Hansard

Thank you for calling me, Deputy Presiding Officer. I welcome you to your new place, and I congratulate the minister on her reappointment.

It is a privilege to make my maiden speech in the chamber; I am deeply honoured to stand before members today as a newly elected Reform member for the Highlands and Islands electoral region. I offer my thanks to all those who made our successful electoral campaign possible, including our party director, our leader and the regional chair; all the candidates, activists and volunteers; and, of course, the voters who have put their faith in my party.

I also offer my thanks to all the staff and volunteers across Scotland who took on the role of tellers, for their admirable display of concentration and stamina for hours and hours as they counted votes one by one. They are an often-overlooked group at elections, but their contribution makes our precious democracy possible.

Like other members, I take this opportunity to congratulate our national football team on their qualification for the world cup—we offer them our best wishes for the campaign. I notice that the First Minister is not in the chamber. I wonder if he is sitting by the phone, hoping for a call-up from Steve Clarke for a place in the squad, perhaps in the position of striker—after all, his independence strategy has given him plenty of practice at kicking the can down the road.

In keeping with parliamentary tradition, I pay tribute to all my regional predecessors, regardless of their parties, who have served the region diligently. Although members here will inevitably hold different political views, we can all respect the hard work, dedication and long service that those former members have given to the people of the Highlands and Islands. I step into my role with a commitment to build on their efforts and to advocate for the needs of those communities, and I look forward to spending the next years travelling to every corner of the area to do just that. One thing is for sure: my camper van will not be spending much time on the driveway.

The Highlands and Islands is a region of unmatched breathtaking beauty—from the bustling streets of Inverness and the shores of Argyll to the furthest reaches of our island communities, it is a vast and diverse region. It gives Scotland so much: Ben Nevis, the UK’s highest peak; Orkney’s rich Viking history and fertile farmlands; the wool industry of Shetland and the Harris tweed of the Western Isles; the best whisky in the world—it is home to four of the five Scottish whisky regions; an encyclopaedia of tartans; and Highland dress itself. The Highlands and Islands give us not only world-class industry and tourist destinations, contributing much to our economy, but much of what we regard as our Scottish culture.

I am delighted to be in the chamber for my first debate, which addresses the Government’s motion on sport. I submit that discussion of that area is often overlooked in the ebb and flow of political discourse. Human beings have evolved to be active creatures, and our modern sedentary lifestyles have pulled us away from our natural state. As we have heard, an active lifestyle is an important tool in both the prevention and the management of mental health conditions and long-term physical conditions such as diabetes, obesity and cardiac problems, with all the costs that they bring to the taxpayer, the national health service and patients with lived experience. In the promotion of an active and healthy lifestyle, sport has a huge advantage over other elements of health strategy such as diet changes and habit cessation.

It is really good fun so long as individuals have equal and regular access to a wide range of different sporting activities to try, so that they can find out what works for them and what they enjoy most. It does not work if we simply force everyone to do one sport, or offer only a few; people need accessible infrastructure and opportunities to figure out for themselves where their passion lies so that they can see the benefits, keep up consistency and improve health outcomes.

I welcome much of what the minister said today—certainly in terms of her intention—and I salute her aspiration and ambition. However, my party’s main criticisms of Scotland’s 2026 summer of sport revolve around the risk of missing the most vulnerable low-income families due to hidden costs, and the economic instability of creating a one-off funding spike following years of stagnation.

Although we have heard the £20 million of investment being championed as a major milestone, sporting bodies, local councils and anti-poverty campaigners have raised critical concerns about structure. The programme mandates that councils prioritise families who face socioeconomic disadvantage, but critics argue that offering free or low-cost sessions is not enough to guarantee equal access, because there is a worry about hidden cost barriers. Even if a sports session is entirely free, low-income families still face steep secondary barriers, including the high costs of specialised sportswear or equipment if they want to take it on in the long term, and having to use expensive, unreliable public transport to get children to venues. Rural isolation also presents a disadvantage, which means that rural and remote low-income families are systematically sidelined. Although all local authorities have received funding, as we have heard, where localised extended overnight camps take place in, for example, Inverness or Oban, they will be functionally inaccessible to island families or isolated communities if transport links such as ferries or roads are not properly funded and maintained.

There is also a worry about nutritional shortfall. Although some regional programmes, such as that in Dumfries and Galloway, have attempted to integrate free food provision, there is no standardised nationwide mandate to ensure that all children are fed.

There are also criticisms of the long-term funding aspect. National sporting bodies have welcomed the funding injection, but point out that it highlights severe systemic funding flaws. Reform agrees that the initiative merely papers over the cracks presented by years of standstill budgets. Prior to this sudden overall cash boost, sports organisations in Scotland endured five consecutive years of standstill funding. The running on empty campaign led by sports governing bodies highlighted that years of inflation and flatlining budgets have left grass-roots sports facilities critically weak. Reform argues that this package provides a temporary Band-Aid rather than a sustainable financial model.

We face a cliff edge. The funding for the summer of sport is explicitly structured as a fixed, finite pool that is scheduled to run out by spring 2027. Club operators argue that wilfully spiking public interest via major events such as the FIFA world cup and the Commonwealth games will create a massive wave of youth demand that local clubs will lack the long-term infrastructure, staff or funding to support once the campaign ends.

Then we have the issue of volunteer burnout. The rush to roll out a massive, short-term, regionally focused programme relies heavily on volunteer labour and youth leaders. Sports analysts warn that, without sustained long-term funding to recruit and retain paid qualified coaches, this sudden pressure on local volunteer systems will make them unsustainable and it will risk the rapid burnout of those volunteers.

For those reasons, Reform UK has well-founded reservations about this initiative. It involves money that should be used to fund and expand our existing infrastructure and to promote grass-roots engagement and mass participation in order to achieve a wealthier, healthier Scotland. That is the vision of Reform UK, and it is an ambition that should be shared by all members across the chamber. There is a real danger that, in the way that it is currently structured, the initiative will look a lot like fee-free university tuition, and like the help-to-buy scheme that has just been announced, in that it will disproportionately benefit middle-class families at the expense of working-class taxpayers.

I am looking at my remaining allotment of time. Unless the Deputy Presiding Officer is willing to award me a generous, Celtic football club level of added injury time, I should probably come to a close. I will finish by saying this: as a Reform member for the Highlands and Islands region, I will strive to be a robust champion for our communities, always advocating the union as the bedrock of our peace and prosperity, now and in the future.

Let me be clear: if anyone from the SNP—be they a member, a minister, a cabinet secretary or a First Minister—comes to this chamber with fanciful, poorly thought through bills or motions, Reform UK will be here to scrutinise them, challenge them and send them homeward to think again.