Chamber and committees

Thank you for your brevity.

Good morning and welcome to the 25th meeting of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee in 2024. I have received no apologies.

Agenda item 1 is to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private and whether to consider in private oral evidence on the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill that is taken at future meetings. Do members agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

We are really pressed for time, and we are just over halfway through this session. You can maybe add your comment in at another point.

Carol, do you have another question?

I apologise for cutting you off, Mr Macfarlane.

Do you have any other questions, Mr Sweeney?

Of course.

I thank Joe FitzPatrick for taking us exactly up to time. I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses. I thank the panel members for their time.

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests: I hold a bank nursing contract with Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board.

It is crucial to free up capacity in our NHS as we head towards a period of higher demand. Will the cabinet secretary outline what work will be undertaken to improve patient flow and to tackle delayed discharge, and will he say how the efficacy of those interventions will be measured?

This past weekend, what commentators predicted would be a victory lap for the new UK Labour Government at its party conference has been overshadowed by fights, fall-outs and scandal. While the new Deputy Prime Minister told her party’s conference that “Now is our moment,” major trade unions were railing against its first steps in office.

What first steps those have been: cutting winter fuel payments from 10 million pensioners in England and Wales and more than 800,000 in Scotland, including more than 50,000 in South Lanarkshire, where my Rutherglen constituency is based. The general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham, did not mince her words when she described the cuts as

“cruel”,

saying that the chancellor was

“picking the pockets of pensioners”

while leaving

“the ... wealthiest ... pretty much untouched.”

The new Prime Minister has admitted that there was no impact assessment ahead of the decision to strip that payment. Incredibly, he added that the UK Government was not legally required to produce one. I am sure that members across the parties will agree that the Prime Minister’s statement that he slashed the payment “with a heavy heart” is of no comfort to our constituents, who are desperately worried about how they are going to get through the winter—not least because the energy price cap is set to rise next month, adding an additional 10 per cent to their fuel bills.

The Prime Minister’s hand wringing does not wash with my constituents, and it certainly does not wash with me. The message from every member of this Parliament should be crystal clear: the cut to the winter fuel payment is unreasonable and cruel, and the UK Government should reverse it immediately.

Of course, when there was a flicker of rebellion among Labour MPs at Westminster, it was squashed immediately. When SNP MPs tabled an amendment to immediately abolish the two-child benefit cap, only seven Labour MPs put their heads above the parapet and voted with them. Not a single Scottish Labour MP joined them.

One in nine families across the UK is now affected by the two-child cap. That is a rise from previous figures. Limiting the support that is available to families with more than two children has been widely recognised as the key driver of child poverty. The chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, Alison Garnham, has stated that it

“makes life harder for kids,”

by

“punishing them for having brothers and sisters.”

Less than an hour after that Westminster vote concluded, the whip was removed from those seven MPs—a ruthless move, from a ruthless Prime Minister. I say to my Labour colleagues that, if so few of their MP colleagues are prepared to do the right thing, all eyes are now on them—on all three of them who have turned up to the chamber.

As Alison Garnham from CPAG also stated,

“Children are losing their life chances to the two-child limit now—they can’t wait for the new government to align every star before the policy is scrapped.”

The two-child cap is keeping families in poverty, and the UK Government must use its first budget to scrap it immediately.

Before the general election, Scots were promised a Labour Government that would give the Scotland Office £150 million to tackle poverty. The then shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Murray, appeared on the front page of newspapers saying it was

“the change Scotland ... can get”.

Confusingly, the new Scottish secretary—the very same Ian Murray—said last weekend that the £150 million figure was “made up”, before retracting that claim and admitting that he does not have the cash in a “war chest”. The change that Scotland has seen instead has been a £160 million cut to the Scottish Government budget, before the UK budget has even been announced.

In that context, it is little wonder that prominent economists are sounding the alarm before the UK budget, calling for the brakes to be pulled on the vicious cycle of underinvestment and continuation of Tory fiscal rules and austerity.

The call is also coming from inside the house. One of the seven suspended Labour MPs, Richard Burgon, managed to speak at a Labour conference fringe event. He warned against the UK Government heeding the

“siren voices on the political Right, in the media, for austerity and for cuts to living standards.”

He also pleaded with the new Government to make a fresh start on living standards and the funding of public services. Given all that I have described and all that we have heard so far, I am afraid that his words might be in vain. As a constituent related to me last week, the Labour Party continues to hammer a message of change on social media and in the press, but for many of my constituents, while there has indeed been change, that change has been for the worse.

Let us be under no illusion about what is happening: the new Labour Government is publicly laying the groundwork for another brutal round of austerity. That may not be what it calls it, but that is what it is. Fourteen years of Westminster failure have left public services in the UK at breaking point. The SNP Government in Scotland continues to push at the constraints of devolution by delivering game-changing policies such as the Scottish child payment, and spending millions of pounds to mitigate punitive UK policies such as the bedroom tax. However, it is impossible to mitigate everything, and Westminster’s painful economic decisions severely impact the Scottish Government’s spending powers.

Since its election, the new UK Labour Government has dodged and brushed off scrutiny, rowed back on promises and slashed budgets. Labour’s cuts have been a political choice. When its budget is delivered in October, it has the opportunity to deliver the change that it promised. It must take ownership of the privilege of office that has been handed to it, and put an end to the politics of austerity for once and for all.

As the Hayward review states:

“The relationship between poverty and achievement is an international challenge.”

Does the cabinet secretary share my concerns that decisions made at Westminster and the United Kingdom Prime Minister’s recent warning that things will get worse will keep more children and families in poverty, the impact of which will be felt across their classrooms?