Chamber and committees

I will give you one example. Yesterday, I was at a recovery-oriented systems of care event for women, where 200 women in Glasgow with lived and living experience were putting the world to rights and certainly holding my feet to the fire. It was a fabulous event with the Glasgow ADP lived and living experience reference group, which will also be one of the reference groups for the national collaborative.

I met a woman at the event who told me that, when she embarked on the early stages of her recovery journey, social work were involved with her and her children, and they were of the view that she could not take her child to a fellowship meeting—a recovery meeting. In my view, although I am not making judgments about such cases, that begs the question whether we understand enough about the recovery community and recovery opportunities. That meant that that lady was very constrained in the time that she could spend going to meetings and investing in herself and her recovery. Sometimes, quite simple things can be done in practice that involve taking a more personalised care approach by acknowledging the challenges that parents with caring responsibilities have.

Monday was a great day with the official opening of Harper house in Saltcoats. It has actually been open for a few weeks now, and the first families have begun to come in. It opened for referrals last month, and we are now beginning to see more referrals, with families entering the great facility. Harper house is a national specialist facility that is available to families from all over Scotland. It will be a leading therapeutic facility, and services across the country will be able to learn from it.

We are doing other work, such as our work with Aberlour. On child and mother houses, we are working with the River Garden Auchincruive in Ayrshire, which is increasing its facilities for women.

In relation to the whole-family approach, the families framework is a stream of work that is led by multidisciplinary experts in the area. They are, of course, working to support and share best practice, but they will also do an audit of how the framework is being implemented. Again, that is about gathering and publishing more information so that we can support, but also scrutinise, what is happening on the ground.

We have made a cross-Government commitment to keep the Promise, which is about keeping families together and preventing the unnecessary separation of children from their parents, because that is in everybody’s interest. Our work also speaks to the additional stigma that women and mothers experience if they have a problem with substances—I know that we will discuss stigma later today in the chamber. Many women fear coming forward to seek help so, as well as early intervention, cultural changes are needed to ensure that women feel safe in coming forward and can build trusted relationships.

That area has certainly not been forgotten. All the lived experience evidence tells us that, when we distil all this, what people need is a home, relationships and to feel valued and that they have a purpose in life. We can help with that by supporting people to take up volunteering opportunities or employment.

People have a basic, fundamental need for accommodation. I hope not to depersonalise the loss of life in any way by talking about statistics, but the information from the homelessness death statistics is crucial. Mr Briggs is absolutely correct to say that death rates among homeless people are too high and that more than half of those deaths are drug related—a very close association exists between homelessness and drug-related deaths. I am not one for overreading one set of statistics but, by way of information, I note that the number of drug-related deaths in that set of figures reduced from 151 to 127—in the homelessness death figures, there was a reduction in the number of drug-related fatalities. That figure is still too high, but the reduction points to some movement.

I am a big proponent of the housing first approach. Mr Briggs will be well aware of the Government’s ambitious record on building social housing. However, there cannot be housing without support, which is why Ms Robison and her team are taking forward the housing first approach—as well as other ones—to provide care for people as well as accommodation.

The Government and the residential rehabilitation development working group are very clear about what residential rehabilitation is and what it is not. The definition is very clear: residential rehabilitation is structured, residential and therapeutic programmes that support people towards an alcohol and drug-free lifestyle. There are other models of residential services, whether those focus on crisis care or stabilisation.

Those models are also important in ensuring that we have a wide spectrum of treatment opportunities and services to get the right people into the right treatment at the right time. I dispute the claim that we are investing in pretendy residential rehabilitation; that is unfair. What we are counting, if I can put it that way, and what we are funding is a traditional residential rehabilitation model that has been undervalued and underinvested in historically.

At the start of this week, I published—in part due to recommendations by the Auditor General—an annual report that details the spend and location of national mission moneys. I am determined to have as much transparency as possible about that.

I am determined to follow the money. I think that that is where I am on the same page as the Auditor General, because I want to ensure that the additional resource that the national mission has secured has the maximum effect. This Government has made a decision to allocate specific resources to residential rehabilitation and I want to ensure that that is used for pathways into residential rehabilitation, for residential rehabilitation beds and, of course, for the associated aftercare. I am accountable to Parliament and I want to satisfy myself that money is being spent on what it was destined for.

