Chamber and committees

My question relates to unsuitable accommodation orders. Charities such as Shelter Scotland and Crisis hear from people day in, day out about the poor conditions that they face in temporary accommodation such as bed and breakfasts and hotels. Problems range from a lack of space or basic cooking and cleaning facilities to intimidation by staff and arbitrary curfews that limit people’s opportunities to work and live normal lives. Is the Scottish Government planning to delay the full implementation of the Homeless Persons (Unsuitable Accommodation) (Scotland) Amendment (Coronavirus) Order 2020, which will leave more families living in hotel rooms?

It is, indeed, a deeply concerning statement. I will ask about two points. When were the Scottish ministers first made aware of this serious adverse event? Given that this is not the first time, sadly, that we have heard of errors in the cervical screening programme—last year, NHS National Services Scotland had to apologise for a two-month delay to screening invitation letters for around 1,500 patients due to what it referred to as a technical fault—and given the pressures that the NHS is currently under, how are ministers working to reassure women that the screening programme is fit for purpose? Will the minister look at undertaking a review of the programme?

Throughout the pandemic, I have been engaging with the soft play sector, and the quotes that I am reading out are specifically from that sector. Soft play operators have said that they need to see support from the Government. They need access to the data, too. They are desperately seeking that action from ministers, as they have throughout the pandemic. Before the protest outside Parliament, one soft play operator wrote to me saying:

“Unfortunately, our numbers have considerably diminished from our first time of protesting in September 2020, this is mainly due to the number of our peers whose businesses have been destroyed by the Scottish Government’s experiment on our industry, and others whose mental health has had such a battering that they freely admit to having been crushed and left with no fight or strength to face the Scottish Government.”

The Scottish Government is a minority Government but, by railroading the bill through Parliament, ministers have acted this week as though they have a majority.

The economic pain from the pandemic is still to be truly realised, and it is increasingly concerning that the decisions of the First Minister and SNP ministers could lead to further economic pain and job losses in Scotland. Perhaps after the summer recess, we will see an SNP-Green coalition announced, although, from what I read in today’s newspaper, I am not sure whether the Deputy First Minister is part of the SNP’s right wing that the Green members seem so concerned about working with.

Scottish Conservatives have tried to engage constructively with ministers throughout the process to see whether the Scottish Government and Deputy First Minister would see the errors of their ways. Perhaps after this afternoon, the Deputy First Minister might wish that he had listened. As he said earlier this week,

“you can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2021; c 14.]

Scottish Conservatives will oppose the bill at decision time.

I am not sure which meeting the member is talking about. For the past—[Interruption.]

I start by thanking the Parliament’s legislation team for the power of work that it has put in over the course of this week. As Mark Griffin stated, this is not how the Scottish Parliament should function. Members of the Scottish Parliament should have a full opportunity to consult and properly consider and amend bills; indeed, Mr Sweeney should have had the same right as Mr Swinney to influence the legislation. This week has just gone to demonstrate the key point that the Scottish Conservatives have made throughout the stages of the bill, which is that rushed legislation can often be bad legislation.

The bill leaves Scotland in a landing pattern. Its unprecedented powers will remain in SNP ministers’ hands for at least another three months, until the end of September, and potentially for a further six months beyond that, into 2022. It is critical that the Scottish Government and the Parliament focus 100 per cent on the economic recovery from the pandemic. Small businesses across the country are crying out for help. Yesterday, we saw employees from the travel and tourism sector demonstrate outside Parliament, and soft play businesses and their staff were also forced to protest outside Parliament recently.

The bill will continue to give ministers powers to further restrict and keep those businesses closed and, potentially, to shut them again at any point in future. The soft play sector in Scotland feels totally abandoned by SNP ministers. These popular local businesses have been legally unable to open for more than 470 days—some 15 months—while soft play centres across the rest of the United Kingdom have operated safely between lockdowns with no negative impact on public health. The soft play sector—with the same public demographic and material environment as trampoline parks, play cafes, playgroups and other children’s indoor activities, which have been open for months—cannot understand why it has been selected by the Scottish Government for such severe closure restrictions and a total lack of financial support.

As Pauline McNeill stated, many businesses have asked for but have never been provided with the evidence that SNP ministers state informs their decision making. One soft play operator said to me that

“There is no data to support the Scottish government action against soft play, no data to warrant”—

I will if I can get the time back.

I have no interests to declare.

I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of her statement.

There is welcome cross-party agreement on, and support for, the actions to tackle child poverty that the cabinet secretary outlined, including the doubling of the Scottish child payment. Many people in the sector are, however, asking what is preventing ministers from taking steps to double the Scottish child payment as soon as possible. The cabinet secretary said that it will be

“by the end of this parliamentary session”—

which is some five years away—and said in the same paragraph that the Government would look to double the payment “as early as possible”. Why will the Scottish Government not commit to a date for delivery?

