Chamber and committees

The Deputy First Minister talks about the operational parameters under which certain public services need to function as we continue to emerge from the pandemic. This point goes to the heart of scrutiny, which has featured a lot in the debate. Schedule 6 to the Coronavirus (Scotland) Act 2020 amends the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 so that the public can

“be excluded from a meeting of a local authority”

should their presence create a “substantial risk” of infection. I am sure that the Deputy First Minister would agree that that risk has abated. Does he not agree that it is now time to repeal that provision to allow greater scrutiny in the corridors of local democracy?

I begin by thanking Angela Constance. In my intervention on her, I made the mistake of referring to her as a cabinet secretary, which has been picked up by other members. She should see that as a reflection of how important members regard her role to be. We all want and need her to succeed. I am grateful for the cross-party consensus that she is trying to build on this important topic.

Evidence matters. Professor Harry Burns said:

“Unless you have evidence all you have is opinion.”

The Liberal Democrats have had an evidence-based approach to drugs policy for years. We called for the decriminalisation of drug use long ago, and Portugal is just one example of that policy’s effectiveness, as we have just heard in another excellent speech by Gillian Mackay. We have all the evidence that we need; it is now time to act.

Laurell K Hamilton once wrote:

“There are wounds that never show on the body, that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.”

She was talking about unresolved trauma. The Liberal Democrat amendment puts trauma-informed care at the heart of every aspect of recovery from drug addiction because there is an undeniable correlation between adverse childhood experiences and drug misuse.

Adults who experienced four or more adversities in their childhood are 11 times more likely to have used crack cocaine or heroin. In 2017, 74 per cent of drug death casualties in Tayside were known to have had a co-existing mental health condition—most commonly, depression or anxiety—at the time of their passing. In 2019, written evidence to the Westminster Scottish Affairs Committee recommended that the views and lived experiences of people who are affected by drug harms should be included when developing legislation. We, in this Parliament, must listen to those voices, too.

We must reduce the misery of drug abuse with compassion and treatment rather than prosecution. In the final days of the previous session, the Parliament unanimously agreed with that idea. We agreed to the principle of diversion by endorsing an amendment that was lodged by my party. That was an important moment, not least because it showed that the debate was maturing.

My amendment today seeks to continue that conversation because, although the conversation in the chamber might well have moved on, the situation on the ground has not. We are still sending the same number of people to prison for personal possession as we were a decade ago. That has devastating consequences. Police officers are well aware of the cruel cycle that follows an arrest. Assistant Chief Constable Steve Johnson gave devastating evidence to the Scottish Affairs Committee in July 2019. He told MPs:

“It is just a matter of time ... Of those people who come out of prison, 11% of them will die within the first month of having been released ... the police officers get used to this carousel, this sense of hopelessness and helplessness.”

That carousel must stop, and we, as a nation, are already empowered to stop it.

The Lord Advocate issues guidance to the police that sets the parameters of all police operations. It is the frame to the doorway into the criminal justice system. The guidance could direct more people who misuse drugs to the treatment and support that they need, as opposed to the destructive experience that many have in the criminal justice system. We know from correspondence with the outgoing Lord Advocate that the guidance has already been used to facilitate recorded police warnings for minor offences.

I reassure the Government that our amendment does not seek to direct the Lord Advocate. That is not its intention or its implication. It is important to be clear about that, because the Lord Advocate’s role is rightly independent, and that independence must be absolute. Dorothy Bain, as the new post holder, will no doubt have the drug death crisis near the top of her in-tray. Should she consider that a review of the guidance is necessary, it is important that she understands that she can do that in the knowledge that the Parliament will back her up and support her.

Rehabilitation is equally as important as trauma in the debate. I am gratified that access to residential rehab seems to enjoy support from across the chamber—and so it should. Residential care is not just about stabilising a person physically; it is about all the wraparound support services that come with it.

Before I came to the Parliament, I worked for Aberlour, Scotland’s national children’s charity. We operated a residential rehabilitation facility in a block of new-build flats, just off Glasgow Green, where mothers with addiction issues could come, with the children living with them, to get clear of those issues. It was the only facility of its kind in the country, and it even cared for neonatal mums and their babies, too. It still moves me, almost to the point of tears, that our service at Aberlour was equipped with what were referred to as “tummy tubs”, which were, in effect, oversized buckets that would be filled with warm water and used to comfort babies who were going through withdrawal by simulating the feeling of being in utero.

