Chamber and committees

I recognise that complaint, and it is certainly one that I made frequently when I was a member in the House of Commons. I accept that we have made a breakthrough, but let us exploit that to its full potential.

I urge the Government to take those points into consideration.

I move amendment S6M-03381.2, to insert at end:

“; acknowledges the recommendation in the action plan that veterans who are at risk of suicide should be considered in the Scottish Government’s new Suicide Prevention Strategy for Scotland; notes that this strategy is now not due to be published until September 2022, and calls for the Scottish Government to update the Parliament, in advance of its publication, on the action taken to develop and deliver veteran-specific suicide prevention training, and improve access to mental health support for veterans.”

My friend raises an extremely important point about data interdependencies. That metadata will be critical to building a network of understanding about dependants of veterans and some of the wider implications of that—they are often people who have lived in service accommodation.

I am concerned about the report in that sense, although it seeks to address the perceived gaps in the system. When veterans and their families fall between the cracks, that has real-life consequences. Just this week, I was contacted by the daughter of Donnie Watt, an 85-year-old veteran from Glenrothes in Fife. Donnie was an intelligence officer for the Royal Air Force in Berlin during the cold war and was diagnosed with dementia in 2017. Since then, he has been confined to hospital wards in Fife and, in the past five years, has spent just five months at home with his family. Donnie’s daughter Jane feels that veterans’ complex medical needs, as in Donnie’s case, are being overlooked in a stretched national health service.

The health and social care partnership that is responsible says that Donnie’s case is complex and that veteran-specific needs are difficult. I do not think that that is good enough. That does not mean that Donnie and other veterans like him are not worthy of the bespoke time and care needed to make them comfortable. The problem is that we do not know how many people like Donnie are out there. Until we collate and analyse all the data that is available to us, we will never know, and veterans such as Donnie will continue to suffer diminished quality of life.

Does the member agree that a particularly difficult cohort is those whose discharge is unplanned—for example, if they have failed a compulsory drugs test—and that they are often not given the necessary support into civilian life?

Will Sue Webber give way?

I begin by sharing the sentiments from across the chamber of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, who are showing such immense bravery in the face of continued aggression from Putin’s barbaric regime. I extend my solidarity to many of the Russian conscripts, who are clearly caught up in a situation that they did not expect to get caught up in. That exploitation is also worthy of condemnation.

Members of our veterans community are owed a huge debt of gratitude for their service to our country. Whether they served in European conflicts many decade ago, in conflicts in the middle and far east or in the Falklands war, each and every one of them should be immensely proud of their commitment to defending our country, often in the darkest of times.

As someone who has been a member of the Army reserves for more than a decade, I know on a deeply personal level the sacrifices that members of our armed forces make. Their role is a vocation; it means spending huge periods away from their family and friends, and it often leaves them isolated from civilian life. That is why I am delighted that the Scottish Veterans Care Network report and recommendations have finally been published. I am particularly pleased to see the emphasis that is placed on mental health and wellbeing services, which feature prominently in the report.

Poor mental health is incredibly prevalent in the veterans community, for obvious reasons, and I have concerns about the pandemic having exacerbated the situation in recent years. We know the particularly stark impact that isolation had on our veterans community. In 2021, the number of veterans who died as a result of suicide was at its highest level since 2005. The issue has been a cause of huge concern for a long time. That is why our amendment calls for veterans who are at risk of suicide to be specifically considered in the Government’s new suicide prevention strategy for Scotland. The strategy has, to be frank, taken too long to be developed, and its publication has been delayed until September 2022. Nonetheless, the strategy is welcome, and I thank the cabinet secretary for indicating that he will support our amendment to the Government’s motion.

I welcome the recommendations in the Scottish Veterans Care Network report that veterans should have equal access to mental health and wellbeing services, regardless of where they live, and that each NHS board, in collaboration with health and social care partnerships, should have a dedicated community-based mental health and wellbeing service for veterans. The report highlights the significant geographic variation in service provision and the lack of clarity on who to contact initially for help. When veterans ask for help, they often get lost in a fragmented and unresponsive system. Concerns were also raised about the lack of co-ordination between NHS community services and broader third sector provision. The situation has the potential to prevent veterans who are seeking support from accessing it, and that can often be catastrophic. That cannot be allowed to happen, and I hope that the steps that I have outlined will ensure that it does not.

The recommendations on providing support at the right time are also warmly welcome. We know that support is most effective when it is sought out, and our services require significant flexibility to be able to react at short notice. It is fair to say that, currently, the system around support services is incoherent, the services are variable in quality and not all veterans who seek help are able to access it quickly enough.

I welcome the suggestion that UK support services should have access to information on Scottish services and to other sources of information. Our veterans community is often highly mobile, which means that continuity and consistency of information, regardless of where people are located, should be of paramount importance. Ultimately, we are seeking to simplify a complex system, and small improvements such as that could make a huge difference to saving and improving lives.

I welcome the general points in the report about developing an anti-stigma campaign while improving public awareness, knowledge and understanding of veterans’ needs. Most of us will know someone who is classed as a veteran, but we might not always be aware of their needs or the type of tailored support that would be helpful to them. In combat situations, disinformation can be rife, and it is easy for public perceptions to become clouded and for veterans to be stigmatised as a result. I therefore warmly welcome the recommendation on an anti-stigma campaign. It is an honourable thing for people to serve their country.

