Chamber and committees

That is welcome, and I hope that the cabinet secretary will update MSPs from across the parties very soon on that. We know that there is concern about a loss of bed space and the fact that the council is now routinely struggling to find accommodation. That has seen not only other councils across Scotland but councils in England being asked to take individual families during the housing emergency.

There should be no prospect of suspending those protections—they need to remain in place for households, including the 25 families with children that are affected. Instead, I hope that ministers will urgently look at what support they can provide the City of Edinburgh Council. We need to see action, because ministers cannot sit idly by while hundreds of households do not know where they will be come 1 December. If we do not see action from the Government and the council, it will completely undermine any remaining pretence that Scotland is leading the world on housing rights and tackling homelessness, as the cabinet secretary said earlier.

In its briefing, Crisis says that

“The Scottish Government should set out a clear vision of what homelessness prevention will look like in practice”

and put in place measures that will get us there.

Local authorities are at breaking point, and the prevention duties that will be introduced, which we all agree should be put in place, will add to the burden that local authorities face. Therefore, we need ministers to urgently outline to Parliament what will change across all Government portfolios and what fresh leadership will be brought to the housing emergency.

For some time, charities and experts in the homelessness sector have warned ministers that the bill will not fix the housing emergency, but all the energy of the Scottish Government and its officials is going into it. The Scottish Government should pause and redraft the bill as a homelessness emergency bill, so that we can focus on what we agree on and get the emergency action that we need across our country.

We need a bespoke approach for Edinburgh and the crisis that my constituents in the capital face. We are not seeing that, and ministers saying that they are having meetings on meetings on meetings is an example of the failure to address the housing emergency and the homelessness crisis. The Scottish Conservatives call on ministers to redraft the housing bill, because it fails to address the factors that are creating the housing emergency. I support the motion in Meghan Gallacher’s name.

Has the member ever reflected on the fact that, since the introduction of rent controls, Scotland has had one of the worst records on homelessness? We have 10,110 children trapped in temporary accommodation, and 42 children becoming homeless every day. That is a consequence of rent controls.

Will the member take an intervention?

Will the member give way?

Good morning. Thank you for joining us.

What Professor Loynes has just said leads on well to what I want to ask about, which relates to measuring the outcomes. The committee is acutely aware of the poor levels of mental health that are being reported among young people of all backgrounds. The building of resilience in our young people is a key outcome that we would like to see from residential outdoor education. From your experience, what would you like to be measured as part of the outcomes?

Dr Scrutton, you touched on your 2012 research paper on the benefits of outdoor education to pupils from lower socioeconomic groups. In that context, how could we measure the outcomes to demonstrate the value that can be added?

Yes.

I thank the organisations that have provided helpful briefings for us ahead of the debate and I welcome to the public gallery representatives from them. As the minister stated in her opening remarks, today is an opportunity for the whole Parliament to reaffirm our collective commitment to Scotland’s children, young people, adults and families with care experience. Indeed, we have all made that point.

However, we need to be honest about where we are now with not only keeping the Promise but delivering it. I think that all members have emphasised that we are now at the delivery point, and we need to accept that we all have a responsibility for that—not only Government ministers but all the members, from every party in the chamber, who have signed up to this.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to introducing the Promise bill in this session of Parliament but, with only 18 months left of this session, we all have a role to play in making sure that the bill is the best piece of legislation that it can be. Across the parties, we have a lot of questions that we want to ask about what the bill will look like and how we can shape it, but those who are trying to deliver the Promise in our councils, education institutions and the third sector will push back at all of us and say that they do not have the resources and that they are getting cuts to their budgets.

Therefore, we also need to understand that funding needs to follow the delivery of the Promise, and we need to challenge ourselves and ministers on that. There has been substantial and welcome progress in recent years, but we have a huge amount of work to do if we are to say that we have kept the Promise by 2030.

I recently met a number of organisations to discuss the Promise and to talk about the peer support that is being provided. It is something that I am passionate about and which I know is making a difference. For example, Scotland’s only national mentoring programme for care-experienced children, intandem, which works with children who are at home or in kinship care, is inspiring Scotland’s young people, matching them with trained local mentors. The organisation works with and supports 280 care-experienced young people. It is a great example of where the Promise has already started to filter down to ensure that advocacy lies at the heart of the progress that we want to see.

I hope that the minister will engage with me and others on what will be in the proposed Promise bill about advocacy for young people. We politicians stand up to make our voices heard, but in doing so, we must ensure that children make their voices heard, too, and that they are listened to and respected. A huge amount of progress still needs to be made on that. Children in the hearings system should be granted better access to independent advocacy to ensure that they are provided with impartial information about their rights and their entitlements, and they should be given enough space to ensure that their opinions and feelings are communicated, within what is often a moving process.

That might require additional resources and potential changes to legislation, but I think that it is important for those changes to be made and for the system to be turned around to ensure that children’s voices are made paramount. It is also important in supporting better decision making by our young people. I hope that there is an opportunity for the minister to work with us on the bill, because I, for one, am passionate about changes to the advocacy aspect.

However, this is not just about process. What is always my concern when I stand up to make a speech and, indeed, when it comes to everything that we do in the chamber—and it is probably a concern for ministers on the front bench, too—is that process is one thing, but delivering an outcome is very much another. The policies that have changed and which are sitting with COSLA are doing just that—sitting with COSLA.

We need all institutions and organisations to move forward at pace to deliver the Promise. In 2017, I campaigned for a national kinship carer payment, but it was delivered only last year. The care leaver payment that ministers are introducing is a welcome step forward, and I hope that it can deliver, but there needs to be a different model for kinship carers, who are often grandparents. Their needs must be further taken into account.