Problematic substance use among mothers accounts for as much as a third of drug dependency in some parts of the country. We know that having a drug-using parent in a child’s early years is an adverse childhood experience in itself, but so too is time in care. Removing children from mothers for the duration of their rehab can lead to trauma, attachment disorder and loss. That might impact those small children for the rest of their lives.

That Aberdour facility was closed a little over five years ago, as it was no longer deemed a strategic priority by Glasgow City Council. That reprioritisation was due, in large part, to the fact that the Scottish Government reduced funding to alcohol and drugs partnerships by 23 per cent that year. Sometimes, our service would see occupancy at 100 per cent, but it would also drop below 50 per cent, and the city did not regard that as optimal. However, that is the nature of residential rehab; it is not a hotel. People are never wholly sure when they will need it, but when they do, they are glad that it is there.

I hope that we, in this chamber, can find consensus on this matter above almost every other aspect of social policy. I hope that we can come together and address the challenge of this monstrous public health issue.

I move amendment S6M-00400.2, to insert at end:

“; notes the recommendation made by Sir Harry Burns to routinely record adverse childhood experiences, and believes that all aspects of recovery and treatment should be trauma-informed; understands that guidance has previously been issued by the Lord Advocate to police officers relating to the use of recorded police warnings in certain cases of minor offending; would support a new Lord Advocate reviewing this guidance and examining how it can be strengthened, in light of the resolution of the Parliament on motion S5M-24396 on 18 March 2021 and the support expressed for working towards diverting people caught in possession of drugs for personal use into treatment, and believes that a parliamentary statement after the summer recess from the new Lord Advocate on the principles and practicalities of diversion would be beneficial in informing public debate and the response of authorities to Scotland's drugs deaths crisis.”

Does the cabinet secretary agree with me that it is vitally important that, where we are trying to help mothers with substance-use issues to manage those issues, they are able to do so with their children, so that we are not compounding the adverse childhood experiences of those children?

It has been a deeply powerful and moving debate. I will reflect on some of the contributions that have been made by members.

As we have heard, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 turns 50 this year, and the need to reform the act is greater than ever. It is outdated, it costs the taxpayer billions of pounds every year and it is simply not fit for purpose.

Earlier, when I quoted the evidence that was given by Assistant Chief Constable Steve Johnson, I spoke about the destructive cycle for drug users that is born out of a prison sentence. It is estimated that almost 2,000 organised crime groups are involved in the supply of illegal drugs, and between them they have trafficked more than 1,000 children, as Elena Whitham rightly referred to. The cannabis cultivation industry alone sees children from Afghanistan and Vietnam held in slave-like conditions in 21st century Scotland. Those are not the statistics of a system that is fit for purpose; they are the statistics of a broken system that is failing our most vulnerable citizens.

It is imperative that we work closely and constructively with all other nations across the United Kingdom, but Scotland has a drug deaths problem that is far more acute than that of any of our counterparts in the British isles.

I am grateful for the tone that the minister struck at the top of the debate, and particularly for reinstating her commitment to put lived experience at the heart of Government policy and the route map out of the issue. I am also grateful to her for taking my intervention on the importance of allowing mothers to deal with substance use issues with their children.

The tone set by the minister kicked off a thoughtful debate. Sue Webber was absolutely right to raise the proliferation of poly-drug use, particularly the use of street benzos. The correlation between death and street benzos in Scotland right now undermines the suggestion that we have repeatedly heard for many years that our particularly Scottish problem with drug mortality was somehow caused by the ageing “Trainspotting” generation and the comorbidities that lie in that group. It is young people who are dying on our streets right now.

Gillian Mackay was the first to mention the HIV outbreak in Glasgow. That outbreak was absolutely coterminous with the 23 per cent cut in Government funding to alcohol and drug partnerships not only in Glasgow, but across Scotland. Although members such as Emma Harper are keen to restate the level of Government investment since that time, we still come jarring up against that devastating funding decision. Through that decision, we lost organisational memory, relationships and good, hard-working services that had been saving lives for years. Therefore, going forward, this Government should mainstream and protect funding, particularly for rehabilitation.

