The Psychotherapy and Counselling Union met me today and raised the point that there are often no other routes of referral apart from CAMHS. Loading pressure on to CAMHS is part of a vicious cycle, which includes cuts to mental health spending across the board in community settings, primary care settings and educational settings. Is that not compounding the pressure that we are seeing, not just in CAMHS but across our mental health services and the NHS?

Will the member give way on that point?

Will the member take an intervention?

The cabinet secretary talked about charting a new path. It is perverse that the biggest capital budget allocated to Glasgow in the next few years will be for rebuilding the M8 motorway while the public transport budget for the city has been cut to zero. Does she share my concern about that?

The member made an important point about some of the flaws in GDP calculations. One example that she might agree with me on is that new-build housing construction is factored into new GDP figures but renovations and retrofits are not. Is that not a perverse situation in a climate emergency, with massive amounts of housing that badly needs to be refurbished?

I thank the cabinet secretary for giving way. She raised an important issue about the growth and scaling of firms in Scotland. One of the concerns that has often been raised with me is that firms in Scotland grow to a certain level, after which they struggle to access more capital then have to sell to overseas ownership. Is there a strategy in place for the Government to anchor more firms to Scotland for the longer term, so that we can have more FTSE 250 and FTSE 100 companies with headquarters in this country?

Would the cabinet secretary agree to allow a briefing—a private briefing, if necessary—to be provided by First Marine International on the benchmarking study that it carried out on the Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) Ltd shipyard and the investment that it would need to make it sufficiently competitive?

If I heard the cabinet secretary correctly, there is a float available for allocation, potentially by the end of this month, of €136.4 million; that leaves 18 days to maximise the allocation. An example that might be useful to the cabinet secretary is the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, which has a current funding gap of between £7 million and £15 million. The very solvency of that theatre company is at risk because the money that it currently has will be expended by the end of this month. If funds are allocated, they could be spent by the end of the year to get the theatre project back on track. Is that an example that we could investigate? The project is already mobilised, so funds could be used immediately, and that could help to maximise the utilisation of the funding.

When I was first elected to Parliament in 2017, I met Vince Cable. I did not think that I would have much in common with a Liberal Democrat MP from a London constituency, but he informed me that he started his political career in Glasgow when he was elected as a councillor—as a Labour councillor, in fact—for the Glasgow Corporation in 1971. He then told me that his greatest achievement in politics to date—despite serving in the Cabinet and rising to some of the highest offices in the land—was successfully persuading the corporation of the city to cancel the Maryhill motorway project in one of the last acts of Glasgow Corporation before it was merged into Strathclyde Regional Council.

I then reflected on being elected to this place in 2021, which coincided with a huge project just adjacent to where the Maryhill motorway was to be built, at the Woodside viaducts. That was completed in the same year that Vince Cable was elected—1971—but it is now going to have to be expensively rebuilt, because the whole structure, which is about 300m long, is suffering from what is colloquially known as “concrete cancer”. It is crumbling and is destabilised. It is going to cost up to £152 million—£71 million more than was first anticipated—simply to prop the structure temporarily. That will last until 2026, which is the end of this parliamentary session.

As an elected parliamentarian from Glasgow, I have had no consultation, and no one has asked my constituents’ opinion about whether that is appropriate expenditure. We have heard about the pressures across the trunk road network elsewhere in Scotland.

I thank the cabinet secretary for that kind invitation, and I look forward to arranging that. I am in no doubt about the seriousness of the issues with that piece of infrastructure, which is more than half a century old. However, there has been a bit of narrow-mindedness when it comes to Transport Scotland’s consideration of all the available options. After all, that is just the temporary propping measure, and not even the permanent repair.

Around the world, the highways to boulevards campaign is showing cutting-edge innovation in urban planning and in how to deal with the legacy of urban motorways, which were in vogue half a century ago. There are many new ideas out there that we should be exploring. At-grade boulevards are increasingly seen as the best practice around the world. I point to numerous examples, from San Francisco and Boston to Seoul, Montreal and Paris, where the Georges Pompidou expressway was replaced by an urban boulevard in 2016 under Anne Hidalgo, who has served as the mayor of Paris since 2014 and is a pioneer of the 15-minute city movement. That has moved 73,000 vehicles a day off the Paris waterfront at the Seine.

We have plans in place. Glasgow City Council has been working with Dutch architect Winy Maas and Austin-Smith:Lord to prepare district regeneration frameworks that point a way to reducing the severe impact that the M8 has. When it was opened in 1971, protesters gathered above the overpass at Charing Cross with a banner that said, “This scar will never heal.” The programme that Glasgow City Council has prepared has a set of categories that say how to heal Glasgow’s motorway scar. We are talking not about closing the M8 down altogether but about reimagining the road in the context of an inner-city environment and taking into account best practice around the world, from Paris to Seattle.

We should try to be world leaders on the matter. If the Government wants to do that and to achieve its objectives of reducing car use while maintaining critical road networks, we should be looking at unlocking that value. Glasgow city centre has the equivalent of Inverness city centre’s worth of motorway running through it. It needs to be reimagined. We could release huge amounts of currently sterilised inner-city land to be repurposed and developed, which could return a significant positive contribution to the public purse to invest elsewhere in Scotland. I urge the minister to explore all those opportunities for the betterment of Glasgow and Scotland.