Chamber and committees

I welcome the fact that the Scottish Government continues to do excellent work to foster relationships with our friends across Europe, the United States and the globe. However, the House of Commons Library reports that the UK Government Foreign Office’s spending, including on consular services, has fallen from a peak of £15.1 billion in 2019 to £14.5 billion in 2020 and £11.5 billion in 2021. Most recently, a third of UK Foreign Office spending was on housing refugees in the UK.

Does the cabinet secretary agree that the degradation of UK Foreign Office spending shows that the UK Government is intent on becoming more insular, and that it is only with independence that Scotland can truly play its part as a progressive, outward-looking—

I will start on a point of agreement with the Labour motion. Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s telling his shadow cabinet, “I hate tree huggers,” in response to a presentation from his climate and net zero spokesperson, Labour’s motion reaffirms its recognition of the global climate emergency.

We have huge potential for more carbon sequestration, carbon capture and peatland restoration. I will unashamedly talk about some of the fantastic examples of promoting and protecting nature activity that are taking place in Dumfries and Galloway, in my South Scotland region.

We are at a tipping point for nature. It is in decline around the globe, with about 1 million species already facing extinction. Restoring nature is crucial and will reduce carbon emissions. Businesses are rising to the challenge of the global climate emergency. Although that is key in helping to meet our climate change targets, it is also bringing economic growth, particularly to our rural areas.

There is a fantastic company in Dumfries and Galloway that I have visited on numerous occasions—most recently with the Minister for Energy and the Environment—and it is leading the way in the field of carbon capture. Carbon Capture Scotland, which is based in Crocketford near Dumfries, has a combined investment of £120 million, including funding from the Scottish Government, to remove 1 million tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year.

CCS is working with farmers, distillers and firms that generate anaerobic digestion energy from waste to capture CO₂ and put it to good use elsewhere or remove it from the atmosphere permanently. CCS uses captured CO₂ to produce dry ice, which caters for the needs of the pharmaceutical and food transport industries. That makes those industries more sustainable, and CCS proudly stands as the UK’s second-largest producer of dry ice.

The company hopes to increase its number of employees to 500 and is a great example of how we can use anaerobic digestion, including through agriculture, to bring economic growth and protect our environment. I would be interested in hearing how the Scottish Government aims to engage and support rural and urban anaerobic digestion in the future.

I welcome the fact that the Scottish Government has scaled up its investment in nature restoration, including peatland restoration. In Dumfries and Galloway, the Crichton Carbon Centre has a project called peatland connections, which highlights the significance of the Galloway peatlands through a range of practical and community engagement initiatives. It is part funded by the Scottish Government.

We do not have time for interventions in these wee, four-minute time slots.

I am interested in promoting the peatland restoration work that is taking place in south-west Scotland. The team at NatureScot has been working with external partners on the restoration of degraded, eroding and modified peatlands. That is one of the most effective ways of locking in carbon and supporting the promotion of nature. It offers a clear, nature-based solution to the climate crisis.

I visited one of the peat bogs at Moss of Cree near Wigtown with Dr Emily Taylor, who is the Crichton Carbon Centre general manager and a specialist in deep peat. The Moss of Cree project, which involves peat measuring 6m deep, shows how the peatland ACTION restoration programme can support landowners and land managers through the process of peatland restoration, from initial ideas and planning through to successful delivery. The farmer Ian McCreath has worked closely with the programme, which helped him to put in a successful funding application to create a 62 hectare forest-to-bog restoration project and bring it to fruition. That project is a fantastic case study. I invite the minister to come and visit the Crichton Carbon Centre to see that vital work.

Time is short this afternoon. I look forward to hearing the minister’s response and to continuing to progress the promotion and protection of our nature in Scotland.

I recently read that the Scottish Government is providing £700 million of support to mitigate things such as the bedroom tax. I know that this is straying into politics. The Barnett formula makes adjustments for Scotland, but we are constrained by the way that the budget is delivered in Scotland by another Government. Do we need to be looking at alternatives to how the Scottish Government’s block grant is delivered?

I am thinking about community pharmacy as another way to direct people—pharmacy first, for instance—and our national treatment centres, which have been established so that elective surgery can be done and emergency beds are not taking up the space for elective patients. That work has been done, but I feel like we are spinning plates sometimes because none of it is an overnight fix. I used the example of Professor Pekka Puska in Finland: it took three decades but, with that approach, he reduced the mortality of men from cardiovascular disease by 80 per cent.

Is the Scottish Government going in the right direction when it comes to budget choices around health and—on the back of Evelyn’s question—when it comes to helping people manage expectations as well?

Yes, and I need to remind everybody that I am a currently registered nurse. I forgot to say that at the beginning.

I have a quick question about the economy. Normally, we take gross domestic product as a measure of how successful a country is. However, we now have a Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy, so we are looking at wellbeing and we know that, if we help to get people out of poverty, that can support them into being more productive. Do you agree that supporting a wellbeing economy is an approach that we can take to how we budget for health? It will be relevant across portfolios when we are talking about things such as housing and poverty and addressing the issues that we face in Scotland.

Thanks.

My question is for Philip Whyte. I have some bits of paper in front of me about preventative approaches. Henry Dimbleby has written a lot about ultra-processed foods, and Professor Pekka Puska has done work in Finland on reducing the mortality of people through a whole-system approach by getting restaurants, cafes and supermarkets involved in providing healthier choices that are affordable for people. I am thinking about having preventative spend rather than secondary care constantly fighting fires. Something has to shift in the way that we invest, in order to stop folk getting into the hospital in the first place and to stop people being sick.

I am also looking at our paper on non-communicable disease prevention. My colleagues Gillian Mackay, Carol Mochan, Sandesh Gulhane and Foysol Choudhury and I have been part of a cross-party approach to look at non-communicable diseases, which contributed around 53,000 deaths in 2022 in Scotland. Something needs to be done differently. What do you suggest that we cut in order to move funding to preventative spend? There is only one pot of money, and it is a real challenge to figure out what we need to do differently.

Thank you.

I want to come in on the back of other questions that have been asked. In chapter 2 of its “Tipping the Scales” report, IPPR Scotland says:

“Important action has been taken within devolved powers ... demonstrating what can be achieved with political will and investment.”

The report talks about the devolution of new welfare powers and the establishment of Social Security Scotland. More than £1 billion has been spent on 12 new benefits, which include council tax reduction, the Scottish child payment and the best start grant.

A lot of those benefits are outside the health portfolio. Ministers in the Scottish Government such as the Minister for Housing and the Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport have their own portfolios, but everything crosses over in relation to health improvement, so I am interested in how we consider the budget.

We should value what has been set up by Social Security Scotland—it focuses on fairness, dignity and respect rather than taking the punitive approach that the Department for Work and Pensions takes. Should anything else be picked up in relation to which form of welfare support would help to improve Scotland’s safety net?