Chamber and committees

Councillor Kelly, in your opinion, how can the national care service go ahead without the co-operation of COSLA?

I have one follow-up question. Many councils do not want the national care service anyway, and there will be huge issues if COSLA is bypassed and the Scottish Government goes directly to councils. I was looking at the written submissions, and Aberdeenshire Council asked whether staff retention, attraction and retention and pay could be focused on. If COSLA continues with withdrawal of its support and the councils do not support the bill and its proposed implementation, is it completely dead in the water?

So, you are saying that COSLA and everyone else has forgotten the people element—the service users—and that we almost need to have a complete paradigm shift and go back to the Feeley report and the people who are receiving the care, and build up from that, rather than have what you describe as a power grab. Is that correct?

The cabinet secretary has not delivered any meaningful action. Why has the cabinet secretary failed to improve A and E times?

The Scottish Conservatives are calling on both the UK and SNP Governments to show some common sense and work together to deliver for all those affected by poverty.

To be clear, we do not support the cut to winter fuel payments imposed on pensioners by Labour and the SNP. It is a betrayal of thousands of vulnerable people in Scotland who are trying to heat their homes. When senior Labour politicians have accepted thousands of pounds-worth of freebies, it truly beggars belief that struggling pensioners have been left out in the cold by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. In Scotland’s colder climate and longer winter, unnecessary deaths loom large on the horizon—all because of a political decision.

The Scottish Government could have mitigated Labour’s decision, but chose not to. Instead, up to 900,000 pensioners in Scotland could lose out on lifeline payments because the SNP chose to replicate Labour’s cuts in full. The important point is that it had a choice but chose not to mitigate. It is shameful, but not remotely surprising, that the SNP is using the motion to try to leverage the issue for electoral advantage. Anas Sarwar’s whataboutery and sticking-plaster solutions will do little to reassure pensioners who are trying to make ends meet during the cost of living crisis. They have been failed by Anas Sarwar and Labour; they have also been failed by John Swinney and the SNP.

As we mark challenge poverty week 2024, a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is clear that the UK and Scottish Governments are failing to use their powers to reduce poverty. “Poverty in Scotland 2024” lays bare the extent of the challenge: more than one in five Scots currently lives in poverty. According to the JRF,

“there has been little meaningful progress in reducing these figures in recent years.”

We have heard woefully little from the SNP about pathways into poverty. There is no commonsense solution in sight in today’s motion, which is why the Scottish Conservative amendment highlights the need to provide

“high-quality healthcare and educational and employment opportunities”.

Surely the motion could have offered politicians at the heart of the SNP Government an opportunity to demonstrate the policies that are in place to tackle such issues and which devolved levers it will use to deliver them.

What about drug deaths? People in the most deprived areas in Scotland are more than 15 times as likely to die from drugs compared with those in the least deprived areas. That is Scotland’s national shame.

What about the housing crisis? Homelessness in Scotland is at its highest level in more than a decade. Rough sleeping has gone up. More children—not fewer—are living in temporary accommodation.

What about the 8,200 people each year who are at the end of their lives and who die in poverty in Scotland? In addition, there are prohibitive public transport costs that impact on work commutes, the closure of vital community amenities because of council cuts, parents who are struggling to meet childcare costs so that they can keep working, and families who cannot cover the cost of school meals.

All those issues fall within the Scottish Government’s control. It can decide how it spends its budget—it sets the policies—but the SNP has been far too preoccupied with blaming others to use the powers that it has to tackle poverty. Even Social Security Scotland will take a full decade to devolve all benefits under the Scotland Act 2016. The SNP has missed the 2020 transfer deadline by six years—I repeat, six years. I see that SNP members have put their heads down. I, too, would put my head down in shame if I heard that.

This debate was an opportunity for the SNP to build consensus and discuss the real challenges that Scotland faces in overcoming poverty. It is a source of deep regret that its motion has failed to provide any solutions.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said:

“We are seeing lots of discussion, but we haven’t seen any useful measures so far that will make it any better for people working in A&Es this winter”.

That sums up the situation perfectly. Cabinet secretary, you have been in post for eight months and you are wheeled out time and again to provide smokescreens—

My first question is for Karen Reid. Karen, what do you understand as being the purpose of the proposed national care service board, and to what extent would it support the shared accountability arrangements?

You talk about a fragmented system, with the NCS board and the NHS board, but it seems to me that the poor relative in all of this is primary healthcare. That sort of healthcare is at the front end of things and should have more investment, but the bill could mean that it gets left further behind.

For the bill to work, would you say that primary healthcare needs further support, too?

Thank you. Isla, you say in your submission that the bill

“does not contain provisions to strengthen co-operation between the national care boards and local authorities.”

Is it possible to expand on that?