Chamber and committees

Finally, after weeks of asking, NHS Lothian announced an hour ago that, from next week, walk-in vaccination clinics will be available to those over 40, which is very welcome. Last week, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care told me that Edinburgh is now the new Glasgow in terms of infection rates. If that is the case, why do we still not have access to the door-to-door surge testing that has been available for weeks in areas such as G41? Why are Edinburgh residents not as deserving of Covid protections as Glasgow residents?

We are just days away from Scotland’s men’s team appearing at its first tournament for 23 years—and at Hampden, of all places. That should kick-start a summer of great sport and activity, from grass-roots to elite level. After 15 months of being locked out of events, people are excited by the prospect, but they expect things to be done in the safest way possible.

Asymptomatic testing has been an integral part of trial events across the United Kingdom, including entry to the FA cup final last month. Euro 2020 events are being advertised as taking place in a Covid-secure environment, but there is no way on earth of verifying that without knowing the Covid status of every participant. Why has the Government decided that mandatory testing is not necessary for attendance at the fan zone or the games at Hampden?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its preparations for Euro 2020, including the fan zone. (S6T-00055)

I support the cabinet secretary’s aspiration of moving as fast as we can to alleviate poverty in Scotland, but does she recognise that, as her Government has taken only 2.8 per cent of the welfare provisions that are available to it and which the Department for Work and Pensions has said that it is ready to hand over, she is not moving at the pace that the Scottish people would like?

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer—sorry, I mean Presiding Officer. You do change around a bit.

I pay tribute to my colleagues across the chamber. They have spoken with real passion and eloquence, and very movingly so. I pay special tribute to those who have made their first speeches today. Marie McNair and Natalie Don made significant contributions to the debate and I welcome them both to their places.

Scotland has a poverty problem that is growing in menace. The Scottish Association for Mental Health recently published a report that states that 29 per cent of people in Scotland are unable to afford three or more of the 22 basic necessities that have been identified as essential and which no one should go without. Being forced to decide between heating and eating is not a choice; it is a blatant violation of human rights.

The SNP fought the election on the basis that it would not seek to hold another referendum until Covid has passed, but even if this Government meets its target of reducing child poverty to below 18 per cent, which is by no means a given, that will still leave us with up to 40,000 children living in poverty. The Government needs to address that issue before we turn to matters of the constitution.

Although it was not entirely a surprise, my colleagues and I were disappointed that the minister felt the need to hijack the debate and turn it into yet another excuse to squabble with Westminster before the motion had even been lodged. The Government will boast proudly of its achievements in reducing poverty in Scotland, but that is not enough. It is simply not doing everything that it could do, and that is why I intervened on the cabinet secretary.

Far from doing down our social security system, I want to empower it. I want to give it the reach that was imagined for it by the signatories of the Smith commission in 2014—all of them. They recognised that the Scottish social security system under full sail would have command over £4 billion-worth of spending. Imagine what we could do to level the playing field and address poverty and social inequality in this country with that kind of reach. Instead, we have taken the levers of just 3 per cent of that opportunity.

The Government will also boast proudly of a range of achievements, but when food bank usage in this country is at a record high, it cannot lay everything at the feet or the door of Westminster. When a household is made homeless every 19 minutes and those in the most deprived parts of the country are more than twice as likely to fail than to get a higher at level A, every second spent bickering about Westminster in order to push forward the constitutional debate is a second not spent assisting those in Scotland who need the Government the most. The Liberal Democrats will always hold Westminster to account, but only when it is relevant to the progress of our society, and we will never try to push forward that constitutional agenda.

I welcome Miles Briggs back to his place, and I look forward to working with him on a cross-party basis. I thought that Pam Duncan-Glancy, with typical passion, brought to the debate a compelling argument about how our two Governments will committee together have to carry some of the responsibility for this issue, and they will have to work together on some aspects. I thought that that was very eloquently put. Maggie Chapman rightly pointed out the instantaneous impact that doubling the child payment and introducing a universal basic income would have on the poverty problem in our country—it would be transformational overnight. It is within our grasp in lots of ways and we just need to reach for it. As I said, Natalie Don’s speech was passionate and I think that that passion will mark many contributions to come. It was also great to hear from Richard Leonard. To listen to him speak about poverty is inspiring; he sets a challenge and a high bar, for which we should all reach.

The Liberal Democrat amendment calls for

“urgent interventions to ... include an immediate end to the scandal of thousands of children and adults waiting over a year for”

first-time

“mental health treatment”.

