THE former finance secretary has apologised after erroneously accusing a Tory MSP of getting their facts wrong.
John Swinney pulled up Tory MSP Douglas Lumsden for statistics he quoted during a debate in Parliament on Wednesday.
He accused the North East Scotland MSP of being “wholly incorrect” in a claim he made about a UK Government fund.
But it has since transpired the former finance secretary was the one who got his facts wrong, and he has written to Lumsden to apologise.
Swinney’s claim came during a member’s business debate on the potential closure of the Dewars Centre, a Perth ice rink which hails itself as the “home of Scottish curling”.
Oh dear. It’s not @dlumsden who is ‘wholly wrong’ with his facts here, it’s @JohnSwinney who has had to apologise to Parliament for lying in my Members Debate @ScotParl tonight. So desperate to put down a @ScotTories MSP that he just makes stuff up pic.twitter.com/Z7WqFnEEth
— Murdo Fraser (@murdo_fraser) May 31, 2023
During the Scottish Government’s response to the debate, Lumsden brought up the extra money the Edinburgh administration would receive from Westminster because of an increase in state funding for swimming pools – which came as additional funding to the block grant.
Swinney made an intervention in response to the Tory MSP and said that the money was not additional and therefore was part of the block grant. He has since said this was not the case.
In Parliament, Swinney said: “I think for the sake of completeness that I need to advise parliament that Mr Lumsden is wholly incorrect.
“The allocation of funding for the Swimming Pools fund was made at the United Kingdom budget in October of 2022, and therefore formed part of the block grant which I distributed in December 2022.
"So Mr Lumsden is wholly wrong in what he’s just put to the minister.”
But later on Wednesday evening, Swinney sent a letter to Lumsden, the Presiding Officer and others as well as the parliamentary library putting on record his apologies.
He wrote: “In the members’ business debate this evening, I intervened on the minister to state that a comment made by Douglas Lumsden MSP, that funding from the UK Swimming Pool Fund was additional to the previously allocated funding by the UK Government, was incorrect.
“I have now realised that I was in fact incorrect and the funding was allocated in March 2023, and not October 2022 which I stated, which makes Mr Lumsden’s point correct.”
