Chamber and committees

According to the latest figures from “The CBI/KPMG Scottish Productivity Index 2022-2023”, productivity grew in the UK in 2021 by 1.2 per cent, but it remained unchanged in Scotland. According to the latest Office for National Statistics figures, productivity in Scotland was 2.4 per cent lower in 2021 than it was in 2019, and Scotland was the second-worst performing part of the UK on that measure.

Again, according to that CBI Scottish productivity index, business investment was lower in Scotland in 2021 than it was in the UK—at 8 per cent versus 9 per cent. Even though the UK’s productivity levels are low compared with other countries, Scotland is even further behind.

Mr Swinney is making a naive and optimistic presentation of an equally narrow set of figures. He made no reference to the figures that I mentioned. He chose only his own narrow perspective. We need to have a broad perspective. I will come on to the wellbeing monitor in a while. It is important that we look at it.

Today’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report states:

“The need for change is clear and expectations are high”.

I am afraid that the education secretary’s statement appears to duck all the big questions. On skills reform, there will be a statement later this year. On qualifications reform, there will be a debate next year. The only thing that is new today is the abolition of the centrepiece of John Swinney’s reforms from the previous parliamentary session.

I recognise the pressures regarding behaviour, the attainment gap, attendance and so on, but those are reforms for the future and they will take time to implement. What further information is the education secretary looking for to enable her to provide the leadership that Scottish education needs?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its consideration of the proposal for a railway station in Newburgh, Fife. (S6O-02664)

Locals have put years of work into the plan. An appraisal, in line with the Scottish transport appraisal guidance, was submitted in June last year but it took more than six months for Transport Scotland to respond. Suggested changes were made to the plan, which was resubmitted months ago, in June of this year. There is overwhelming and enthusiastic support for a new railway station at Newburgh, so when exactly will a decision be made?

I will start with a quote from one of my favourite Nobel prize winners, the economist Professor James Heckman. He said:

“some kids win the lottery at birth, far too many don’t—and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives.”

He went on to say:

“Early investment in the lives of disadvantaged children will help reduce inequality, in both the short and the long run”.

I do not think that anybody in the chamber would disagree with that.

There is a common understanding about what we are trying to do, and I accept that some of the work that the Government has done has been positive. The expansion to the 1,140 hours for three and four-year-olds and some two-year-olds is a good thing, and I think that it has made a difference to many young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. I take some credit for the expansion to the disadvantaged two-year-olds, which I eventually persuaded Alex Salmond to adopt after considerable and repeated badgering in this Parliament over many months. The support for those two-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds is an important part of raising the life chances for that group.

Let me just say this next bit.

It is a bit odd that today’s debate is broadly about rhetoric rather than a plan. I like the rhetoric; I could talk about rhetoric all day. However, we need a plan if we are going to have a meaningful discussion about what is next.

We have got into some of the detail today. I think that the Government’s proposals for family nurse partnerships and breastfeeding are equally good. The steps on minimum unit pricing for alcohol—which deal with some of the points that Roz McCall was talking about in relation to alcohol and drugs—are helpful.

However, there are big midwife shortages and huge CAMHS waits. We have real problems around the issues that Oliver Mundell was raising about speech and language therapists. It would be good to have a plan about how will tackle those issues so that we can examine what is going forward.

I want to get some clarity from the minister on a really important point—that she will not be surprised to hear me make—about the private, voluntary and independent sector. We have had promises for a long time, including from the First Minister during the leadership hustings for his party, that he was going to solve the problem. I welcome the £12 an hour living wage increase—that is a good thing. However, the minister knows that that is not going to solve the problem on its own. The problem is that experienced staff are leaving the PVI sector because they can earn more elsewhere. That is threatening the quality of the education and care that those facilities provide. In future years, we might face some really negative Education Scotland and Care Inspectorate reports. We need to deal with the problem now so that we can avoid that in the future.

I will give an example. I received a report from Cambusbarron village nursery near Stirling, which has been recruiting for a new member of staff. It found that the starting salary for early years practitioners in the local council was £16.02 an hour. The Government promised to fund £12 per hour starting salaries for the PVI sector. That leaves that nursery to fill a gap of £4 if it has a hope of getting anybody to work in that post—it is expected to cover a third extra. God knows where it will get the money from, because the sector is not rolling in money. The Government has somehow built in a discrimination that means that the nursery worker in Cambusbarron village nursery will be expected to provide exactly the same quality service as the worker in the council nursery for £4 an hour less. Who is going to do that job? The Government has, by design, built that discrimination into its funding of the PVI sector. That has got to change. If we are going to have a hope of getting good quality, flexible private nursery provision, which is a major part of the Government’s offer, the Government really needs to solve that problem—ideally very soon and in the next budget.

