs. That starting point for us is no step back from where we were in the last budget.”

If the SNP cannot strike a deal with the Greens, the only realistic option to pass a budget would be securing an agreement with the Scottish Lib Dems.

A Scottish Lib Dems source said the party leader, Alex Cole-Hamilton, had also “had a brief chat with [Public Finance Minister] Ivan McKee”, but stressed “we haven’t shared priorities and they haven’t set out any information on what money there is”.

The source added: “Everyone is waiting to see what happens with the UK government budget. We'll be constructive as always, but there is a big gap between us and a lot of unknowns.”

Ms Robison said she was “focused on aligning the budget priorities that are set out in the Programme for Government with the resources that we have available to us”.

She said: “That, in turn, requires some discussion about deprioritising, which is always the difficult part, and that we create a budget that can command support across Parliament.”