Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Chamber

Meeting of the Parliament 09 March 2011

09 Mar 2011 · S3 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

“Report on preventative spending”

Hepburn, Jamie SNP Central Scotland Watch on SPTV

I congratulate the committee on its work on this report. I am not on the committee and have not been intimately involved in the process, but even a rudimentary read will show that it is an important report that deals with important issues and has important lessons for Scotland. That is particularly true given the current circumstances, and it is important that we consider preventative spending in the light of spending constraints from elsewhere.

First of all, though, I echo others’ comments about the work of Andrew Welsh. I wish him very well in his well-earned retirement. He has represented his party—my party—and his area with very great distinction for many years since he was first elected in 1974. I have not seen him in action at the Finance Committee at first hand, but his colleagues’ comments this afternoon speak volumes about his work and this is the culmination of many years of dedicated public service and his astute chairmanship of the Finance Committee. I wish him well for the future.

As I have said, the report is important. However, a useful starting point might be to ask the question, “What is preventative spending?” After all, we have been using the term without assessing what it means. The committee report says:

“there is not an established definition in use by relevant bodies that would capture all the examples that were provided to the Committee”.

Essentially, however, what it means is spending that helps to prevent negative social outcomes, as becomes clearer in the context of the three specific policy areas that the committee examined. Those areas are the early years framework—I should declare an interest as the father of a one-year-old at home—health and social care, and collaborative working. Before I look at each of them, I should mention in passing the benefits of the committee focusing on and looking at such areas in very close detail.

Considerable research has shown the benefits of early and effective intervention in the early years. Indeed, I am talking not just about policy-based evidence; the Scottish Government’s response to the report highlights the work of Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago, whose studies of the neuroscience of brain receptivity from pre-birth to age three show that intervening in the very earliest years is likely to achieve better results than later intervention. As a result, the committee was right to focus on the early years framework. Evidence also shows that the benefits of such intervention apply at any stage of a child or young person’s life, indeed even after they have been defined as a young person. The early years are our first chance to get it right for every child.

The report highlights examples from the Netherlands and Scandinavia, including universal child care provision from birth. I am sympathetic to such policies—I should perhaps redeclare my interest—but I think that, in its response to the Finance Committee about implementing such policies in Scotland, the Scottish Government was probably right to caution against cherry picking policies from different contexts and taking them in isolation. I do not want to strike a discordant note, but the committee might like to reflect, as I am sure some members have, on the fact that the context for the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands is very different from that of a devolved Scotland. For a start, those countries are independent.

The report also examines specific preventative spending issues in health and social care. I was very interested to hear of the life begins at 40 project that Mr FitzPatrick mentioned although, unlike him, it will be many years before I will have to avail myself of it.