Chamber and committees

I thank you, Presiding Officer, and the First Minister for the kind words upon my election as Scottish Labour leader. The kind good wishes from across the chamber, including from members of different parties, are a personal reminder to me that just because we do not agree on everything does not mean that we cannot agree on anything.

As the country looks to this place for solutions to the significant issues that are impacting on every place in Scotland—the cost of living, opportunities for young people, secure work, good housing and better public services—it is incumbent on us all to find common ground and work together to address those fundamental issues in people’s lives and to deliver change now. We should all consider that amidst the heat of a constitutional debate.

The first thing that I did on my election on Saturday was to write to the First Minister to seek his support for establishing a cross-party commission on meeting the child poverty targets that the Parliament wrote into law. We are set to miss those child poverty targets by a mile, and the Parliament’s priority should be to get us back on track. We should recommit today to change the lives of children right across the country.

It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the SNP has a different priority. That priority is not really independence and, to be frank, it is not even securing another referendum. This debate—which I believe is an annual one—is about managing the First Minister’s party, not leading the country. Every single supposed step forward for the independence cause since 2014 has been a step up a hill for party supporters, who the SNP then briskly march back down again. I honestly believe that those people deserve better than that.

I know many people who voted yes in 2014; I count them among my friends and family. I believe that we can be a fairer and stronger nation without being a separate state. I do not believe that we need to risk our currency, defence, markets and budgets to deliver a more equal and just Scotland. We disagree on that, which is okay; supporting independence is a perfectly honourable political position to hold. However, so too is believing that Scotland is better placed as part of the UK.

I feel sympathy for the people I know who support independence—not for their political choice, but for how comprehensively the SNP Government has failed them in that regard for the past 12 years. Every six months or so—normally, when an election or an SNP conference is on the horizon—people are told that independence is just around the corner and that all it requires is one more push and one more heave.

None of the reasons for the independence campaign losing in 2014 has been addressed. There are still no answers on the currency, borders, defence or public spending; instead, there are photo opportunities and fundraising drives. I believe that the people who vote for the SNP deserve better than that. If the First Minister were to read The Herald newspaper today, it would be entirely apparent that SNP members agree with me.

I refer the First Minister to some of what Mr Rennie has already said. You—sorry, the First Minister; I will speak through the chair—clearly set out his position prior to the election, which was that a referendum would require there to be a majority of SNP MSPs. We, as a Parliament, should not participate in the goalposts being moved again.

This leadership always wants to take that easy route rather than doing the hard yards. There has always been a route to another referendum—John Swinney knows it, and Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf knew it. That route is to build a case through honest deliberation and careful compromise to allow the prosecution of the argument, to build a coalition of those who seek change and to build an overwhelming consensus, making it the settled will of the Scottish people. That is how the case for devolution was made and won.

Not at the moment, sir.

No one can seriously suggest that, since 2014, that work has been done by those who are in the positions to do it. Why is that? It is because it is easier and more immediately useful to manufacture grievance than to build consensus.

SNP supporters have been repeatedly let down by this charade, but the whole country has suffered, too. I want to see a stronger Scotland in a changing UK. In the 12 years since the referendum, Scotland—including our national health service, our education system, our economy and even the Parliament itself—has got weaker under this SNP Government. The SNP leader who secured the referendum understood the value of good governance to his party’s founding cause. Alex Salmond understood that the SNP was founded with the twin aims of independence and advancing Scotland’s national interest.

None of that is to say that power is being wielded in the correct places in Scotland. This Parliament hoards too much power, money and control at the expense of Scotland’s communities. I want there to be a new generation of devolution deals that redistribute power, wealth and opportunity out of the Scottish Parliament and into Scotland’s regions. This Parliament was never meant to hold on to power. Donald Dewar said that it was “not an end” but

“a means to greater ends.”

Those greater ends included social justice, which brings me back to the letter that I sent to the First Minister on Saturday.