The current approach is not working, which is why we need a health-centred approach that will not only save lives, but mitigate risk factors that lead to drug use in the first place. In 2001, Portugal ended the criminalisation of people who use drugs, and it established a health-led approach instead. Since then, drugs-related deaths in Portugal have consistently fallen below the EU average. Levels of problematic use and school-age use have also fallen. Portugal has gone from accounting for nearly 50 per cent of yearly HIV diagnoses that are linked to injecting-drug use in the EU to just 1.7 per cent. That is partly why I welcome Labour’s amendment. Safe consumption is essential to saving lives. Blood-borne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C occur in one in four people who injects drugs, so the safe and adequate provision of clean needles is vital.

I am absolutely happy to endorse that point of view, and I hope that the minister will reflect on it in closing. I take the opportunity to put on record my thanks to Paul Sweeney and Peter Krykant for the volunteer work that they have done on the front line of the drug deaths emergency. They have put themselves at risk of criminal prosecution, but I hope that history will regard them as heroes and pioneers in the field. They deserve all our thanks.

Preventing deaths does not go far enough. We need to provide people who are suffering with addiction with the physical and emotional support that they need to recover, which is why rehabilitation is vital.

In her excellent first speech, Stephanie Callaghan reminded us that we must see the person beyond the addiction, and she revealed just how close to home the issue can be for some of us. I am grateful for her bravery, and for that of Collette Stevenson. In her powerful and emotional speech, Collette Stevenson captured us all and carried us with her.

With his usual absolute clarity, Michael Marra articulated the importance of getting help fast. The people who are in the grip of a chaotic lifestyle cannot wait for days for the help that they have sought in a moment of lucidity that might be all too rare. He was not overstating things in his use of the word “lethal” when it comes to the bad decisions that have been made.

Miles Briggs spoke of the trepidation that we all feel about the publication of next month’s drug death statistics. Addiction is a disease that is in large part brought out by trauma. Paul O’Kane was absolutely right to call it a pandemic. Nobody chooses to become dependent on drugs, just as nobody chooses to develop any disease or mental illness. Those who suffer from addiction deserve the same level of care and compassion as any other person who suffers from a chronic health condition.

People are most at risk of death from drug use when they are at their most vulnerable—for example, after being released from prison, after a bereavement or relationship breakdown, or when in poor mental or physical health. That fact underpins why I say that drug use is a symptom of and response to trauma, rather than the cause of it.

I close by saying that the responsibility for reversing Scotland’s drug crisis does not lie solely with the Government or its task forces—it is incumbent on all of us as MSPs. As a Parliament and as a country, it is time that we stopped asking victims of drug misuse, “What is wrong with you?” Instead, we need to ask, “What has happened to you?” and, crucially, “How can we help you to heal?”

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility to the international minimum. (S6O-00047)

As long as Scotland sets its age of criminal responsibility at 12, we shall forever fail in our ambition to lead the world on children’s rights. We are in the basement, below Russia and China. Our progress to lift our age of responsibility from eight to 12 in the first place was glacial, but it started with a move to end the criminal prosecution of those aged under 12, which required no legislation. Will the minister work with the new Lord Advocate to end the criminal prosecution of those under the age of 14 and pave the way for us to finally lift the age of criminal responsibility to the international minimum?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I seek your guidance under the terms of standing order 7.3.2, which covers the conduct of members in this chamber.

In the Scottish Government debate on Thursday, James Dornan stated his belief that the decision by Lothian Buses to suspend its services on the night of 17 March was motivated by sectarian prejudice against Irish Catholics on St Patrick’s day. Any Edinburgh member of the Scottish Parliament will tell you that Lothian Buses suspended its services on 17 March after its drivers had suffered many nights of sustained abuse and violent attacks, including repeated stoning. Its decision was motivated by a desire to protect its staff, and nothing more.

Had Mr Dornan’s remarks been made anywhere beyond the proceedings of this Parliament, they might have constituted defamation against Lothian Buses. They cannot be allowed to stand. What powers do you have to compel Mr Dornan to correct the record and apologise to Lothian Buses and this Parliament, Presiding Officer?

I am grateful for the chance to speak in what I hope will be a genuinely constructive debate.

As the Government’s motion sets out, tackling the climate emergency must be a shared and national endeavour, and that is why the Scottish Liberal Democrats are proud of the part that we have played in working with others to force the pace of change so far. Our 2030 target for a 75 per cent reduction in emissions, which the Scottish Liberal Democrats supported and worked hard with others to secure, is one of the most determined in the world, and experts recognise that it pushes us to the very brink of what is possible. Chris Stark, the chief executive of the UK Climate Change Committee, described it recently as “very, very stretching”.

