Seòmar agus comataidhean

This is an important and timely debate with an immediate purpose. It is the kind of debate that we should be having more of in the Parliament, but that, sadly, we rarely do. The Government does not often want to debate issues such as this—issues that it has made commitments on but that it is not prioritising, and issues that it could easily achieve.

Everyone in Scotland knows that social care is really being held together by the hard work of overworked and underpaid carers across the sector, and that they hold it together every day with little support from central Government. If you talk to workers on the front line, you feel that there is very limited support from this Government.

On top of that, those who require care are often some of the worst-hit by inflation and the general increase in the cost of living. Unfortunately for them and so many others, we are now well into the depths of the cost of living crisis, which is already biting hard for families all across the country. Those same people are asking for help.

This Government’s record of supporting local government is very poor. I think that we should have some honest debate and discussion around that. This Government has presided over the slashing of care packages and the withdrawal of respite care. It has failed to immediately implement a number of key Feeley review recommendations, including that of universal non-residential care. All of those things would have made such a crisis much more bearable for those with care needs and their families. Let us not forget that it was this Government that set up the Feeley review, so why are we still awaiting its implementation? Far too long a time has passed.

To ask the Scottish Government what discussions justice ministers have had with ministerial colleagues regarding using antisocial behaviour laws to prevent people from carrying out intimidating protests outside abortion clinics. (S6O-01252)

It is welcome that the Scottish Government has accepted the recommendations that were made in the review, although it remains unfortunate that the Scottish Greens have had to be forced, yet again, into backing a policy that they committed to supporting in their manifesto just last year. The announcement will be welcomed by campaigners who I have campaigned with many times at the Killoch site in Ochiltree, East Ayrshire. Given the report, surely the minister can categorically confirm that the notification direction on planning permission will mean that the proposed incinerator development at that site will not go ahead.

I am pleased to open the debate for Scottish Labour.

We welcome the committee’s report into the health and wellbeing of children and young people. That is an overlooked and important subject that requires much greater attention, especially as a cost of living crisis looks set to grasp hold of many families for months, and possibly years, to come. Let us hope that that does not continue for years—but let us hope that, in the Parliament, we all commit to taking the necessary action to ensure that, if it does, it does not affect our young people. We must do that in every way that we can.

The evidence is overwhelming. It is not just that there are too many children living in poverty in Scotland—even one is too many—but that as many as one in four children is living in poverty. I will say that again: one in four children in this country lives in poverty.

In a great number of cases, those children are not living in homes where no one works, although the right-wing media would like to paint that picture sometimes. Those children are often from working families that simply cannot put food on the table. There are many factors as to why that is the case. Above all, for me, it is a matter of people being underpaid and abandoned to insecure work that simply does not provide enough to raise a family on. If we change that, the mental and physical health of young people across Scotland will begin to improve, year on year.

Naturally, young people cannot wait for all Governments to get their act together, so we must reflect on the marked effects that deprivation has on mental health as well as on physical health right now, and we must do all that we can to prevent inequality and ensure that prevention strategies are properly funded so that our young people’s health is protected right now.

The committee recognised that we must look at CAMHS. At the end of March 2022, more than 10,000 children and young people were waiting for CAMHS treatment. I know that this is said every week to the minister in this chamber, but it appears not to be being heard: these figures are unacceptable and clearly demonstrate the SNP’s long-term inability to improve mental health services. For eight years, the First Minister has followed the same script about her Government’s priorities with regard to young people, but young people need action, not rhetoric.

That includes, as the report highlights, dealing with the limited capacity in our mental health workforce. We clearly cannot wait for the SNP Government’s workforce plan to bear fruit. We have to train and employ a generation of new mental health workers on good wages who can commit their working lives to helping to tackle this problem. Scottish Labour is calling for real investment in mental health services to bring down waiting lists and put specialists in every GP practice, and I reiterate that call today. The Scottish Government must prioritise the issue and do more.

We Labour members recognise that many young people have unpaid caring responsibilities, as the report mentions. Despite that, there is no real strategy in Scotland for unpaid carers—particularly young carers. We heard a lot of evidence about that. Those young carers desperately need the restoration and expansion of respite services, with entitlements to short breaks and wellbeing services as standard. They are entitled to those things and we should press to ensure that they are available across the country.

It has been raised with me that we must also continue to analyse and report on the impact of Covid-19—particularly the impact of long Covid on the health and wellbeing of children and young people—and consider what challenges that is already creating and will create in the future, ensuring that that influences any policies that we implement.

All those reforms will help us to focus on prevention and early intervention in the immediate term, while wider economic change is, I believe, inevitable and essential. The cost of living crisis is rapidly exposing how thin our safety net is, and, in my opinion, the entire concept of employment and the ways in which the state protects and assists its most vulnerable people need to be revisited to create something that is fit for the 21st century.

There is no reason why a wealthy and prosperous country such as ours should even have to worry about this problem; it should be the first order of every day in every Parliament across this country. However, under successive Governments of all stripes, not enough has been done. That has to stop. We all have to do more.

I am sure that I speak for my party and many people in the Parliament and around the country when I say that the current state of provision is well below what is acceptable and we will not continue to put up with it.

The member knows that we, on these benches, have called for a number of measures. However, when we debate these issues, I would like the Government and back-bench members to come forward with plans that we can implement now. They often tell us that change takes a long time, so let us use what we have here and now to do everything that we can to ensure that children and young people do not live in poverty.

The last Labour Government went some way towards reducing child poverty, but our understanding and methods to combat it have moved on since then, so we will not rest. That is why Scottish Labour’s focused plan has, at its heart, a child poverty commission that will develop real plans to tackle child poverty—we hope—once and for all.

As I said at the start of the debate, if we want to alter the trajectory of young people’s health and wellbeing over the long term, the only solution is sustained investment in services. The Scottish Government must do more to commit to mental health services, in particular. We must look at employing more qualified staff on good salaries. Again, the Scottish Government must do more on that than it has done so far. Above all, we must wipe away that low-pay, insecure world of work that so many families barely earn a living from. All Governments must do more in that regard.

The Scottish Government’s women’s health plan accepts that women from higher socioeconomic areas are more likely to take up cervical screening than those from the more deprived areas. Given that we know that a clear way of bringing screening closer to home is by rolling out self sampling, can the minister outline any progress that has been made in that regard and say what role self sampling will play in the cervical screening programme in years to come, if the women’s health plan target of reaching more people who might not ordinarily engage is to be met?

I thank my colleagues from the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee for their work on the report, and I look forward to ensuring that the actions that are recommended in it are delivered.

I hope that the committee members will see themselves in the important role of holding the Scottish Government to account.

Do the witnesses have any thoughts on how we can ensure that the system understands that people are entitled to that healthcare?

That is lovely. Thank you.