When the Social Justice and Social Security Committee held a private round-table meeting with kinship carers, I distinctly remember speaking to a lady from Glasgow. The police arrived at her home at 3am with her half-naked grandchild and told her, “This is your responsibility. You are the next of kin.” Her daughter had had an addiction and substance misuse issue; the police had intervened and had brought her granddaughter to her home—and that was it. It was a case of “Over to you.”

The financial support package for kinship carers is not really there. Many kinship carers, and many grandparents in our society who are bringing up young people, are concerned that if they reach out for help, social services will get involved and the children will be taken away. There are still barriers in our system to many of our fellow citizens, who are doing their very best by our young people and keeping families together, being able to reach out for help. We need to do something about that, because if we do not, some individuals will continue to not ask for help, and the outcomes will not improve for those young people.

A number of members have mentioned the progress that we need to make. I do not think that we have a clear route to delivering the Promise by 2030. I hope that the proposed bill can make that happen, and we can look towards that. In his excellent speech, Willie Rennie mentioned that we are starting to see the development of a postcode lottery in the delivery of the Promise. I know that we all hate using the words “postcode lottery”, but some individual leaders in our councils are delivering progress, while others are not. We need collective work to take the Promise forward.

Kevin Stewart made an important contribution with regard to public and private relationships within the delivery of the Promise. How can they be taken forward, especially in relation to employers? That is an important aspect that we all need to look towards, and we must challenge the private sector to come and help to deliver the Promise along with the public organisations that we are tasking with doing that.

There is still a lot of potential with regard to what can be delivered on housing. When I visited the University of Edinburgh recently, I was pleased to hear about the work that it is doing to ensure that care-experienced young people have wraparound housing for the whole year, not just during term time, if that is what they want. We have seen some good progress on that.

Oliver Mundell and Nicola Sturgeon made similarly challenging speeches, and I welcome their contributions. There is no point in our congratulating ourselves on what we are doing: we need to be honest about the delivery and the structural reforms that are needed, which will be difficult to put in place. As Nicola Sturgeon said, achieving our aims will need strategy, leadership and funding, but we have all voted for the mission that we are undertaking, and we should all unite behind it, because we need to ensure that we deliver it.

To conclude—and I welcome the extra time that you have given me, Deputy Presiding Officer—I do not think that the delivery of the Promise requires a great deal of legislative change. As The Promise Scotland said in its briefing, we must ensure that we do not see the landscape becoming more complicated and cluttered. I hope that the proposed Promise bill is broad enough in scope to ensure that the required legislative changes are made to enable Scotland to keep the Promise everywhere, every day and to everyone.

I thank Clare Adamson for securing the debate and for her campaigning on the issue, which is an important one. A number of us have spoken in what has become an annual debate. I welcome the fact that we have such a commitment. As Clare Adamson did, I welcome to the public gallery the many campaigners who have pushed the Parliament in the right direction on this issue. It is important that we recognise them as advocates and crusaders around pancreatic cancer. We know why they do that, and we know why many of us want to speak in the debate: each of us will have lost a family member, a work colleague, a family friend or—given our job—even constituents. That is why we want things to improve. All of us, across all parties, agree on that.

In most years, the debate around pancreatic cancer awareness month will be consensual and will point to the making of welcome progress. However, I feel that this year is different, having spoken to campaigners and read the briefings that we have received ahead of the debate, which raise serious concerns, as Clare Adamson mentioned, about the Scot HPB pathway and the future opportunities that it presents. We need to raise those concerns in the debate. In the time that I have, I will concentrate my remarks on that.

As co-convener of the cross-party group on cancer, I have been made aware of the concerns about a move to a regional approach rather than the national approach to pancreatic cancer that was being developed by the Government very effectively and was welcomed by many people working in the cancer community. However, it feels as though that approach is now under threat. Pancreatic Cancer Action’s briefing for the debate makes specific reference to the fact that, in December 2023—a week before Christmas—the Scottish Government surprisingly announced that it was cancelling the project, despite significant improvements in outcomes for patients. Thanks to campaigning by patients—many of whom are in the public gallery—the Government eventually reversed that decision and restarted the project.

If we fast forward to now, we see the Golden Jubilee and other hospitals being ruled out as national hosts, with a push back towards having a regional model. I think that that would be a step backwards and hope that ministers, in response to this debate, will consider where we are today and how that national approach can be taken forward and developed as part of the Government’s national cancer strategy. We know the positive outcomes that that could have, particularly when treatment decisions are taken by multidisciplinary teams treating pancreatic cancer.

We have heard the call for action from charities and campaigners. I hope that, in responding to the debate, the minister will look at what has been outlined. I know that she has had briefings and is acutely aware of the concerns and hope that she will also agree to meet to discuss the situation with charities and with the members who have spoken in this debate. Scotland has made great progress, some of it world leading, but I am concerned that that is now at risk. We must deal with that and ensure that we get back on track.

As Clare Adamson outlined, the outcomes for pancreatic cancer patients are still not improving quickly enough. That model could have addressed that, so we must ensure that it is protected and taken forward.

I welcome the debate and the opportunity for us to raise the issue. I again congratulate all those involved in the awareness week and thank them for the work that they do all year round. We must ensure that that is celebrated and acknowledged by Parliament.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The Government’s 2023 consultation found mixed views on the independent review’s proposals. Last year, Professor Hayward said that the independent review’s report reflected an agreed position, and she has outlined the working groups that led to that.

I ask the panel to explain the differences between the findings of the Government’s consultation and those of the consultation that was undertaken by the independent review. Given that we are all waiting to hear what the cabinet secretary will say in December, are you concerned that the Government seems to be content with the low-hanging fruit among the 26 recommendations that you put forward?

I also have nothing to declare.