Now, the work of making that target a reality really needs to bite, because more warm words will just make for an even warmer planet. The measure of our commitment will be ascertained not in the ambition of the targets that we set, but in the rate and reach of their achievement. My amendment speaks to the specific challenges that are presented by the transport sector, and that is what I intend to spend much of my time discussing.

We will not have a chance of meeting our climate change targets unless options for transport are truly, rapidly and radically decarbonised. The First Minister said that she recognised that in her reshuffle and arranged the portfolios accordingly. I welcome that. In 2015, transport became Scotland’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. It accounts for more than a third of our emissions. Progress has been made in other sectors, but transport has not budged. If that does not change, we will be in trouble, so that has to be one of the main missions in the current session of Parliament.

Car travel has been on the increase since the end of world war two. In 2019, 48.7 billion vehicle kilometres were travelled by road—up 10 per cent in a decade. The pandemic means that people are—understandably—nervous about getting back into the groove of using public transport, and surveys have shown that people are even more inclined to favour their cars above other forms of travel. Getting people out of their cars is one of our biggest challenges. Let us not shy away from the issue of active travel. We have, so far, failed to make Scotland a cycling nation.

My critics will point to the fact that I helped to lead a campaign that forced the City of Edinburgh Council to shelve plans for a low-traffic neighbourhood in my constituency. That is entirely true, but I opposed that scheme not because I oppose active travel—I do not; far from it—but because, had the city council bothered to ask my community, it would have discovered that it was proposing to close routes into what was largely a low-traffic area to begin with. In doing that, it would actually have compounded congestion and pollution on arterial routes.

I passionately support the principles of LTNs. I like what they have achieved in Waltham Forest, but I particularly like the five public consultations and the co-production that went into their creation there. None of that took place in my constituency, which was a great shame. As the council knows, its approach in seeking to strong-arm my constituents into permanent lifestyle change has set back the active travel agenda in our city. That is typical of the disconnect between political aspiration and delivery on the ground.

The 10 per cent target for 2020 completely failed to materialise, and last September’s statistics show that the share of car journeys that are instead being taken by bike has fallen to 1.2 per cent. Put simply, cycling needs to be made as easy as possible. Lockdown showed that when people feel that cycling is a safe option they are eager to take it up. With quieter roads, whole families were taking the opportunity to get out and get active in a safe and sustainable way. The streets of Amsterdam are not filled with bikes by accident. The Government there gave people the infrastructure and support that they needed so that both young and old could feel safe, secure and comfortable enough to get on their bikes.

There are many things that we could do in Scotland to help people to feel exactly like that. We could use planning processes to make sure that roads have space to keep everyone safe, and we could make funding available for facilities such as showers and changing rooms in workplaces. We could also get cycling proficiency training in schools back on track. At the moment, its availability is plummeting, which makes no sense at all.

Electrification must be the way forward for journeys for which active travel is not an option. Again, confidence will be key. Half of those asked say that they would consider buying an electric vehicle if they felt that the charging network was there to support them. We want to help people along the way by switching police cars and vehicles that are used by councils and the rest of the public sector to electric. That would help to motivate the roll-out of the charging network and build people’s confidence so that they can make that switch.

My amendment signs off with a challenge. Heathrow airport is already the single biggest producer of emissions in the UK. A third runway would go directly against all our green ambitions—the flights that would come to Scotland as a result would release 600,000 tonnes of emissions into our environment. Despite that, the Scottish National Party has a contract to support the building of that third runway. That flies in the face of the climate emergency and everything that we are trying to achieve. [Interruption.] I am afraid that I am in my final minute.

When the First Minister stood in Parliament and declared a climate emergency, we were told that difficult decisions would have to be made and everything would be under review—everything, it seems, except for that contract. That cannot be allowed to stand. Therefore, I urge all colleagues in the chamber to support my amendment.

I move amendment S6M-00278.4, to insert at end:

“; recognises that rapidly reducing emissions in the transport sector will be critical to Scotland meeting its 2030 and 2045 targets; considers that achieving sustainability will require the acceleration of work, including the opening of new railway lines and stations, establishing a network of well-maintained rapid chargers for electric vehicles and additional support to rapidly increase active travel, and believes that, as an indication of its commitment to sustainability, the Scottish Government should immediately withdraw from its written agreement with Heathrow Airport to support the building of a third runway, which is incompatible with the climate emergency.”

