Chamber and committees

I am grateful to the minister for having acted on our calls to bring in international expertise in that way. It is vital.

The report highlights that the impact of substance use is not limited to the user; it also exerts an impact on the families around them, especially children. On any given day in Scotland, as many as 25,000 children are affected by parental substance use. I therefore welcome the announcement of Phoenix Futures’ family service in Aberlour’s mother and child house. I worked with Aberlour when it had a previous iteration of that service; however, the service had to close, due to a myopic decision by Glasgow City Council at the time, which decided that the service was just not being used enough. What guarantees can the minister give to members about the longevity of such services? I ask because we are going to need them, even when we might think that we do not.

I cannot believe that again I have to remind the Deputy First Minister that the SNP Government is not the people of Scotland. I was belittling the approach of his Government, not that of the people. He needs to wake up to that, because it is a mistake that his Government makes time and again. The SNP is not Scotland.

Will the Deputy First Minister guarantee that all Ukrainians—both those in-country and those on their way here with a visa and a promise of a home—will have a permanent place to live or somewhere they can live for at least six months that is not a hotel, a cruise ship, a barracks or a gym hall?

I rise for the Liberal Democrats.

This programme for government is a poor read and represents thin gruel to anxious Scots who will be looking to the Parliament for reassurance this afternoon. The First Minister gives the impression that her Government has responded to the crisis with £3 billion-worth of money, but that figure has been roundly debunked by the Scottish Parliament information centre time and time again. On another of today’s flagship announcements, I note that, after a hike of rail fares by 4 per cent already this year, today’s announcement only delays by two months a further increase in fares. When we consider rail travel costs across the rest of Europe, that is just embarrassing.

It is clear that, after more than 15 years in power, this is a Government that lacks the humility, creativity and ambition that is necessary to solve the problems that the people of Scotland currently face. Those problems are legion. We face the biggest hit to household budgets since the liberation of western Europe in 1918. Households in almost every demographic in Scotland are eyeing the coming months with fear due to energy costs, food prices, rising home costs and mortgages. The crisis is not coming over the horizon; it is already here.

Although the face at the helm in London has changed, the people of the United Kingdom have no faith that the Conservative Government has their best interests at heart. As Shakespeare might have put it, “Now is the summer of our discontent made inglorious and freezing winter by this daughter of Yorkshire”. Liz Truss could dispel the anxieties of millions of households and businesses that fear their coming energy bills; she could do so in a heartbeat by adopting Liberal Democrat proposals—embraced by other parties—that would freeze the price cap for the coming year and paying for the freeze with a meaningful windfall tax on the superprofits of the energy producers.

However, the UK Government is not the only one with the levers of power that are necessary to help struggling Scottish families. I find it astonishing that SNP members have used the summer to focus solely on their efforts to break up the UK, in large part blind to the suffering around them and desperately trying to pass the buck for things that they manifestly had the power to fix. I hope that, as the First Minister moved between the venues of her Edinburgh fringe festival appearances, she felt a profound sense of shame. All that mess, the lost business and the reputational damage to our festivals are the direct result of the year-on-year cuts by her Government to local council funding, which prevented those councils offering vital workers the pay rise that they deserved. Our capital was disgraced by the refuse strikes; Edinburgh was diminished, sullied and made a material threat to public health as the rubbish in bins piled high and the vermin feasted. If it was in the First Minister’s power to intervene to end the bin strikes in early September, it was in her power to stop them in July.

We have heard today that the First Minister will plead governmental poverty to almost all of that and will lean into the fallacy that we have a fixed budget. She talked about hard choices. Let me direct her to some savings that she could make tomorrow. She could abandon her costly ministerial power grab of social care, scrap national testing in our schools, tell her ministers to stop playing dress-up diplomat in embassies that we do not need and stop spending her time and our money on a referendum that is simply not wanted by the people of Scotland.

The other crisis of the SNP’s own creation is the fate of those Ukrainians who sought safe harbour in our country and are languishing in temporary accommodation. I refer members to my entry in the register of interests, in that my family and I have been hosting a Ukrainian refugee since August, under the homes for Ukraine scheme. Once again, not for the first time, I hear jeers and heckling at that. What message does it send to the families that we are trying to entreat to open their homes to Ukrainians if all that they get from SNP members is derision and scorn? It is utterly shameful.

During recess, I met aid workers based in Lviv who are working to provide safe passage out of Ukraine and into Scotland. They described the Scottish Government as being humiliatingly underprepared for the needs of refugees. The Government rolled out a supersponsor scheme, but called an abrupt halt to that a few months later, leaving thousands of people in limbo and even forcing some families to separate. Scottish ministers wanted the positive press of being seen to help, but did little of the backroom work necessary to make that happen, so we have homes across Scotland that are waiting to be matched with a Ukrainian guest and Ukrainians who have been placed in remote areas without access to transport.