That wait is keeping so many people from fulfilling their potential—and not just those people, but those who care for them and live around them.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I was not able to log in. I would have voted yes.

I am grateful for the engagement that the cabinet secretary has offered me on the outbreaks in Davidson’s Mains and Silverknowes in my constituency. Given that he has offered walk-in vaccinations in hotspot areas of Glasgow for those who have not yet been offered their first or second jab, will he make the same provision available to my constituents?

I warmly welcome you to your place, Presiding Officer—it is great to see you up there.

I thank the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care for bringing the debate to Parliament so swiftly at the start of the parliamentary session and for the inclusive way in which he has reached out across the chamber aisles in the first days of his tenure.

Two weeks ago, I received my first dose of the AstraZeneca jab. My constituency is home to three vaccination centres, and I received my jag from a constituent who I have helped with unrelated casework—it is wonderful how small a village Edinburgh can sometimes feel. My constituent was one of the first people to volunteer for the vaccine programme. It is no overstatement to suggest that the work of our vaccinators is truly remarkable. It gives us all hope that, through their efforts, the nightmare of Covid-19 might finally be coming to an end.

It is therefore right that we should now start to devote parliamentary time to the remobilisation of the NHS and the much-needed reform of our social care service. However, Liberal Democrats cannot support the Government motion unamended. Although much of its sentiment is laudable, we do not support the establishment of a national care service. Although social care is unquestionably in need of reform in this country and needs parity of investment, we do not believe that the management and control of reform should lie in the establishment of another centralised bureaucracy.

The motion implies that the principal source of delay in treatment that patients experience is the pandemic. The coronavirus emergency has certainly made a bad situation worse, but the Government was failing patients long before anyone had heard of Covid-19. I have lost count of the number of patients who have come to my surgery clutching letters advising them of their right—one that the Government enshrined in law—to be seen within 12 weeks when there is no hope of them being seen within 50 weeks.

Nevertheless, I am glad that the motion begins to acknowledge the backlog that has been created in both mental and physical health services, and aims to redress the balance. However, it is simply not good enough to aim for pre-pandemic standards. We must do better, with proper workforce planning and major investment—in particular, in mental health services and in screening services because, as we know, cancer has remained the biggest cause of death in Scotland, even when the Covid-19 virus was at its peak.

Cancer did not slow down during the pandemic, but diagnosis rates did. In 2020, cases of cancer in Scotland fell sharply and, for several months, national screening services for breast, bowel and cervical cancer were stopped completely. The impact of that is still being felt. As at March this year, the number of people on waiting lists for those vital diagnostic tests was 25 per cent higher than it was last year.

The wait for a cancer diagnosis test is not only physically dangerous; the mental strain that it puts on patients and their families cannot be overstated. As the Scottish Government attempts to tackle those huge waiting lists, it must do so in a way that will lead to long-term improvement in cancer services, so that no one faces a long and traumatic wait to receive that diagnosis.

In February, by backing a Liberal Democrat motion, the Parliament declared a mental health emergency—a crisis. A recent survey of over 1,000 people underscored the extent of that emergency in finding that 13 per cent of those who had tried to speak to their GP about their mental health during the pandemic had been unsuccessful. We learned this morning that, in the field of child and adolescent mental health, the list of children waiting more than a year for first-line support has grown by one third since Christmas.

As I conclude, I thank the Government for its commitment to mesh survivors, which enjoys the support of every party. I restate my admiration for all our NHS and social care staff for the work that they have done and will continue to do for us.

The subject of the debate is one of the fundamental challenges to us in this session of Parliament. It should command Parliamentary time in nearly every week during which we sit. Although we may disagree on how to get there, Liberal Democrats will play a constructive part on that journey.

It gives me great pride to rise for the Liberal Democrats.

I congratulate Gillian Mackay on an excellent speech and I extend good wishes to all those who will make their first speech today. It has been evident for some days that the intake of new MSPs has brought with it a welcome breadth of new talent. I wish them well and I look forward to working with them.

Shortly before new year’s eve in 2019, Chinese public health officials first alerted the World Health Organization to the human transmission of what was being referred to in the hospitals of Wuhan City as “animal pneumonia”. Back then, it all seemed so far away and, in those early days, our principal concern as members was over the Scots who were in that part of China and were unable to leave it. Then, suddenly, the virus was here.

