The Bill before us will transfer nearly 50% of tax and 60% of spending to the Scottish Parliament. We promised to make it the most powerful devolved Parliament in the world, and that is a promise we will keep. As I have always said, we will ensure that the Bill is delivered in full, both in spirit and in substance. We will go further, as we will debate in Committee in due course.
Let me return to the £7.6 billion deficit—[Interruption.] I know that SNP Members do not like to talk about the £7.6 billion deficit, but it is important to get it on the record. It is unfortunate that they have consistently misquoted the figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and indeed it has had to ask them to retract what they have said about its figures.
We have also heard no mention of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s oil report, which was published last week. It showed that the reliance on oil as an underpinning of the Scottish economy is no longer a viable projection. The collapse of revenues from oil will see the tax take from that source drop from £37 billion to just £2 billion over the 20-year period to 2040. That would be catastrophic for Scottish public finances. The question, then, is this: will SNP Members vote with the Tories to deliver what they want, as they have said they
will do, or will they finally admit in this House that their flagship policy of full fiscal autonomy is economically illiterate?