Yes, that is not a problem—we will have a look at that.

I appreciate the point that time is of the essence. Again, as members will appreciate, it will not help matters if I step into other people’s duties and terrain. Nevertheless, your point is well made. These services work. They are not the only solution, but they work, and I have seen them for myself.

The core aim of the national mission is to get people into the treatment that is right for them. Although I have—I hope—conveyed my conviction in and around abstinence-based intervention and traditional residential rehabilitation, I also stress that we need to be absolutely fearless about harm reduction, because lives depend on it.

I know that some aspects of harm reduction will feel counterintuitive to many people, but we have to do what works, follow the evidence and do what we can to reach people where they are, so that we can build relationships and begin the journey to connect them with other services. Safer drug consumption is part of that. It is about saying that we care and we want people to live, survive and thrive.

The reason why we have a national mission is to join the dots, so that drug policy does not sit in isolation. Ms Webber asks a fair question about what early intervention looks like in relation to drug policy, our work with families, work with communities and work with housing and homelessness. That all needs to be absolutely aligned. The purpose of the cross-government action plan is to align the whole breadth of actions and the huge investment that is being made—despite what are trying times across government—in a better way and to work better together to achieve better outcomes.

Regarding our support to alcohol and drug partnerships, it is clear that they should not be working in isolation. They need to be very much connected, and the work that they do must be central to children’s services plans and broader community planning.

All public authorities have a fairer Scotland duty. I know that because I introduced it a number of years back, as Mr Cole-Hamilton might remember. In every strategic decision, we need to think about how the decisions that we make here and now have an impact on child poverty and on reducing poverty and inequality. Our work with ADPs is driven by the fact that the work that they have done has often been separate from other work done by IJBs or community planning partnerships—but it has to be front and centre.

Gosh! How to answer that succinctly? I will do my best, convener.

My focus in this job has always been, first and foremost, on what I can do; therefore, my endeavours are focused on the powers and resources that are at my disposal. I am a pragmatist at heart, and I want to crack on and do things now. However, I do not ignore the implications of powers that exist elsewhere. I am not looking to enter into a constitutional debate here and now but, of course, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 has implications for what we can and cannot do. In my view, it impairs some of our approaches to harm reduction—or certainly makes the journey towards improving such interventions harder.

The issue of decriminalisation, or drug law reform, is complex. I would frame the issue as drug law reform more generally. Decriminalisation means different things in different countries, but in terms of going back to principles and the basics, the question is what is gonnae work—what is gonnae make folk safer, if not safe. I am very clear that we cannot punish people out of addiction.

We published a paper last March or May that looked at international responses to drug law reform. The international evidence that we have looked at shows, in very broad terms—I am summarising, convener—that the public health approach has been more effective at reducing harm. Some people have fears around drug law reform more broadly and often worry about increasing drug use, but the evidence does not appear to show that that happens.

In my view, we need to have a review of drug law across the UK, but I think that it is fair to say that the UK Government is not inclined to do that. I will meet the new minister at the beginning of December—that is a frequent discussion point.

Despite some well-documented differences of opinion with Kit Malthouse, who was the first UK Government minister I met in relation to this job, we nonetheless had a lot of engagement. The quick succession of ministers in recent times that has coincided with recent changes of Prime Ministers means that two ministers were in office for such a short period of time that, although I wrote to them welcoming them to their role and raising all the issues that I wished to discuss with them, time did not permit us to actually meet them.

There is some agreement between us and the UK Government on issues such as leadership, investing in the reform of services and the importance of treatment. We have some agreement in and around the need to legislate for the regulation of pill presses, which is very important for tackling the illicit marketing of benzodiazepines. We will see where we get to with Home Office applications in and around drug checking. We are at a completely different place on safe drug consumption facilities, but I will see where the new minister—a gentleman called Chris Philp—is on that.

Uppermost in my mind just now is the UK Government’s white paper on “swift” and “tough” consequences. That approach is misguided. I think that it will potentially cause more harm and that it is based on an outmoded punitive approach, and I continue to seek urgent clarity as to whether and how it would apply to Scotland. The Home Office white paper states that tier 1 and tier 3 interventions could potentially apply to Scotland and Northern Ireland, and I would have grievous concerns about that. I am conscious that I have written to the committee about that, too.