I am quite certain that as those huddled masses made their way across Europe with dreams of Scotland, they did not have a disused cruise ship or hurricane Katrina-style gym hall accommodation in mind. I say to the Government that it should reissue the call for homes, give councils the resources that they need to manage that properly and extend the discretionary travel scheme so that all those who seek safe harbour here can reach job opportunities far away from their homes. There are still 18,000 Ukrainians who are making their way here with a visa and a promise of home. That is a bin fire.

Some of the warning lights blinking across the dashboard of public policy have been crying out for the Government’s attention for far longer than those that emerged this summer. Today’s waiting time statistics are the worst that they have ever been. A staggering one in seven Scots is on a waiting list. The seeds of that crisis were sown long ago and lack of ministerial interest has allowed them to take root. That is why my party is calling for the health secretary to come to Parliament this week to set out a replacement for his failing NHS recovery plan. If he agrees to such a statement, I hope that he will adopt Scottish Lib Dem plans to recruit and retain staff through a burnout prevention strategy.

I am dismayed by the lack of provision in the programme for children’s mental health and for people of all ages who are suffering from long Covid. The only out-patient waiting time target for child and adolescent mental health services is set to be missed. The national treatment centre that the First Minister announced has been delayed still further and a study published today found that a quarter of all deaths among five to 24-year-olds were from suicide. That is devastating. No child should ever be left feeling suicidal. We must move heaven and earth to ensure that every child knows that they are loved and supported, but that is not happening.

The same ministerial lack of interest is being visited on those Scots, many of them children, who are suffering from long Covid and whose number is fast approaching 200,000. There is precious little for them in this programme. It is to the SNP’s shame that that is what patients have come to expect from them. Although the Government has accepted that Covid will exist among us, it continues making no provision for what Covid can later become. Yet another group of people has been forgotten about and abandoned on the altar of nationalism.

They are not alone. Island communities have once again been left high and dry by this Government in the pantomime of its re-provisioning of lifeline ferries. They were originally scheduled for completion in 2014, but we are now told that they will not be ready until 2023. It is not only the boats that are behind schedule: the harbours are not even ready to take them. This would be comical if it was not for the impact that it is having on people’s daily lives in island communities, and still nobody has been held to account for those inadequacies.

When the Supreme Court throws out the legality of a non-binding referendum, ministerial disinterest in the day job will reach new heights. All the oxygen of this Government will be diverted to the single issue around which it intends to fight the next general election. We have Green ministers for the first time in Scottish history. How sad it is, then, that their party has turned out to be the only Green party in the world that cares more about nationalism than it does about the environment. Let me say this: if the SNP and its Green coalition partners will not fight the climate emergency, the Scottish Liberal Democrats will.

We will fight the next general election on all the issues that matter to the people of Scotland. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that a general election can become solely about one’s myopic world view, and the voters will render a judgment accordingly. The programme for government offers no real hope that we can expect to find anything different from a coalition Government that is fixated on only one thing.

Will the Deputy First Minister give way?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. The Guardian has uncovered an internal Scottish Government memo that confirms that the Government “almost certainly” made changes to legislation at the request of the Queen’s lawyers. Alterations to exempt Crown interests in the royal household from certain aspects of law were made before legislation was introduced to the Parliament. We do not know what changes were made or even which bills were changed, and the Parliament and the public deserve to see and understand those changes.

Presiding Officer, I ask for your guidance on how the Parliament and the people of this country can get sight of the changes that were made to legislation at the request of the Queen’s lawyers before it was introduced to the Parliament.

To ask the Scottish Government when the rural affairs secretary last met with Crown Estate Scotland. (S6O-01301)

—should we take it that evidence of corruption is not a bar in the Government’s assessment of what quality looks like?

In 2018, the Scottish Government established a due diligence test to establish the human rights and corruption records of the companies with which it does business. That was after it dealt with Chinese companies that were connected to the abuse of human rights.

Liberal Democrat research, reported in The Scotsman today, shows that Crown Estate Scotland did not seem to know that that diligence test existed when it was awarding ScotWind sea bed leases. It invented its own test; in effect, it asked companies involved whether they had done anything wrong recently. That meant that Japanese company Marubeni, which paid corruption fines as recently as 2014, did not need to declare those fines.

The Scottish Government promised to change its ways but, in the biggest sale for years, it seems that Government bodies are still not performing stringent checks on who they partner with. Given that the Government insisted that ScotWind leases were sold on the basis of quality, not price—

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I could not connect. I would have voted no.

Well, here we are again. What an appalling waste of energy and focus this is. Frankly, I can think of better uses of our time, and I am not alone. I am sure that those who are waiting for cancer care in the longest queue on record can think of better uses of our time; those children suffering from long Covid who were left disappointed after waiting to meet the First Minister in the cold outside the Parliament this afternoon can think of better uses of our time; and island ferry passengers, Ukrainians stuck in hotels and victims of violent and sexual crime who have been left waiting for justice can all think of better uses of our time.

The First Minister is putting disquiet in her party ahead of the needs of this country. Why will her fixation with breaking up the United Kingdom always trump the needs of the people we are all here to serve?