Chamber and committees

You lost the independence vote. You need to just deal with that and move forward. That is what we need to do in this Parliament—

We need to deal with the things that I am going to tell you that we need to deal with—the things that people are telling me that we have to deal with.

Creating a modern, diverse and dynamic Scotland requires addressing the everyday issues of people across our nation. A summary of polling data from 2021 that the Scottish Government published found that, across all age groups, the economy and health are consistently ranked as the top two priorities.

On the economy, the SNP’s long record in government leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly. Under the SNP’s leadership, the state of the Scottish economy has cost the budget £624 million. If members do not take my word for it, they can take the opinion of Graeme Roy, who is the chair of the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Even more disappointingly, the Scottish National Investment Bank, which the SNP established, suffered pre-tax losses amounting to £14.6 million between April 2023 and March 2024, further to a £20.2 million loss the year before.

On the second priority—health—the SNP has been unable to reach its own cancer treatment target. The target is that 95 per cent of patients who are referred with suspected cancer should begin treatment within 62 days of their referral. The last time that the target was met by NHS Scotland was in 2012, which is well before Brexit and well before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Under the SNP’s leadership, NHS Scotland’s waiting lists have more than doubled over the decade since 2014. At the end of June this year, there were 714,000 people on waiting lists for new out-patient appointments or for in-patient day-case appointments, as opposed to 313,000 in September 2014.

No conversation about health would be complete without talking about the SNP’s most shameful legacy of all, which is the drug deaths crisis—21,965 drug and alcohol-related deaths have been recorded since 2014. Year after year, Scotland’s reputation for having the western world’s worst record for drug-related mortality is reaffirmed. How do affected families feel about the SNP’s claims of a modern, diverse and dynamic Scotland? Perhaps the Scottish Government should use the 10th anniversary of the 2014 independence vote as a decisive moment to move on.

The Scottish independence cause was put to a vote exactly 10 years ago, and Scots voted to keep their nation a part of the UK. The debate is dedicated to creating a Scotland that is fit for the future. To do so, I do not believe that fixating on the past, especially on issues that are as divisive as independence, should be the answer, nor should that be a key priority for any Government. Instead, I implore the members of the SNP Government to focus on addressing the issues that affect regular Scots and on the plethora of issues that we face every day.

Thank you.

Good morning, Jeremy, and good morning, officials. Just to touch on what Paul O’Kane was asking about, I would just note that, when I and my colleague Marie McNair held evidence sessions last week with the Glasgow Disability Alliance, a lot of the people there said that the commissioner did not have enough teeth. They pointed out that there were no enforcement powers and asked why no enforcement powers had been put into the bill to start with. Can you explain to them why they were not put in at the start?

You have talked about potential amendments at stage 2. Do you have anything in mind at the moment that we could look forward to hearing about?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My app would not open. I would have voted no.

No, I am fine, thank you.

Yes.

We have heard today and, indeed, over a number of years, who the Scottish National Party thinks is to blame for child poverty. No doubt we will, no matter the outcome of this debate, hear it many more times. However, seeing as we are standing here in Edinburgh, in the Scottish Parliament, where the SNP has been in power for more than 17 years, let us start at home.

We have heard the Scottish Government talk about its commitment to eradicating child poverty. That pledge has been made in speeches, press releases, statements, manifestos and, most recently, in the programme for government. However, since the SNP came to power in 2007, the level of child poverty in Scotland has remained the same.

Despite the SNP having full control over health, education and many other key devolved portfolio areas, nothing has changed. Perhaps some of that failure can be attributed to another SNP pledge that came to nothing—the pledge to reduce Scotland’s poverty-related attainment gap. Perhaps if ministers had succeeded in closing that educational gulf, they would not now need to spend so much time talking about child poverty. Perhaps if their actions even occasionally matched their warm words, tens of thousands of young lives would have been enhanced. Instead, we are back to square 1.

As an MSP for the Glasgow region, I see the effects of child poverty as clearly as anyone. The ripples go through society and the economy. They can drag down schools, community centres and local facilities and worsen the mood of just about everyone.

Key infrastructure, including schools, is important. One way or another, most MSPs believe that education is the best way to deliver opportunity and that it is a way out of poverty. All kids deserve to go to school, where they will be cared for, educated well and nurtured. It should be that way from the moment they step inside the school gates for the first time, as so many young ones across the country have done in the past few weeks.

One immediate commitment that the Government could make is to properly rolling out free lunches for every pupil in primary school, but, as we have heard today, that will not be happening. That would ensure that, at the very least, those children were not being expected to learn on an empty stomach, and it would take some pressure off the household budget for many hard-pressed families.

There is more that can be done. Violence in schools has become a problem in recent years, with a number of news reports showing increases in the number of pupils, as well as teachers, being attacked. The very fact that the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills made a statement on the matter earlier in the week proves that there must be a growing problem. We cannot have young people being too scared to attend class and teachers too frightened and downtrodden to work. We need to give schools the powers and resources to properly crack down on bad behaviour, which can ruin the experience for a whole class and drive down the overall performance of a school.

However, it is the failure to close the poverty-related attainment gap that causes the most long-term damage. Despite it famously being the former First Minister’s top priority, in the years since, it has been downgraded to something that one minister described as

“exceptionally difficult, if not impossible”.—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 18 January 2023; c 24.]

That dearth of ambition was played out in the recent figures that show that the gap has widened in the past year from 16 to 17.2 percentage points. That represents thousands and thousands of children whose futures are determined by where they grow up.

The conditions are not much better for their parents. The situation around childcare is a mess and is making life more difficult for parents—and, let us face it, childcare is almost always on women. In order to get back to work and to get the family bank balance up again, they need proper childcare. However, research in Scotland has repeatedly shown that parents are not getting the childcare that they want or need. Despite an expansion of free childcare provision, the system remains “fragile”, according to Scotland’s own public services watchdog.

It will be harder to change the short, medium and long-term prospects of any family if the children are not getting on as they should in school and the parents do not have the flexibility that they need in order to work. It is within the gift of the Scottish Government to find a way to solve those problems.

Research has shown time and again that the people of Scotland want the Scottish and UK Governments to work more closely together. They want that to be the case across all areas and at all times. However, never has the case for joint working and collaborative effort been more essential than it is for enhancing the prospects of the next generation. That cannot be done unless real changes are made and the dial on child poverty is shifted once and for all. My party agrees with John Swinney that that is one of the single most important objectives. It is time for both Governments to show that they really mean it.

I totally agree with Mr Doris: we do.

The bill would have made registration for certain types of off-road vehicles mandatory, and it would have required those vehicles to display registration plates. That would have made identification enforcement a lot easier for Police Scotland.

Moreover, as we have heard, a great additional step was taken when the UK Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport at the time agreed to the creation of a dedicated task force to examine the wider problems associated with off-road vehicle misuse. I would welcome the involvement of local authorities, Police Scotland and the Scottish Government in any such working group to address the numerous facets of the issue. Input from authorities at all levels of government in Scotland would be an absolute necessity in tackling it.

Misuse of off-road vehicles of various types has been a continual problem in Scottish communities, especially in Glasgow. Aside from being a public nuisance, the problem has often resulted in criminal offences being committed and in people being hurt or even, in the case of Mr Gow, being killed. That extends both to those using the vehicles and to fellow drivers and pedestrians. I support greater cross-body collaboration so that we can resolve the issue, which blights our communities, and so that the cost to human life of off-road vehicle misuse is tackled head on.