Chamber and committees

I am very grateful, Presiding Officer.

The NDNA has also said:

“the rates that are given are not sustainable since they are not keeping up with inflation, but also with rising economic and living costs. Nurseries are finding it more and more difficult to meet the cost of delivery, which could result in the potential loss of smaller settings.”

The issue with the 1,140 hours policy that really gets me angry is that, under it, a child in a private sector nursery appears to be worth less than a child in a local authority setting. No child should ever be worth less or more when it comes to getting the best possible start in life.

The SNP Government is fully aware of the problems, but there is yet to be any update provided to Parliament on how it intends to fix the policy or make it fair for all partners. While the SNP remains silent on the issue, nurseries will continue to close.

It is a yes/no answer, Presiding Officer.

I said that I would take the minister in a little while.

A business will not survive if it is not able to identify and correct issues relating to its model, and I do not see why the Scottish Government should be exempt from acknowledging the problems that the PVI sector experiences daily. It is not as if the issue is not reported time and again in the press. As recently as this week, The Herald reported a case study of a childminder losing their income because of the need to complete paperwork, as the sector is in crisis. She revealed that she is losing in excess of £600 a month as she has to commit a full day each week to complete paperwork—time that she is not paid for. The childminder blamed the excessive level of lost income on the bureaucracy that I mentioned earlier, and said that it is having a huge impact on her business. She said:

“We can’t do paperwork when we’ve got children in our care ... I absolutely love the job I do. I love watching the children develop and being a key part of that but what I am in effect doing is paperwork for a job I love, but I’m not being paid for it.”

That childminder is not alone.

What has become clear to me is that—as we heard from Liz Smith, who gave the timeline of failings—the Scottish Government has been in power for so long that it has lost the will and desire to fix its failing policies.

The SNP often tells Opposition politicians that we do not come to the table with any solutions. Therefore, for the benefit of the cabinet secretary and others, I will offer solutions that will make the 1,140 policy fair for local authorities and the PVI sector. I am happy to give way to the minister on this point, with regard to the fixing of the funding formula. Will she commit to a review of the funding formula to make it fair for the PVI sector and local authority nurseries?

I will take that as a no.

I understand that I must conclude my remarks, so I will just say that today we have heard damning reports from members across the chamber. It is about time that this SNP Government got a grip of our education system for the benefit of our children in Scotland.

To ask the Scottish Government how it plans to address the reported increase in incidents of violence in schools. (S6O-01272)

Teaching unions such as the NASUWT and the Educational Institute of Scotland have raised serious concerns about the soaring levels of violence and aggression in classrooms. The unions have warned that the reduction in classroom assistants, combined with the Scottish National Party Government’s refusal to commission research into poor behaviour, are contributing factors. One union representative has even claimed that it is

“as if they don’t really want to know”

the scale of the problem.

That is happening under the SNP’s watch. Will the cabinet secretary listen to the concerns that are being raised about the increased level of violence in our schools, and will the Scottish Government admit that cuts to council and education budgets are putting teachers at risk?

Yes—certainly.

Absolutely—I commented on that issue at the time. No memorial that has the names of loved ones on it should ever be defaced in such a manner, so I agree with the member’s comments. I know that some of my Central Scotland region colleagues will go on to mention various other examples like the one that Clare Adamson mentioned.

Given the level of attacks on war memorials across Scotland, groups such as the friends of Dennistoun war memorial group have been formed to take direct action and to introduce better protections. They have organised a successful social media campaign to highlight the number of incidents, and they have brought together groups of people who care about our heritage, our history and our war dead. They have petitioned the Parliament on numerous occasions to ask that more be done to protect these sites from the mindless and abhorrent attacks on the memories of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. It is a rather sad indictment that those petitions have so far been unsuccessful in achieving their desired outcome.

Furthermore, many of the leading veterans charities in Scotland have condemned the attacks. Poppyscotland and Legion Scotland have regularly condemned the attacks on war memorials, and they are especially concerned about the detrimental impact that such attacks have on the mental health of the veteran community that they so passionately represent.

The Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans and other ministers might suggest that we already have in place legislation to deal with cases of vandalism of our war memorials. They might tell Parliament that perpetrators of vandalism can face up to six months in prison or fines of up to £5,000 under current legislation that deals with the vandalism and desecration of statues and memorials, including war memorials. However, I do not feel that those laws are tough enough, and they do not provide the necessary deterrents to stop such events from happening in the first place. If the legislation was adequate, there would not be an increasing number of attacks on the memorials.

There is a massive difference between the graffiti and vandalism of a picnic table and that of a war memorial, yet under the current legislation both events are categorised in the same manner. That cannot be right. I therefore intend to introduce a member’s bill so that we can finally provide stronger legislation to better protect Scotland’s war memorials, as has already been successfully introduced by my colleagues in England and Wales via the United Kingdom Government.

I remind Parliament that armed forces and veterans week starts on Monday. It is an opportunity for local communities to come together to support our armed forces men and women and the charities and third-party organisations that work alongside veterans once they return to civilian life. I look forward to working alongside various groups as I begin to progress my bill through Parliament.

I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important committee debate. I offer my apologies, because I will need to leave the chamber before the conclusion of this afternoon’s debate.

I, too, thank the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee for publishing its report, which makes 99 recommendations for the Government to consider in order that it can improve the wellbeing of young Scots. It now falls to the Government to consider seriously the recommendations and to make much-needed improvements.

In March, the Scottish Parliament restated its commitment to keeping the Promise and improving outcomes for care-experienced young people. Although that was welcome, the SNP ignored calls from the Conservatives to acknowledge the concerns that had been raised by various charities and third party organisations that work directly with young people in care. I found it upsetting that, during the minister’s opening remarks, not one reference was made to care-experienced young people.

I thank Clare Haughey for her intervention. However, given that the Promise is one of the Government’s flagship policies and a recommendation of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, I would have thought that there would be more focus on the matter in the minister’s opening remarks.

On top of that, more concerns have emerged since the SNP’s handling of implementation of the Promise. The concerns outline a lack of progress since the independent peer review that was initially launched in February 2020.

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet Fiona McFarlane, who is the head of oversight at the Promise Scotland, to discuss the work that the oversight board is undertaking to ensure that the Promise is rolled out. She has been critical of the level of progress that the Government has made in the past two years, and she admitted that young people’s lives will not have improved but might even, in some instances, have got worse.

A study that was conducted by the Promise Scotland oversight board found that the pledge that had been made by the Government in 2020 was more of a commitment than a true implementation plan. One of the main flaws in the Government’s Promise policy relates to a lack of meaningful data or true understanding of young people in care. For example, the study shows that between 2019 and the first nine months of 2021, 59 young people died, of whom 17 were children in care, seven were in continuing care and 35 were in throughcare and aftercare. One death of a young person in care is one death too many. It is heartbreaking that the data on the lives of those young people has not been properly recorded.

Failure to understand young people not only makes recording data more difficult—it fails to provide authorities with important information that could prevent future deaths. Although MSPs can accept that the Promise has been described as a 10-year transformational change, those problems have existed for years.