Chamber and committees

I had the opportunity to meet the chief executive of Glasgow 2026 Ltd last week and it was made clear that further development of the transport plan would be welcome. It is rather disappointing that the Government is not minded to consider free public transport.

Last week, the first batch of half a million tickets for the games went on sale, with thousands of fans from Scotland and across the world securing the opportunity to witness unforgettable sporting moments over 11 days next summer. With fans travelling from venue to venue to see the world’s top athletes, it is right that Glasgow should put its best foot forward. We will have 3,000 volunteers, 3,000 athletes and, potentially, half a million spectators.

We provided free public transport for the 2014 games and, in 2021, for the 26th United Nations climate change conference of the parties—COP26. Surely, then, the minister should, in tandem with the transport providers, explore all options to introduce temporary free public transport and, indeed, integrate the active travel opportunity of the e-bikes that have been introduced to Glasgow. Let us look at that and try to put our best foot forward. There is still time to move on it.

I rise to support the amendments in the name of my colleague Ms Villalba. However, I have a fundamental issue with the scope of the bill. There has been a long-standing and unambiguous policy recognition by the Government and the Parliament that land reform must encompass both urban and rural contexts. The current bill will exclude urban Scotland and other settlement types unless they are situated on a large landholding. Therefore, this provision will not provide any mechanisms to ensure that the public interest is considered in urban land management or urban land sales.

This is a pressing issue in urban and peri-urban areas, which are often blighted by vacant and derelict land, absentee and corporate landowners and widespread land banking and speculation. Indeed, 67 per cent of respondents to the consultation on the bill were in favour of the inclusion of urban Scotland. It is not good enough for the Government to put that in the pile of things that are too difficult to deal with. It is important that we grasp the opportunity of urban land reform.

I recognise that a lot of work is under way, but a lot of work has been under way for many years and it feels like the pace of progress in Scotland is glacial, particularly on things such as compulsory sale orders, which have been on the agenda for more than a decade. To be honest with you, it is getting quite tiresome that the issue continues to fail to progress at the pace that we need in Scotland.

For example, Glasgow, which I represent, has by far the highest proportion in Scotland of people who live near derelict sites—53 per cent of the population live within 500m of derelict land. Living within a five-minute walk of a derelict or vacant site can have a serious negative effect on mental health. When mass industrial closures and urban clearances happened in Scotland in the past half century, people’s entire neighbourhoods—where they were born and brought up—and their sense of place were completely upended. That has had a significant social effect.

Whatever we do in response to the issue needs to be coherent, robust and joined up, and it has to stitch our cities, as well as our rural environments, back together again. Last year, the total level of vacant and derelict land in Glasgow was 781 hectares, which is down from 834 hectares the year before—a reduction of around 72 full-sized football pitches—but the issue is the pace. If the current rate of annual reduction of derelict land is maintained, it will take until the middle of the century to regenerate all our current long-term industrial and derelict sites across Glasgow. We need to raise our ambition.

To reinvent our urban centres and get people back into them, we have to figure out a way to get some of that vacant space back into use—residential use in particular. The key to that is to address negligent land and property ownership in urban areas. In Glasgow city centre, 3 million square feet of floor space is not in use, which is more than the floor space of the entire Empire State building in New York, and 600,000 square feet of the vacant stock is made up of properties that were constructed before 1919. If that space were converted into residential units, it would be enough for 4,500 flats.

The Scottish Government has had a commitment to urban land reform in place since the 2015 act and the 2016 act, but the bill does not explicitly include it in its scope. After the election in May, I hope that we see a Parliament and Government that are resolved to finally reform the damaging land ownership patterns in Scottish cities, which result in significant levels of vacant and derelict sites, declining high streets and an urban housing crisis.

Ms Wells’s point is important, and it reflects the point that Michael Marra, my colleague from Dundee, made, which was that we must meet people where they are, without judgment and without setting tests that they are doomed to fail, because too often the system becomes more important than the person’s needs. We need to build a system that reflects the needs of individuals and does not set tests that they are doomed to fail.

When I worked as a volunteer on the overdose prevention pilot, a young lady came to that service and overdosed. She was involved in exploitative sex work. She had fled from a care setting because she was suffering sexual abuse, and she was sleeping rough in the city. She was terrified of accessing services, but it was through the initial conversation—that small act of love and compassion of giving someone a warm drink and having some conversation—that her life was saved, even though she had overdosed. She resolved, because of conversation and interaction, to seek the help that she needed. She was referred into rehabilitation and she is now thriving. That is an example of what we can achieve. There have already been some referrals from the Thistle, but it is certainly early days for that pilot. I would like to see a much more robust approach.

