It is a pleasure to support the motion.

The cabinet secretary is right to highlight the fact that the national care service, or its concept, is essential for the future of Scotland. Social care is so critical to all aspects of our civic society that most families in Scotland will have experience of care requirements in their own households. Therefore, it is essential that we get this right. Unfortunately, it seems that no good idea can survive contact with the calamity of this Government’s administration of it.

Time and again, all parties have offered good will to the Government in an effort to get the bill right. Numerous months have been spent in committee trying to support the Government to get the bill right, but we have ended up in a position in which key stakeholders across local government, the trade unions and the social enterprise sector have withdrawn their support. That is a disastrous performance by the Government, and it should be reflecting on it with humility instead of simply trying to deny reality.

The commitment to establish a national care service was made by the Scottish National Party Government in 2021, in the wake of the pandemic, but, in the three years since then, £30 million of public expenditure has delivered precisely nothing of any real value to the people of Scotland. We are no further forward, and the crushing issues in the social care sector persist: rising delayed discharge rates in the national health service, low pay, poor working conditions and a lack of choice and agency for people who receive and provide care.

In pursuing the bill, the Scottish Government has tried and failed to be all things to all people. It has lacked decisiveness, grit and a vision of what the national care service should look like. It should have learned the right lessons from the creation of the national health service. When Aneurin Bevan steered that legislation through the UK Parliament, it was not some immaculate conception; there was immense challenge and dispute around the creation of the NHS. It took grit, determination and a decision on what it would be—it would not happen in local government or in privatised hospitals but would be a national service. At least, at that time, the Government made a decision; the minister, the cabinet secretary and the Scottish Government have not had the gumption to do that on this occasion.

I have been contacted by multiple constituents who are on waiting lists for assessments for ADHD and autism in Glasgow. Recently, a constituent told me that the waiting time for an ADHD assessment is now three years. The minister mentioned the £1 million fund, but can she confirm that she has challenged NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde on those unacceptable waiting times? What support is available to my constituents while they struggle as they wait on a diagnosis?

Mr Cole-Hamilton has made an astute point. In fact, the Scottish Trades Union Congress has highlighted the fact that more than £100 million a year leaks out of the social care system into profiteering. The Government does not mention that point often when it is tackling the issue of efficiency in public expenditure, nor the fact that people often have to sell the assets that they have worked their whole lives to build up to fund social care. Private profiteering of asset sales is a challenge in our society today.

Three years into a Parliament that was meant to introduce a national care service bill, it is no further forward. Indeed, the number of care home places has dropped by 6 per cent in the past decade. Precious time has been wasted when the Government could have been acting to deliver the immediate changes that are needed in social care—the minister conceded as much at the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee yesterday. We have no Anne’s law, no right to breaks and no collective bargaining—the list goes on.

Those changes could have been introduced long before now. We could have been building the framework of the national care service without holding it hostage to one grandiose piece of legislation. Indeed, the minister mentioned yesterday that the recommendations in the Feeley review could have been implemented without primary legislation. However, the end of this parliamentary session is fast approaching and instead of taking those steps, the Government remains devoted to pursuing change through one labyrinthine bill that has unfortunately run out of steam.

Labour remains committed to a national care service and open to collaboration to reform social care. However, the minister should accept that the bill in its current form is simply not salvageable and is not the way to deliver that change. The Parliament cannot afford the public expenditure required for us to spend more time considering the bill in its current form. I urge the Government to return to the drawing board with a focus on the actions that we can take now to realise areas of consensus and effect crucial change in the social care sector.

Clearly, the cabinet secretary was not keen on joining the queues at Mount Florida train station after those fixtures, which are infamously long due to the totally inadequate train service to Glasgow Central. What efforts is the Scottish Government making to improve public transport links to the national stadium for those who do not have the benefit of a chauffeured ministerial car?

Scotland is facing a housing emergency, as borne out by the fact that 13 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities have now declared one. The culmination of that disastrous situation has not happened overnight. It has been a long-running trend, and a feature of Scotland’s post-war history. An interesting fact is that in the mid-1970s—perhaps the member for Eastwood will recall this era—more than 50 per cent of all housing stock in Scotland was social housing, the highest concentration of any country in the democratic world. In fact, it was surpassed only by the Soviet Union.