A key area on which the cabinet secretary did not touch is the Scottish Government’s record on children who live in temporary accommodation. The most recent Scottish Government statistics show that 7,900 children are living in temporary accommodation, which is a 9 per cent increase on the figure for 2019-20.

We all know that a safe and stable home is vital to a child’s wellbeing and development. After 14 years of Scottish National Party Government, the situation is getting worse and worse, especially here in the capital. Will the cabinet secretary say what plans the Scottish Government will put in place to ensure that we end the problem of households that include pregnant women and children living in temporary accommodation? How will the Government prioritise the issue?

I have no interests to declare.

The Covid-19 pandemic presented a set of challenges that no one in the chamber had ever faced: a global health crisis of a type that had not been seen for more than 100 years. We all accepted that we needed to act swiftly and collectively. When ministers suggested that 100,000 of our fellow Scots could lose their lives to the disease and that councils and the military might have to undertake mass burials, we were all shocked and concerned, as Gillian Martin outlined, and we worked constructively to facilitate the powers that ministers said they needed at the time in the national interest. The variation of some regulations was also justified at earlier stages of the pandemic.

However, today’s debate must acknowledge that we have come a long way since the start of the pandemic. The First Minister has admitted that the Scottish ministers got things wrong due to a lack of consultation. It is therefore concerning that ministers have left us with only three sitting days until recess to consider the measures and the intended—and often unintended—consequences that they will have. Ministers say that the powers will be extended for an initial period of just six months, but it is likely that they will be extended for a longer period. As I have outlined, the emergency response at the start of the pandemic was appropriate at the time, but it is not appropriate for ministers to try to keep hold of the powers, and there has been a failure to genuinely consult businesses and individuals whose lives and livelihoods will be affected by the consequences of the further extension of the powers.

Today, the First Minister committed, in principle, to the lifting of restrictions, which is due entirely to the success of the United Kingdom’s vaccination programme. The question is why it is therefore necessary to consolidate the powers beyond the return of Parliament after the summer recess. Both those things do not go hand in hand. Full consultation and cross-party input and discussion over the summer would allow for proper scrutiny and for the negative impacts of the extensions to be fully understood by the Government. I agree with my colleague Murdo Fraser that it is simply unnecessary to extend the exceptional powers in the way that the bill provides for without that vital scrutiny.

In relation to housing, as a few members have touched on, the initial coronavirus acts provided protections to students and tenants and made reasonable accommodations regarding notice periods and council tax. This has not been mentioned in the debate, but it is important to note that, during the pandemic, landlords have actively and responsibly tried to support tenants and small businesses to meet the rent payments and challenges that we know from our constituency mailbags many people have faced.

As has been highlighted, extending the evictions ban, and therefore postponing the work of tribunal proceedings further, might only deliver more uncertainty and build up new problems for renters, rather than leading to the long-term sustainable solutions that all members want to see. Before the pandemic, the average amount of debt that was owed by tenants who were being evicted for rent arrears was, at the point that a tribunal decided to grant an eviction order, 8.9 months of rent arrears. During the pandemic, with the powers in place, the average amount has risen to 13.3 months of rent arrears.

I know from discussions that I have had with housing and poverty organisations since taking over my portfolio that there is a growing concern at the significant increase in unmanageable rent debt. There is no doubt that many tenants face significant financial difficulties due to unemployment or to a reduction in take-home pay during the pandemic.

The Deputy First Minister is not in the chamber at the moment. As my colleague Murdo Fraser said, we welcomed the establishment of the tenant hardship loan scheme when it was announced last November, and I welcome what the Deputy First Minister outlined today regarding the £10 million grant fund. However, the devil will always be in the detail, and I look forward to seeing the criteria and knowing how that will be delivered on the ground.

As we emerge from lockdown and hope to see the restrictions lifted, there is concern about the long-term impact that poor credit scoring will have on tenants seeking rentals and on the rental sector, especially here in the capital where the private rental market comes at a higher price.

In relation to local government, it is a concern that the bill seems to give local authorities powers to continue restricting access to meetings, to delay the publication of reports required by statute and to further relax local planning guidelines. Our previous debates about FOI and access to information show that that must urgently be looked at so that we can properly scrutinise decisions taken by local government. It is vital to fully scrutinise decisions and to hold local authorities, as well as the Scottish Government, to account.

Although it is essential to move cautiously, it is more important than ever to remember that the decisions that we take impact on people’s livelihoods and businesses and on the fragile economic recovery that we all want to see. Parliament should be able to do the important job of properly scrutinising Government decisions. The Deputy First Minister says that he will allow eight weeks for consultation in the future. We have an eight-week period ahead of us in which we could have done that consultation and then come back to look properly at the regulations. SNP ministers are preventing the Parliament from doing that work, and that is regrettable. I hope that they will think again as we take the bill forward in the coming days.