Hansard

I thank the organisations that have provided helpful briefings for us ahead of the debate and I welcome to the public gallery representatives from them. As the minister stated in her opening remarks, today is an opportunity for the whole Parliament to reaffirm our collective commitment to Scotland’s children, young people, adults and families with care experience. Indeed, we have all made that point.

However, we need to be honest about where we are now with not only keeping the Promise but delivering it. I think that all members have emphasised that we are now at the delivery point, and we need to accept that we all have a responsibility for that—not only Government ministers but all the members, from every party in the chamber, who have signed up to this.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to introducing the Promise bill in this session of Parliament but, with only 18 months left of this session, we all have a role to play in making sure that the bill is the best piece of legislation that it can be. Across the parties, we have a lot of questions that we want to ask about what the bill will look like and how we can shape it, but those who are trying to deliver the Promise in our councils, education institutions and the third sector will push back at all of us and say that they do not have the resources and that they are getting cuts to their budgets.

Therefore, we also need to understand that funding needs to follow the delivery of the Promise, and we need to challenge ourselves and ministers on that. There has been substantial and welcome progress in recent years, but we have a huge amount of work to do if we are to say that we have kept the Promise by 2030.

I recently met a number of organisations to discuss the Promise and to talk about the peer support that is being provided. It is something that I am passionate about and which I know is making a difference. For example, Scotland’s only national mentoring programme for care-experienced children, intandem, which works with children who are at home or in kinship care, is inspiring Scotland’s young people, matching them with trained local mentors. The organisation works with and supports 280 care-experienced young people. It is a great example of where the Promise has already started to filter down to ensure that advocacy lies at the heart of the progress that we want to see.

I hope that the minister will engage with me and others on what will be in the proposed Promise bill about advocacy for young people. We politicians stand up to make our voices heard, but in doing so, we must ensure that children make their voices heard, too, and that they are listened to and respected. A huge amount of progress still needs to be made on that. Children in the hearings system should be granted better access to independent advocacy to ensure that they are provided with impartial information about their rights and their entitlements, and they should be given enough space to ensure that their opinions and feelings are communicated, within what is often a moving process.

That might require additional resources and potential changes to legislation, but I think that it is important for those changes to be made and for the system to be turned around to ensure that children’s voices are made paramount. It is also important in supporting better decision making by our young people. I hope that there is an opportunity for the minister to work with us on the bill, because I, for one, am passionate about changes to the advocacy aspect.

However, this is not just about process. What is always my concern when I stand up to make a speech and, indeed, when it comes to everything that we do in the chamber—and it is probably a concern for ministers on the front bench, too—is that process is one thing, but delivering an outcome is very much another. The policies that have changed and which are sitting with COSLA are doing just that—sitting with COSLA.

We need all institutions and organisations to move forward at pace to deliver the Promise. In 2017, I campaigned for a national kinship carer payment, but it was delivered only last year. The care leaver payment that ministers are introducing is a welcome step forward, and I hope that it can deliver, but there needs to be a different model for kinship carers, who are often grandparents. Their needs must be further taken into account.

When the Social Justice and Social Security Committee held a private round-table meeting with kinship carers, I distinctly remember speaking to a lady from Glasgow. The police arrived at her home at 3am with her half-naked grandchild and told her, “This is your responsibility. You are the next of kin.” Her daughter had had an addiction and substance misuse issue; the police had intervened and had brought her granddaughter to her home—and that was it. It was a case of “Over to you.”

The financial support package for kinship carers is not really there. Many kinship carers, and many grandparents in our society who are bringing up young people, are concerned that if they reach out for help, social services will get involved and the children will be taken away. There are still barriers in our system to many of our fellow citizens, who are doing their very best by our young people and keeping families together, being able to reach out for help. We need to do something about that, because if we do not, some individuals will continue to not ask for help, and the outcomes will not improve for those young people.

A number of members have mentioned the progress that we need to make. I do not think that we have a clear route to delivering the Promise by 2030. I hope that the proposed bill can make that happen, and we can look towards that. In his excellent speech, Willie Rennie mentioned that we are starting to see the development of a postcode lottery in the delivery of the Promise. I know that we all hate using the words “postcode lottery”, but some individual leaders in our councils are delivering progress, while others are not. We need collective work to take the Promise forward.

Kevin Stewart made an important contribution with regard to public and private relationships within the delivery of the Promise. How can they be taken forward, especially in relation to employers? That is an important aspect that we all need to look towards, and we must challenge the private sector to come and help to deliver the Promise along with the public organisations that we are tasking with doing that.

There is still a lot of potential with regard to what can be delivered on housing. When I visited the University of Edinburgh recently, I was pleased to hear about the work that it is doing to ensure that care-experienced young people have wraparound housing for the whole year, not just during term time, if that is what they want. We have seen some good progress on that.

Oliver Mundell and Nicola Sturgeon made similarly challenging speeches, and I welcome their contributions. There is no point in our congratulating ourselves on what we are doing: we need to be honest about the delivery and the structural reforms that are needed, which will be difficult to put in place. As Nicola Sturgeon said, achieving our aims will need strategy, leadership and funding, but we have all voted for the mission that we are undertaking, and we should all unite behind it, because we need to ensure that we deliver it.

To conclude—and I welcome the extra time that you have given me, Deputy Presiding Officer—I do not think that the delivery of the Promise requires a great deal of legislative change. As The Promise Scotland said in its briefing, we must ensure that we do not see the landscape becoming more complicated and cluttered. I hope that the proposed Promise bill is broad enough in scope to ensure that the required legislative changes are made to enable Scotland to keep the Promise everywhere, every day and to everyone.