The debate has been excellent, and there were first-class first speeches from both Sharon Dowey and Mercedes Villalba. It is great to have them among us, and I look forward to their further contributions.

We have so much to do—if nothing else, today’s debate has shown us that. We need to plant millions of trees and heat our homes and all our buildings without burning fossil fuels, as we do at the moment. We should have whole towns running on renewables, using ground-source and air-source heat pumps and district heating systems. We need to switch from millions of polluting cars to electric vehicles and get the charging networks in place. Liam Kerr spoke very well on that topic. He also talked about the need for carbon capture and storage, and I absolutely agree that it is part of the solution. CCS works, but it is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it must be done in tandem with a radical overhaul of how we all live our lives. He talked extensively about the quandary of the north-east. It is a quandary, because we cannot just pull the plug there. We need a just transition, and Gillian Martin was right to address that point.

As a critical part of our endeavour, we need to restore nature around us and recognise the inexorable link between the nature emergency and the climate emergency—they are deeply intertwined. Both the cabinet secretary and Lorna Slater mentioned the need to restore our peatlands. Some members may know that, in the previous parliamentary session, I was the RSPB Scotland species champion for the rusty sphagnum bog moss—they called me “the moss boss”. Members may laugh, but the proliferation of bog moss is key to Scotland’s efforts to reduce our emissions. If the moss is sufficiently irrigated, it grows on peat, and it is one of the best absorbers of CO₂ that grows in Scotland. When we dry and cut peat, we release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. That is why restoring our peatlands is important, and I will continue to campaign for it even if I am not the moss boss in this session.

Monica Lennon articulated well the need to deal with the waste products of the various industries in our society. That theme was picked up by Maurice Golden when he talked about addressing the massive problem of plastic pollution. We need to get rid of all single-use plastics. In Scotland, an estimated 300 million plastic straws, 276 million pieces of plastic cutlery, 50 million plastic plates and 66 million polystyrene food containers are used annually. At a beach clean-up in South Queensferry, in my constituency, we pulled from the beach 174 single-use wet wipes that had been flushed away and had not degraded in the sea.

I am sure that, during the election campaign, every member in the chamber felt the public will for change. All parties were elected on promises of a greener and fairer future. In her spellbinding first speech, Mercedes Villalba really captured the point about a fairer future. She reminded us of the substantial barrier to progress that profit creates in existing business practices. She also reminded us that climate injustice and poverty are inexorably linked. Alex Rowley was right to say that it is easier for someone to go green if they have money to do so.

The message from young people, in particular, is clear. I am glad that the Labour amendment refers to the work of the Teach the Future campaign, which my party fully supports. Young people have already had an incredible impact on the conversation around the climate emergency, and the school strikes of 2019 made a huge difference. When young people marched down the Royal Mile and knocked on the Parliament’s door, I was with them, along with my teenage son Finn.

The declaration of a climate emergency finally followed, along with our new emissions reduction targets, but we cannot make progress only when we have people knocking on the door of the Parliament, demanding it. Where sensible policies are implemented, real systemic change can happen. The plastic bag charge is one example of that, but we need more such measures.

There are many promising policies in the realm of the circular economy, such as the deposit return scheme, which the Scottish Liberal Democrats have long campaigned for. Likewise, a latte levy would help people to get back into the habit of taking their reusable cups with them. I am concerned that the strictures of the pandemic have caused us to lose our way and have reversed some of the progress that people had made on reusable options.

Of course, those are all problems on which we need to work together. Mark Ruskell talked about cross-party consensus. I have worked with him before, and I look forward to working with him in this session to find that consensus.

We need to work together internationally as well, because we need countries to come together and companies to change their ways and methods of production if we are to realise the phase shift that we have defined in the debate. COP26 gives us the opportunity for new international thinking. It is a chance to show Scotland and the UK at their best and to prove that we are ready to play our part on the international stage. However, it will not be easy. We need politicians to be constructive and to work together. Such events are no place for divisive and toxic discourse between Governments, and the Scottish and UK Governments really need to step up.

We need to be completely focused on recovery from the pandemic and recovery for the planet. Every delay reduces the chance of our avoiding catastrophic climate change and temperature increase, as well as species loss. Every delay will cause more pain for the countries that are already living with the impacts of climate change and that are most at risk of the worst damage. Alex Rowley is absolutely right that we need to get past making well-meaning speeches. Distractions could be fatal.