Chamber and committees

The Government waited until after the election in June, and for months after it had discovered that there was a problem, to tell Parliament that a woman had died after wrongly being excluded from screening. Today, we have learned not only that two more women have cancer after being excluded, but that a review of 200,000 women’s records is under way.

How were indications of this public health scandal detected on four separate occasions without that triggering a full-scale investigation? Will the Government as a basic courtesy now write to the 200,000 women whose records will be reviewed in order to keep them updated and give them agency to seek help if they want to?

I will.

The Government’s meddling in centralisation projects that have gone before has not helped people at the business end of the delivery of services and the approach will not help with the delivery of care. Liberals stood against the centralisation of Police Scotland and we shall stand against the centralisation of our care system, because our party believes, as a matter of principle, that decisions are better when they are made closer to the people whom they most affect.

For all that the Government wants to be remembered with the reverence with which Nye Bevan, the father of the NHS, is remembered, its national care service is a cynical power grab and nothing more.

I move amendment S6M-01190.4, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:

“notes that the NHS is under intense pressure because ministerial mistakes in workforce planning since 2007 contributed to the failure to meet key waiting times targets for years pre-pandemic; believes that the NHS Recovery Plan should be strengthened with a trajectory for meeting those targets to give new hope to overworked staff and patients waiting; further believes that there should be new national entitlements to guarantee quality of care for service users, with the funding to match, and new national fair work standards for staff to improve pay, conditions and career progression; believes, however, that Scottish Government proposals for a centralised ministerial takeover of social care will distract and detract from those ambitions; recalls the mistakes of previous centralisations conducted by the Scottish Government, and calls for the additional proposals contained in the Scottish Government consultation to use centralisation to seize control of other services, including children and young people, community justice and social work, described as an attack on local government, to also be withdrawn.”

I am grateful to the minister for giving way. Does he recognise that one of the main reasons why unpaid carers are on their knees and in desperate need of respite is that his Government refused to allow adult respite services to reopen until now?

I say for the record that Covid identification cards must be ruled out for children, because there should be no external pressure on families when deciding about the vaccine.

Last week, the First Minister leaned in to the words of Professor Stephen Reicher to justify the ID card scheme, but he is actually against it. She implied that Geoff Ellis from the events industry supported it, too. He does not. In fact, he told me today:

“I am prepared to support a drive to encourage young people to get the vaccine, but that is different to saying you are going to exclude them if they don’t.”

The First Minister is running out of experts to quote, so will she cancel Covid ID cards for all age groups today?

I start by echoing the thanks that have been offered to our valiant health and social care workers. We will never be able to fully repay the debt that we all owe them.

American clinician Atul Gawande once wrote:

“The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”

The provision and effective delivery of social care is a vital part of how we answer that challenge and offer dignity, agency and independence to our most vulnerable residents. It is a critical piece of the jigsaw when it comes to all other aspects of treatment and care in our society.

Let me put it simply: if social care is broken, it interrupts flow throughout the whole health service. We know that the record-breaking A and E waiting times are not caused by a deficiency in emergency care but are the result of insufficient social care provision in our communities. People are waiting in A and E departments for admission to the main hospital because in-patient beds are taken up by people who are well enough to leave hospital but lack the necessary care provision that would enable them to be received at home.

We need to reform social care—of that there is no doubt—but we need to do so by paying care workers handsomely, dealing with market inconsistency, reforming self-directed support and making care a profession of choice again. We do not reform social care by stripping decision-making power and money from the local care partnerships that currently deliver it. The last thing we need is a big, clunking, centralised bureaucracy that is ultimately run by the Scottish ministers—the same ministers who are, in part, responsible for the catastrophe in our care homes in the foothills of the pandemic.

It is cynical of the Government to brand its proposals a “national care service”, when they are in fact a ministerial takeover of social care. The branding exercise is designed to make the proposed arrangements sound like our most treasured national institution, the national health service, but that is where the similarity ends. The NHS was forged in the rubble and poverty of war. It offered, for the first time, medical care and treatment to every citizen in the United Kingdom, free at the point of delivery. It is the most successful model of socialised medicine in the world. The proposal behind the national care service is not for a service that will be offered free at the point of delivery. There will not be a socialised model for the delivery of care; nor will care be nationalised—it will still be provided by the private and charitable organisations that account for the lion’s share of the market.

The naming of the project is a cynical attempt to win public support, when, in all actuality, the delivery of care will suffer. The new model simply transfers power from local authorities and communities and gives it to ministers, to determine the shape of the care service.

Every single one of the European nations that the cabinet secretary has listed has had in place, for many years, constitutional protections around ID cards. We have no such protections in this country.

I accept Mr Fraser’s very nuanced position and respect the fact that it might be different from mine. However, does he recognise that the hospitality sector and the events industry have said that their preference is for lateral flow certification, so that people can evidence their health on that particular day, which is far safer than the Government’s vaccine passport plan?

Earlier in the year, when Scottish Liberal Democrats suggested the idea of a commission to prevent violence against women and girls, the Government agreed that it would be willing to explore the idea of such a commission with an open mind and that a commission might help bring all the strands of the work together.

Statistics that have been published this week show that, of 1,045 stalking charges reported to the Crown Office in 2021, at least 592 were identified as domestic abuse. I am dismayed to hear the cabinet secretary—

—suggest that there will not be a commission. I ask her to explain to the chamber why the Government has decided not to embark on such a commission.