I will never forget the Opposition briefing at which the chief medical officer and the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport appeared, ashen faced, to tell us that the virus could no longer be contained and that our public health priority was to protect our NHS from being overwhelmed. Schools and businesses would close, home working would become the new norm and we would have to teach our children the meaning of the word “lockdown”.

As the NHS mobilised, so too did our communities. In that, we have seen humanity at its greatest. I am sure that colleagues of all parties will share my sentiment as I speak of the gratitude that we owe our communities. In my constituency of Edinburgh Western, local hospitality businesses delivered free meals to the vulnerable, and mutual aid groups made a colossal effort to ensure that vulnerable neighbours were not left isolated or without support.

While we should be proud of our communities, we should be doubly so of our care workers and key workers. The nation owes them a debt that I do not think we can every truly repay.

However, in those weeks of high infection, amid the frantic efforts to prepare for an expected tsunami of Covid cases, part of what was done in preparation undoubtedly led—inadvertently—to catastrophe. When the histories of Scotland’s pandemic are written, the tragedy of that story will be found in our care homes.

The minutes of the Scottish Government’s Covid advisory group of 2 April 2020 cover several topics, but two points stand out in particular: first, that our scientists were struggling to understand how the virus was moving around in Scottish hospitals despite infection control measures; and, secondly, that it wanted to speed up the movement of elderly patients out of those hospitals and into Scottish care homes.

The international health community had been screaming about asymptomatic viral transmission since January, yet the decision was taken to accelerate the movement of more than 3,000 hospital patients whose Covid status was unknown—and of dozens who had even tested positive—into care homes that were working desperately hard to keep residents safe and to find personal protective equipment. That put a time bomb into the heart of the most vulnerable communities in our country. The response to outbreaks in our care homes was brutal—isolation and the misery of separation.

I do not blame any one person for those realities or those decisions, but it underscores the need and the urgency for the Government to commission an independent public inquiry without delay. That inquiry should not be about politics but should be about catharsis, healing and learning for the remnants of the virus and for any future pandemic that may visit our shores.

In that spirit, I thank the Government for its efforts to include Opposition members in the pandemic response. Ministers and cabinet secretaries made themselves available and responded swiftly—in some instances, to individual cases of constituents who had been left behind or who were unfairly disadvantaged.

When I raised the reality that Edinburgh zoo was just weeks from permanent closure if the Government’s timetable for reopening was not amended, I was gratified that I was taken seriously and that the zoo was given the latitude that it needed. When, along with Monica Lennon, I raised the plight of new parents who had spent their pregnancies shielding and were now adrift from support networks, they were granted permission by the Government to visit one another indoors.

Those exchanges showed what the Parliament can accomplish through consensus. We are going to need much more of that—for the wedding and events industry, which still lacks clarity about how the easing of restrictions will allow it to come back into profit; for those with additional support needs who are still prevented from accessing long-stay or short-stay respite services; and for the young people who did not expect to have to sit life-qualifying exams but who now face a diet of assessments without a clear appeals process.

We often talk about life before the pandemic, before we were confined to our homes, when we could hug our loved ones and go to the pub with as many of them as we chose. Aspiring to get back to life before the pandemic is a low bar to set, because before the pandemic students from our poorest communities were being failed by a system that is widening the attainment gap, our communities were being torn apart by the drug deaths emergency—the worst in the developed world—and children suffering from mental ill health faced the longest queue in our NHS.

We need to put the recovery first, and that starts by recognising that the pandemic is far from over. This morning, I had cause to speak to the headteacher of Davidson’s Mains primary school in my constituency for the second time in as many days since an outbreak of Covid closed her school on Tuesday. Twelve classes are now isolating and community transmission is surging. I ask the cabinet secretary to reassure my community in his closing remarks that the outbreak commands the full attention of his Government.

The first debates of a new parliamentary session strike a different tone from those that we were used to in the closing days of the previous session. The eyes of the country are fixed on the chamber in anticipation and expectation. Our success in living up to that expectation will be measured by how we build consensus, how quickly we respond to emerging areas of greatest need and how we resist the divisions of the past.

I am sure that members are gratified to hear about the measures to deal with the hot spots in Glasgow, but hot spots and outbreaks of Covid-19 are not limited to Glasgow. As I said in my speech, Davidson’s Mains primary school in my constituency was closed on Tuesday, and 11 classes are now self-isolating. There are dozens and dozens of infections there. Can the cabinet secretary reassure people in my community that the Government’s focus is very much on them and that they will receive due attention?