My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and I intend to deal with some of those points later in my speech.
The hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) said on Second Reading:
“I want to see our two Governments working together as they do on city and growth deals the length and breadth of the country.”—[Official Report, 14 September 2020; Vol. 680, c. 89.]
I absolutely agree with him: for as long as we have two Governments for Scotland, they should indeed work together.
However, citing that argument in support of the Bill is, I believe, fundamentally flawed because these deals already work and there is no need for a further encroachment on the devolution settlement to make similar deals work better.
4.15 pm
Prior to being elected as the Member for Gordon, I spent some time as the co-leader of Aberdeenshire Council, and I was a signatory on behalf of the local authority to the Aberdeen city region deal. Within that deal, total investment by the Scottish Government is currently out- funding the commitment of the Westminster Government by a factor of 3:1. Under existing arrangements, the UK Government could—if they had the will, the means and the determination to do so—match that funding straightaway. There is nothing stopping them.
The UK Government could put in place the resources to fund a sector deal for the North sea. They could, if they wanted to, help local government defer—or, better still, write off—the interest on the Public Works Loan Board loans of local authorities right across Scotland, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) has called for. They could even, if they wanted to work in a genuine spirit of partnership, expand the financial powers of the Scottish Parliament to embrace borrowing powers.
The hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) and I had an exchange earlier when he accepted my intervention, for which I thank him. May I recommend to him, for his bedtime reading tonight, the “Scottish Local Government Finance Statistics 2018-19”, particularly chart 2.2, where his eyes will feast on the general fund net revenue expenditure figures for Scotland? He will see that the Scottish average spend is £1,981 per head, and in Aberdeenshire it is £1,970, which is just immediately below the average. I commend it to him. Many criticisms can indeed be made of the funding formula. I will be glad to share that diagram with the press when his press release goes out later, and I will be glad to add some factual context to it.