I am actually going to talk about why we should be given the rebate and why what happened makes sense.
Scotland’s police and fire departments have been paying an annual charge of about £35 million a year in VAT, and we have repeatedly asked for those services to be excluded. The SNP has asked for it 140 times, and several other people have asked for it, too, and we have been given so many excuses why it could not be done. Murdo Fraser said that there was
“no justification for a VAT refund.”—[Scottish Parliament Official Report, 31 October 2017; c. 77.]
The Chancellor himself said that they would not be able to recover the VAT under EU law. However, the fair thing for the Government to do has always been to give police and fire services access to the VAT rebate. Highways England and the London Legacy Development Corporation have access to the rebate, and both are national organisations. Now, suddenly, the welcome decision has been taken to give us the rebate, but nothing has changed to cause that to happen. The situation is no different from what it was three years ago. The police and fire services are structured exactly the same as they were three years ago, yet somehow the Government have decided that we are now eligible for the rebate when previously we were not.
6.45 pm
The only fair thing to do—I encourage the hon. Member for Gordon (Colin Clark) actually to read the amendment, because it would not do what he suggests—is to have a review. The amendment asks the Government to look at the implications of giving us back the money that our police and fire services have claimed. This is absolutely a matter of fairness. The rebate should always have been available to the Scottish police and fire services. The money should always have been available, so that we could ensure that we had the best possible services and so that we could do things such as tackling the public sector pay cap within those services.
We are asking the Government to consider the consequence that would occur if the money were available to be claimed back retrospectively, and I contend that the consequences would be that we could spend more money on police and fire services in Scotland, we could counter this Government’s reduction in the block grant and things would be better for the police and fire services in Scotland. This is a matter of fairness. Nothing has changed except the Government’s position, and they should give us back the money that they have always owed us.