In the most recent survey of alcohol and drug partnerships, every single one reported that there are barriers to residential rehab. It can be catastrophic and deadly if timely intervention is not available. I was in Copenhagen, where the overdose prevention facilities operate in concert, in the same neighbourhood, with residential rehabilitation. People can be referred into residential rehab within five minutes of expressing that it is an appropriate course of action. We do not have such a facility in Glasgow right now. Although we are taking steps in the right direction, we need to go so much further.

That is why I urge the Government to at least give the bill a hearing at stage 2, to allow us to work in concert and sustain unity of purpose to try to improve the bill. I believe that there is a role for every aspect of these interventions in our society, which can stem the catastrophic flow of preventable death in our communities.

We must act as one. We cannot afford to split on this issue. I urge the Government to maintain some unity as we go through the legislative process.

I thank the minister for advance sight of his statement.

We all agree that the current system for young people who seek mental health support is broken and must be transformed. I came to the Parliament from the Bipolar Scotland conference held in Edinburgh this morning, where there was broad agreement that prevention is often ill recognised and poorly resourced, particularly because of irrational and incoherent decisions made by integration joint boards in allocating budgets.

At First Minister’s question time, the First Minister told me that the Government was on track to meet its commitment to spend 10 per cent of the national health service budget on mental health services by the end of this parliamentary session. Does the minister agree with the First Minister that that will be achieved, and is he willing to be held to account for that commitment?

I thank the member for making a very powerful speech. I note that the Law Society of Scotland’s recommendations pertain only to changes to sections 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the bill, but the bill has 11 sections. Surely it can be amended—it is eminently amendable—and there are ways to do that at the next stage.

Dr Pavan Srireddy, the vice-chairman of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has described the autism and ADHD waiting time scandal as “a public health emergency”. Will the Scottish Government fulfil its commitment to spend 10 per cent of the national health service budget on mental health by the end of this parliamentary session, so that those who are trapped on waiting lists will have some reassurance that they will get the support that they need?

I extend to Mr Ross my compliments on his work to develop the bill in concert with, in particular, Annemarie Ward and Stephen Wishart. They have worked very hard on it over a number of years in the current parliamentary session.

Soon after I was elected to the UK Parliament in 2017, we had a debate on this very issue in the House of Commons. At that time, there was division about the efficacy of certain interventions, but over time we have learned—in a school of negative learning in Scotland, unfortunately—what we need to do to make a positive difference, to save people’s lives and to preserve and enhance life.

Today, many speakers have described personal experience of addiction and the pernicious effects that it has on families. For people from working-class families in the west of Scotland, the impacts run deep, and they have affected my family. I have had relatives who have suffered premature death because of alcohol addiction and tobacco addiction, and other members have spoken powerfully about their personal experiences.

However, even I, after my election to represent the north-east of Glasgow in 2017, could not comprehend the sheer scale of the drug deaths emergency that confronted my constituents at that time. That happened in the context of the Government having cut £50 million from addiction services in this country over the previous five years, before I was elected, and having compounded it by almost prohibiting the routine prescribing of benzodiazepines through primary care practitioners. That combination was catastrophic. It structurally shifted Scotland’s profile of drug-related deaths to be the worst in Europe, and that has been a persistent structural catastrophe for this country over the past decade. Last year, there were still 1,017 drug-related deaths. Since the Government announced the national emergency, we have had more than 6,000 preventable deaths.

It is incumbent on us all to understand what we can do together, with a unified purpose, to stop drug deaths as much as we can. Every circumstance will be different, but circumstances are often related. I remember meeting Annemarie Ward for the first time, in the Possilpoint community centre in 2019, along with Peter Krykant, who I also met for the first time at that event. We discussed the catastrophic drug-related deaths in the city and what needed to be done. It was clear that everything needed to be done—everything that would be useful and was backed by evidence. At that time, I resolved with Mr Krykant to support his work to open an unsanctioned overdose prevention centre in Glasgow.

That work helped to save nine people’s lives; nine overdoses were reversed and 900 injections were supervised. During that period, I was able to build consensus with Mr Ross and others in the chamber about the need to at least test the efficacy of the programme. So far, the official pilot has encountered 60 medical emergencies and has demonstrated that its operation results in lives being preserved.

It is one thing to preserve lives, but it is another to allow people to have a reason to live. Often, encounters can be instrumental. That is why it is important that we stay unified. There is a role for harm reduction measures, but they have to be augmented and reinforced by a pathway to recovery. It is in no one’s interest to sustain addiction for a minute longer than is necessary. We must provide a way out of addiction for people who are able and have the capacity to take it. However, first and foremost, we need to preserve lives.

Will the member take an intervention?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update regarding the work that Social Security Scotland is engaging in to support veterans in accessing its services. (S6O-05020)