This Parliament can choose to do what it now always seems to do—to divide itself along constitutional lines, with members pointing fingers at one other, and to get nothing done. That would further demonstrate to the people of Scotland that the Parliament is not serious about addressing their real concerns.

Our position is entirely reasonable, because, during the 1980s and 1990s, when the Deputy First Minister and I were both children, the Labour Party generated a settled will among the Scottish people, with overwhelming demand for devolution and the creation of the Scottish Parliament. That is the job that sits in front of her, and I recommend that she gets on with it.

I assure Kate Campbell that I did not make my mind up about the issue since Sunday. It has been my long-term position that Scotland is—clearly—a nation and that we made a decision on that in 2014, 1997 and 1979.

I have already had a conversation directly with the First Minister about the potential that we can see to find common ground between the Labour Party and other parties in this Parliament, be it on the budget or other issues. I am sure that the First Minister will hold me to those words in the conversations that we have in the months ahead. I say to Mr Greer, though, that the deals that he and other members of the Parliament have struck have not worked. We are going to miss those targets by a country mile, so we have to reassert them today and commit to a process that will get us there.

I apologise to Mr Kerr, but I am running out of time.

We can vote together to recommit ourselves to the work to lift children out of poverty. That is the future that I want Scotland to be able to decide on. My values are for equality, for a stronger Scotland and for a good life for working people. Those are Scottish values and I believe that they are Labour values, too.

Labour’s amendment seeks not to divide us for the sake of headlines but to bring us together around the common purpose of freeing Scottish children from the chains of want so that they might live a fuller life in a better country. I encourage members to support our amendment.

I move amendment S7M-01264.2, to insert at end:

“; recognises that Scotland faces pressing challenges that require urgent action to improve people’s lives; believes that the Scottish Government must strengthen its efforts to build a fairer, more equal and prosperous Scotland; recognises that tackling child poverty must be an immediate national priority; believes that parties across the Parliament should work together to deliver the actions needed to reduce child poverty; recognises the positive impact of measures such as the Scottish Child Payment and the removal of the two-child limit in tackling child poverty; further recognises the importance of secure employment, education, housing and strong communities in achieving this, and reaffirms its commitment to achieving the targets set out in the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017, including reducing relative child poverty to fewer than one in 10 children by 2030.”

15:27

The First Minister will be aware of the severe issues that women in Tayside face in accessing gynaecology services. NHS Tayside has told the Scottish Government that the number of women who are waiting for more than a year has reduced from 1,348 to 11, but those figures are simply not true and I have many constituents who have been waiting for multiple years. One constituent was told that she would wait for more than three years for a hysterectomy. She took out a loan and went private and she has never made it on to the waiting list as a result. Does the First Minister believe that those terrible waits in Tayside are acceptable?

The programme for government must be about seizing our opportunities and facing up to the big challenges that Scotland faces. The clearest example of that is child poverty—the loss of potential in our country and the affront of great need among our young people. That is the First Minister’s declared number 1 priority.

The Parliament set a legal target that fewer than one in 10 children should be living in relative poverty by 2030. However, the latest Scottish Government figures tell us that the figure stands at 21 per cent today. That means that 210,000 children in Scotland are growing up in poverty, and three quarters of those children live in households in which somebody is in work.

There is a significant distance that we must all travel. The Government’s own modelling suggests that, if we keep to the current trajectory, the proportion of children living in relative poverty will still be at around 18 per cent in 2030-31, which is almost twice the number in the statutory target that was unanimously agreed by Parliament. The question for all of us is what we are going to do about that. I believe that the Government should establish a cross-party commission to bring together the evidence and agree on proposals to get us back on track towards meeting the target. I hope that that is something that the First Minister might consider.

In his statement, the First Minister did not address the black hole in the public finances that we all know will dominate the next five years of this session of Parliament. Ministers, including the First Minister, may say that that is a matter for the budget—we will hear plenty more about that from the Deputy First Minister—but it is the policy agenda that has led to that black hole, and only the policy agenda can fix it.