Today, the figure is 24 per cent. In large part, that change is due to the Conservative Government’s decision in 1980 to introduce the right-to-buy scheme, which led to 494,000 houses being sold to the private sector.

It is a good thing that the right-to-buy legislation was repealed. I recognise that that has been helpful in stemming the flow of social housing stock to the private sector, which has been a source of major concern. Indeed, it has been calculated that around £2 billion of profit was generated in the asset growth from those sales. That is, in effect, a massive subsidy from the state to the private sector, at a rate of £25 of profit per day.

The issue that then arises is how to redress the balance. It is one thing to stem the flow, but how do we reverse it? I suggest to the minister that it would be helpful to introduce a national buy-back scheme, whereby the state can recover social housing stock. We want such a scheme to be introduced. We know that many housing associations actively pursue such buy-back schemes, which are a helpful way of recovering social housing stock.

The member makes a point about property owners selling their property. However, surely that will not destroy the housing stock; it will simply transfer it to different ownership, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It is perhaps about people who own multiple homes simply redistributing that property in a way that might be more efficient for future occupation.

As the cabinet secretary will be aware, the past couple of years have been very hard for Glasgow’s arts and culture sector. Funding cuts to Creative Scotland, as well as the inflationary impacts of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine and so on have led to some of Glasgow’s iconic cultural institutions being pushed to the brink. Local authorities have also faced pressure and have taken steps to raise extra revenue, such as removing the rates relief on empty listed buildings.

That has had an unintended consequence. For example, the Govanhill Baths Community Trust has already raised nearly £10 million to restore that historic building in Govanhill but still faces a £6.5 million shortfall. It is unable to use the building, which is in the midst of restoration, but it now faces a rates bill from Glasgow City Council, which threatens the viability of the restoration project.

Will the cabinet secretary undertake to engage with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and local authorities to see whether there can be amelioration or mitigation of the rates burdens that are faced by not-for-profits that are trying to restore listed buildings so that they are not undermined by those burdens?

I am sorry, but I want to proceed for a moment.

It might be useful to recognise that a large share of the £1.18 billion that is spent on housing benefit goes on subsidising private landlords. A more efficient utilisation of that public expenditure might be to recover ownership of the housing stock. That might also help offset some of the massive cuts that the Government has introduced, such as the whopping 26 per cent cut to the affordable housing supply programme, which has led to 1,800 social housing projects and affordable housing projects stalling across Scotland.

It is helpful to recognise that rent controls and restrictions have a place, certainly in the private rented sector, given the rapacious profiteering that we have seen. As Ms Chapman has mentioned, the privilege of being able to afford a mortgage comes with the bonus of 30 per cent lower housing costs on average, while those in the private rented sector face a massive premium, even though they might be living adjacent to someone paying far less for the same type of property. That gross inequality lies at the heart of many of the issues around poverty in Scotland that we face today.

There are myriad other issues that we need to address as part of the Housing (Scotland) Bill. Rent controls are one thing, but it is important to recognise that housing stock quality is another. One unintended consequence of the 1915 rent controls was that they effectively killed off factoring of tenemental property in Glasgow, leading to large-scale slums in the city by the 1960s and, in turn, the demolition of around 100,000 tenement properties in Glasgow over a 20 to 30-year period.

Today, around three quarters of Glaswegians live in tenement properties, and a number of major reforms are still needed, not least of which is ensuring five-yearly condition and fabric inspections and a compulsion on owners to carry out those inspections, in the same way that people have to have their car pass an MOT. We need to ensure that owners associations are collaborating and co-operating effectively. We need to use our community-based housing association network in Glasgow to build capacity and ensure that we have a much better-performing housing stock, as well as simply introducing rent controls. I hope that the minister will address that in the round in his closing remarks.

To ask the Scottish Government, in light of the United Kingdom Government announcing the largest funding settlement in real terms since devolution, how it will use any increase in funding to ensure that Glasgow’s arts and culture sector is able to thrive. (S6O-03948)