Chamber and committees

I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. Parliament should be able to scrutinise the budget and ensure that the Scottish Government spends taxpayers’ money effectively. Instead, we have creative, selective and often complex presentation of figures, key budget documents going unpublished and well-regarded voices, including those of the Fraser of Allander Institute and Audit Scotland, criticising the Government’s failure on transparency. Can the cabinet secretary guarantee that all the agreed information will be supplied to the Scottish Fiscal Commission ahead of the Scottish budget? Will she use the 2025-26 budget to put an end to 17 years of creative accounting and financial sleight of hand?

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to improve transparency in the management of Scotland’s finances. (S6O-03855)

This disagreement between COSLA and the Scottish Government has been going on since February. It is disappointing that the Government has not resolved the issue and that schools will continue to miss out on funding. The Scottish Government now faces twin crises of its own making: a failure to retain and expand teacher numbers, despite its promise to do so, and the results of years of local authority underfunding.

In May, this Parliament voted to recognise the precarity in the teaching profession today. For too long, teachers have been running on good will. Research that the Educational Institute of Scotland published in June found that far too many teachers are working beyond their contracted hours and are reporting increasing stress and decreasing job satisfaction.

Many local authorities are struggling to fill posts at all. Data from the teacher induction scheme shows that only 66 per cent of council requests for probationers were fulfilled and that fewer than half of the required number of maths and computing probationary teachers were being delivered to local authorities. Those figures are made worse when we consider that fewer than a third of post-induction scheme teachers move into full-time employment. The Scottish teachers for permanence campaign group also states that we have thousands of teachers who want to work but are being denied the opportunity or are facing long waits on supply lists before gaining temporary employment.

Clearly, the current strategy is not delivering. We need regular publication of clear data that shows where we need more teachers and how many are on supply lists, and a workforce plan to address the staffing gaps in all areas of our schools.

The consistent underfunding of local authorities has also contributed to the dispute. Even if funding is released to retain teachers, as the Scottish Government has requested, other areas of education may face cuts. Additional support for learning, bus travel to and from school, and the length of the school week are all in danger. Funding for all of those things comes from core local government budgets, which have been disproportionately cut in the past 10 years, and COSLA has noted that there has been a cut of £63 million to the core revenue budget in 2023-24. Local government financing will remain an issue regardless of the outcome of the dispute.

The Scottish Government must work urgently to resolve this conflict with local authorities and publish a workforce plan to resolve the longer-term issues in the teaching profession, as was called for by this Parliament in May.

We should keep the petition open and write to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to ask for an update on the Scottish Government’s work with local authorities to reach an agreement on the provision of learning hours, including information on how the work is expected to progress and when information on the outcome of that work will be available, and to ask when the analysis of responses to the consultation of prescribing minimum hours will be published. Given that the consultation closed in June 2023, we should ask for an explanation as to why its publication is taking so long.

We should keep the petition open and write to the Scottish Government to highlight the requirement in England for an assessment by two doctors before short-term detention and to ask how it can be confident that just one medical opinion is sufficient for cases in Scotland.

We should keep the petition open and, as well as doing what Mr Marra suggested, write to the Scottish Government to ask whether it accepts the petitioner’s view that Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and hypermobility spectrum disorders are not necessarily rare diseases, as they are often undiagnosed. In the light of that, we should ask what action is being taken, beyond the rare disease action plan, to improve diagnostic services. We should also highlight the commitment by NHS Wales to co-produce a hypermobility pathway for primary care and ask whether a similar exercise could be undertaken in Scotland.

We should write to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to ask what the next steps will be following the publication of the gender-based violence in schools framework, when the Scottish Government intends to commission an independent review of the framework and when it expects that review to conclude.

The news regarding the People’s Story, which is Edinburgh’s only museum dedicated to working-class history, is deeply disappointing. The public deserve to see history that represents them. Will the Scottish Government step in to protect this important facility? Does the cabinet secretary recognise that the Scottish Government’s consistent underfunding of local authorities and museums will force more councils in Scotland to make tough decisions and damage local culture?

In March, I hosted a members’ business debate to mark brain tumour awareness month. Many members highlighted the need for greater research to improve the outcomes for those living with brain tumours. I welcomed the announcement of the establishment of the Scottish Brain Tumour Research centre of excellence in July. Has the Scottish Government engaged with the centre since its launch, and how does it plan to support the research into the most aggressive form of brain cancer?

I thank the Presiding Officer for allowing me to leave the chamber before the debate finishes.

I, too, congratulate Stuart McMillan on bringing this important issue to the chamber. In France, anyone who wishes to offer medical aesthetic treatment must be registered with the board of the National Chamber of Physicians. In Belgium, practitioners must be doctors, and under-18s must have permission from a parent or guardian before they can have treatment. In Poland, practitioners need to qualify in aesthetic medicine. In Scotland, though, someone who goes on Instagram today will be presented with numerous practitioners who offer aesthetic treatments, very few of whom display medical qualifications and all of whom complete work on very young people.

Such procedures are far from non-invasive. Lip, nose and chin fillers and anti-wrinkle fillers all involve injecting Botox into people’s faces, which can have severe consequences when treatments are botched. A practitioner who does not operate from a medically clean site can cause infections, which means that patients will require further care from our NHS down the line. The treatment can also cause bruising that is much worse than should be normal for such procedures. Nodules can form due to the use of cheap filler, which can cause complications years after a procedure has been completed. This year, there was a story involving 15 women being hospitalised after having beef gelatine injected into them.

Despite those risks, the practice of non-surgical procedures only seems to grow in Scotland. Since under-18s have been banned from having medical aesthetic treatments in England, we have heard reports of more and more children coming to Scotland for injections. That is deeply concerning. I join other members in calling for the provision of such treatment to be limited to those who are over 18. Most such procedures are not conducted by medical professionals. It is possible for lay practitioners to complete training in just one day. No medical body has oversight of the industry. It is therefore clear that we are in a dangerous situation.

I join other members in welcoming the Scottish Government’s launch of a consultation on a proposal to regulate the sector, but it is long overdue. France, which I mentioned earlier, first legislated on the issue in 2009. In 2013, the Keogh report called for improved regulation of the cosmetic industry in the UK. However, the Scottish Government did not even consult on the matter until 2020, when respondents agreed that we needed further regulation. We heard the result of that consultation two years ago. I hope that the Scottish Government’s new consultation will open the door to meaningful progress being made. Too many people who want to improve their confidence are being left with their mental and physical health deteriorating further.