We need honesty from the Government about the state of Scotland’s public finances, because only honesty will do. The issue of the black hole will define, and will either drive or destroy, the programme that the First Minister has set out today. The £5 billion figure is the gap between what the Government plans to spend and the resources that will be available to it by the end of the decade; it is a figure that predates the additional spending commitments that the SNP made during the election. We still have not had clarity about the status of the additional £1.4 billion of spending commitments made in the party’s election manifesto.

Ministers will inevitably seek to blame others, but the evidence simply does not support that argument, because the crisis is one of the SNP’s own making. The Scottish budget has increased by billions of pounds in recent years. Last week, amid a blizzard of panicked independent analysis, the Auditor General set out absolutely clearly how we have arrived here and said that those decisions “are all political choices.”

That is the reality that the Government must confront. For years, ministers have relied on short-term fixes and one-off allocations to balance budgets instead of delivering meaningful reform of our public services, and that is the approach that Audit Scotland has repeatedly warned the Government about. Public service reform is necessary, but it cannot become an exercise in making front-line workers and communities pay the price for the Government’s chronic failure to sustainably manage Scotland’s finances.

Jackie Baillie was absolutely right to say that there is merit in the headlines of some of the proposals that the First Minister set out today, but we will reserve judgment until we have far more detail. I believe that the First Minister and his Government have started big and really serious conversations today.

Regarding NHS boards, it is worrying that the Highlands and Islands and the north-east are not being protected with individual capacity, given the specific circumstances that those communities face because of both geography and need. We must see that being addressed. [Interruption.] The cabinet secretary is saying from her seat that they are being protected, but we have not seen that provision. I know for a fact that two chief executives—one in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh—have been being paid more than those in the rest of Scotland for the past year, which means that there will be extreme worry across the country. We know that there is a question about whether there will be east and west boards; we still do not have that detail. If the cabinet secretary is able to provide that, I would be glad to hear it.

The cabinet secretary makes a fair point, but we need to see the plans and proposals in order to understand how equity will be provided. We are absolutely concerned about democratic oversight and accountability in those plans, because, when those are absent, we end up with scandals such as that at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital or the Eljamel scandal. We must be clear that proper oversight and proper accountability are required in order to ensure that citizens get the protection that they need in their health service. We must see the detail of that; I am sure that there is an awful lot more to come.

On local authorities, we have scant details of what I think it is fair to say is the First Minister’s decade-long attack on local government in this country. Budgets have been decimated under this Government, and a further £0.5 billion of cuts are slated in the Scottish spending review.

We know that the First Minister believes that responsibility for education should be extracted from local authorities. Now we have proposals to extract responsibility for social care as well, alongside the transfer of economic development functions.

There is a very strong case for some of those issues—economic development in particular—being addressed on a regional basis, but, again, we need to see the detail of how that will work and, crucially, what power this Government will give up and hand to local regions to drive economic growth where it is absolutely needed.

These are big discussions, and the question is whether this is about doing government better or about achieving greater efficiency, because there appear to be few up-front savings in the proposals that have been brought forward today. We know that the £5 billion black hole is not just looming but is already present.

All the changes, including those that the Government claims will reduce management costs, will require up-front investment, and it is not obvious where any savings will be realised. We should look carefully at the example of the national care service. In the previous session of Parliament, we were told from the outset that that would be a mission of the then Government and the most fundamental reform of public services that this country had ever seen. However, there was a total and abject failure by the Government either to plan properly or to do the finances properly, to the point where the Finance and Public Administration Committee had to reject the proposals that were before it.

That is a salient lesson for this Government about the challenges. The most important thing is that we have clarity on intent. What is it that the Government intends to achieve? What is driving the plans? If the First Minister can tell us, we will be constructive partners in those discussions, including in the chamber. Greater clarity on that will give us a better chance of success.

17:07