Budget 2026

January 16, 2026

The Scottish Budget was on Tuesday. I helped the Future Economy Scotland (FES) people do some instant analysis. Kind of fun: took me back a little to when IFS used to do live analysis of the UK Budget for the BBC.

Juan-Pedro and Hanna from FES did a pretty good job, I think (I just do the numbers..). Key thing is that if you’re serious about a Social Democratic, Green Scotland, that doesn’t come for nothing, but you can’t just tax the rich.

FES could prove really important small outfit because the standard of analysis of the Scottish fiscal system elsewhere is really depressingly bad. The SFC do a creditable job as best as I can tell, but other analyses, like this from the Fraser of Allander and this from IFS have just repeat SFC things without any attempt to validate or test different assumptions, but with a few headline-grabbing lines which add nothing. (IFS seems to me to have stuck in a similar doom loop with the OBR for at least a decade).

One takeaway from this is that I have to start modelling the wider Scottish fiscal system, especially the rUK Fiscal Framework and the block grant system to local authorities. I have to fully understand them first, though..

Juan-Pedro has started contributing chunks of code to the model, which is quite exciting. He also live-updated the model’s uprating data to match the SFC forecast.

FES and I have been using Pluto Notebooks for collaboration. It’s worked really well. I’ve been preparing them, adding needed graphics, tables and whatnot, and we share the notebooks via github. Here’s a PDF dump of the Budget one. (The PDF doesn’t render perfectly, unfortunately)