On Saturday afternoon, I met residents in Auchtermuchty who had been subjected to significant floods. Their houses were dirty and damp, and the smell still pervaded their whole premises. That is the reality of flood: it is fast to arrive but slow to leave. In recent weeks, I have also visited Freuchie, where residents have had to leave their properties twice in the past two years. One particular resident cannot sleep at night every time it rains for fear that her house will be flooded. On Sunday, the high tides demolished a large part of the St Andrews aquarium at the West Sands in St Andrews and threatened homes in Pittenweem and Anstruther. A large part of the coastal path near Elie was wiped away completely.

That is the reality of climate change. If anyone had any doubts, it is here. No single weather event can be directly attributed to it, but there is no doubt that the frequency and the extremity of these events are significant. If there was any doubt about it, inaction is more expensive than action. We need to look to the long term and provide the investment that we need, not just in mitigation but in meaningful climate change measures.

Understanding is important, and I will come to that later, because with understanding comes confidence that we will be safe. We need to have the understanding in order to plan for the future so that we can adapt much more significantly than we ever thought was possible. I have never really witnessed such extreme weather events. Of course, there have been individual events, but the frequency and the extreme nature of recent ones are much more significant, and we therefore need to revise plans for the future.

Another lesson from the past few weeks has been the ability of the emergency services to respond. There is no doubt that they deserve huge credit for what they did in Angus and Aberdeenshire, Tayside and Perthshire. In extreme circumstances, they came together and made a significant impact. However, the capacity of local authorities to respond to extreme weather events is limited. I have witnessed many communities who cannot get through to call centres, partly because of the volume of calls but also due to the limited capacity of teams at the other end to respond to them. Fire services are also much more limited. That is why we will support Labour’s amendment at decision time.

John Swinney is right about community resilience. If we have community resilience teams in areas that are able to have the expertise and knowledge to be able to respond and work in partnership, they could act much more quickly than any emergency service. If they have the knowledge and understanding, they can also assist. I have to call out Fraser Kotlewski from Auchtermuchty, who has done a tremendous job over the past few weeks in supporting his neighbours. We need more people like Fraser across the country in order to be able to make a real difference.

I will come back to common understanding. I am a strong supporter of farmers, who are great custodians of the land and are the experts in it. They know how their land works, how it has changed, where water flows and where it does not and how they deal with all of that.

We have some brilliant advice, examples of best practice, research and guidance from various institutes. We have funding in place for special schemes, such as at Eddleston in the Borders and the West Sands in my constituency. We have agricultural support in relation to swales and reservoirs. However, we need to go a step further, because I am not sure that neighbours next to farmland really understand whether the land that is neighbouring their property has been properly managed and is adapting to the change that is coming, which John Swinney has rightly highlighted.

Over the weekend, I received reports about dredging in the River Eden. It has not been dredged significantly for some time, and the current view is that dredging is not in vogue and that we should have a much more naturally flowing river. However, there is anxiety in the community that the lack of dredging is holding the water back in the tributaries and is having an effect on the ability of the water to flow freely. There is a lot of expert advice on that, but the communities clearly do not understand it and do not understand how it applies in their communities. Therefore, an extra job needs to be done in order to get a common understanding.

I am leading some work in Strathmiglo, the village that I grew up in, along those very lines. I am getting the farmers together with the council and various authorities to get a common understanding about dredging and also about rewilding in that community, as well as about issues such as how potatoes are sown in the field. If they are planted up and down the field rather than across, what difference does that make? Apparently, the machinery only allows the planting to go up and down the field. However, people with properties neighbouring the field get concerned that the dreels go up and down, because they think that the water is going to go right into their houses—and, in some cases, it has. How do we deal with that? Do we continue to grow potatoes next to certain properties? All that needs to be properly explored, and I am not sure that that is happening.

I have so much more to say.

I absolutely agree with Mr Swinney. Riparian trees are also important, as they hold the river banks together. It is incredibly important to ensure that we understand that issue, and that we adapt policy to reflect that.

Everything that I have touched on means that we need to have a look at our policy and educate, inform, debate and discuss to ensure that neighbourhoods have confidence that the right plans are in place and that the land is managed properly.