Overall, there is much to be welcomed in the report, although there are some wider points that could and should have been included. For years, stakeholders in the sector have been warning of an information vacuum. To fully understand the needs of the community, we need to understand the community itself, but data on veterans is often scarce, disjointed and outdated. The community is traditionally difficult to define, and we have no definitive or conclusive understanding of the size of the community or its other characteristics. The report mentions the collation of increased data, particularly through the new census question, and intelligence to improve our understanding of the community. I welcome that, but I remain concerned with the pace of progress.

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reported warnings from residents, business and advocacy groups that the current quality of ferry service represents a real threat to island life. (S6O-00780)

Will the minister at least accept that the failure of the shipbuilding programme for Caledonian MacBrayne has played a key part in harming the quality of life for islanders and marginalised communities in Scotland, and will she commit to a national shipbuilding strategy and a continuous shipbuilding programme that is centred around the public sector procurement contract for Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd, in order to build a proper, sustainable shipbuilding industry in Scotland that will help provide lifeline services for communities in the islands?

Members have illustrated the challenge that Scotland faces with energy in future. With Scotland having used more nuclear power than any other UK nation in 2020—26 per cent of its electricity generation was from nuclear—the forthcoming end of generation at Torness and the cessation this year of generation at Hunterston B present a significant challenge to the resilience of Scotland’s electricity grid.

According to the Climate Change Committee, the country will need four times as much clean power by 2050 to hit net zero and 38 per cent of that clean power will need to be from firm, reliable, always-on power sources regardless of weather conditions, so we are faced with a stark choice: reliance on gas or the utilisation of new-generation nuclear stations. Whether in Scotland or other parts of the United Kingdom, it is as simple as that.

We are presented with a choice. That choice is not simply the non sequitur presented by other members, such as Hinkley Point C. I am not a fan of the European pressurised water reactor technology. It is a dog of a design and deeply problematic. It is a symptom of the domination of the British nuclear industry by the French state. Other opportunities are presented to us not only to consider new technologies but to build an industrial renaissance in Scotland by being at the forefront of the energy industry.

In 1933, the father of nuclear physics, Sir Ernest Rutherford, said:

“Energy produced by ... breaking down ... the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine ... We hope in the next few years to get some idea of what these atoms are, how they are made, and the way they are worked.”

That statement by Rutherford illustrates how great minds can fail to anticipate the evolutionary direction of their own discoveries. Like all scientific discoveries, the conversion of matter into energy can be used for good or ill, and it is for us to make the right choices.

New types of nuclear reactors have significant potential to counter the three principal threats to public acceptance of nuclear power generation by improving safety, reducing waste and reducing cost. That opens up the prospect of their making an important contribution to any future emissions reduction strategy, and Scotland should support the development of such nuclear power technology.

Nuclear generation has a very small CO₂ footprint, but most existing nuclear plants are not suitable for coping with variations in grid demand and cannot contribute to restarting the system after a grid failure, because the presence of the grid is required as a prerequisite for the reactor to start up. As a result, we should seek to design nuclear plants that are more commercially competitive, reliable and flexible and which exploit inherently passive safety features that can contribute very significantly to capital cost reduction. Such ambitions might seem like a tall order, but new fourth-generation reactor technology should be able to deliver such a vision.

For example, designs for molten salt reactors are showing great promise in a number of countries, and they have the potential to achieve large cost savings by removing the hazards that could lead to the explosive release of dangerous fission products into the atmosphere. In the hierarchy of approaches to safety engineering, hazard elimination, harm reduction and managing the likelihood or mitigation of consequences of the hazard itself normally prove to be the most cost-effective strategy, and that is where technologies such as molten salt come into their own.

Other favourable features of molten salt reactors include the elimination of salt and steel corrosion problems through chemical-reducing properties in the coolant formulation and the ability to carry out refuelling on load and unpressurised, further reducing capital costs. Moreover, the maintenance of long-lived radioactive waste is much easier and cheaper, because radioactive waste with a fairly long half-life is converted into much shorter half-life isotopes. A range of fuel types can also be used; for example, thorium fuel has the potential to be used when uranium reserves begin to run out, and the UK legacy stock of plutonium can be used for new fuel production. Indeed, the reuse of plutonium as fuel would have immense strategic value in removing or reducing the proliferation of potential weapons material. Finally, molten salt reactors can also be produced as road-transportable modules.

We have the potential to utilise such new technologies to build a supply chain in Scotland that can crowd in wealth and opportunity. If the nuclear industry had not evolved from military imperatives and had developed independently, the molten salt technology that is now under development would probably be regarded as a dream contribution to the challenges of reliability and carbon reduction in the electricity system. That is the opportunity that we could have if we fundamentally reassessed what nuclear energy could present the country with, and I urge the cabinet secretary to broaden his horizons and consider these emerging fourth-generation technologies. Scotland could be leading on this globally, and we should seize that opportunity.

Would the cabinet secretary accept that, as I outlined in my speech, the transformational effects of such technologies as molten salt can introduce passive safety, so it is actually a revolutionary change in how the nuclear industry would operate, massively reducing the capital cost of stations? Even for the supply chain, Rolls-Royce is interested in building a heavy pressure vessel factory in the UK, with £200 million of investment. The cabinet secretary’s colleague the member for Glasgow Provan says that he has not even met representatives of the company to discuss the prospects of that factory being located in Scotland. That is a supply chain opportunity for heavy engineering and advanced manufacturing. Would the cabinet secretary at least consider taking that up proactively with Rolls-Royce?

What consultation has the Scottish Government carried out with trade unions and what actions have been agreed with them with regard to the specification for the freeports?