Hansard

I am pleased to speak for Labour in support of the Finance Committee’s report. I associate myself with the remarks of the cabinet secretary on our convener, Mr Welsh. I fear that I might have tested his patience somewhat on occasion, but he always dealt with it with good humour, for which I thank him. I also associate myself with Mr Welsh’s remarks, thanking our clerks for their hard work not just on the report that is before us, but during the two years for which I have been a member of the committee.

It is not just we on the Labour benches who believe that Scotland should be one of the best places in the world to bring up children. As Mr Welsh commented, the committee’s report was unanimous. Anything that puts me, Joe FitzPatrick and Derek Brownlee on the same page in agreement must be an achievement. Throughout the Finance Committee’s evidence sessions, that view was echoed by nearly every contributor to our discussions.

All parties believe that Scotland’s public services must focus more on preventing social problems from arising, rather than reacting to problems once they have occurred. I believe that the negative aspects of Scotland, including our higher rates of drinking and substance abuse compared with the rest of the UK and other countries, our relatively high prison population as a proportion of the total population, and our lower life expectancy compared with the rest of the UK, particularly in some parts of Glasgow, remain a major concern for us all.

The scale of the challenge that faces Scotland’s public sector in dealing with child wellbeing and social problems such as violence and ill health is huge, but it is not insurmountable. A lot of interesting and successful work is being done in that regard.

Is it not common sense to recognise that good habits that are picked up early in life can have an impact on reducing the future cost of ill health to the NHS; that they can help to boost economic output; that they will reduce the risks of vulnerable individuals getting involved in crime and potentially going to prison—with all the costs that are associated with that; and that they can impact on the quality of learning and the skills that are held by individuals, with productivity implications for society as a result? All our expert witnesses suggested that a preventative approach is one of the best means of tackling those problems, and that it can deliver significant financial savings in the process.

Mr Welsh has already quoted Detective Chief Superintendent Carnochan of the Strathclyde Police violence reduction unit, and I would like to do so, too. He said that

“the future of Scotland’s children”

was

“at a crossroads”.

He commented that, if he was offered the choice between 1,000 new police officers and 1,000 health visitors, he would be minded to opt for the health visitors.

Mr Carnochan said:

“We are presented with the opportunity to make Scotland the best place in the world to bring up our children and to change their destiny and improve their outcomes. That is within our grasp ... their future is our future. Our economy, our culture and our country depend on them.”

He went on to say:

“Plans and interventions that tinker around the edges and halfway measures are no longer acceptable ... Doing nothing is not an option ... we need to make investments in the early years so that our kids are not left behind before they even get to school.”

The committee’s report shows the consensus across the board that more focus must be placed on preventing social problems from arising, rather than on reacting to them once they have occurred. With common sense, we can see that there is no shortage of evidence and experience firmly pointing towards the placing of greater emphasis on prevention and early intervention, rather than on crisis intervention. The overwhelming consensus during the Finance Committee’s inquiry shows that greater recognition is required for that crucial early stage.

Children 1st put it in black and white in its submission: it wants less talk and more action. The charity is concerned that shifting the balance towards prevention should not remain merely theory and rhetoric but should become the reality on the ground.

For example, we spend more than £1 billion on funding higher education. That is more than three times more than we spend on pre-school education. One of our witnesses, Professor Edward Melhuish, of the University of London, suggested that the emphasis in investment should be the other way round.

Children 1st used the example of police funding. Police forces spent £320 million on community safety in 2009-10. Much of the money is spent on diversionary activities for young people to prevent offending, on antisocial behaviour teams and on closed-circuit television operations. There is no doubt that some community safety activity prevents problems from escalating, but it would be far better to prevent the problems from even beginning.

Some preventative work is going on. Dundee has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the UK and NHS Tayside is one of the pilot areas for the family-nurse partnership programme, which supports vulnerable pregnant teenagers. Another scheme is running in NHS Lothian. We heard it argued that such a service should be universal in Scotland, as is the case in the Netherlands. Many respondents argued for universal services for all families, on the grounds that such services are non-stigmatising, ensure that people who need intensive help can be more easily plugged into support and, most important, enable every family to put in place the parenting approaches, attitudes and supports that ensure parent-child attachment and a positive home environment.

As we found, and as Mr Welsh and the cabinet secretary said, in the short-term cycles in which political debates take place it can be difficult to shift spending priorities towards the longer term, given that the benefits of doing so might not appear until years or generations later. Let us try to move those concerns aside. Labour certainly does not think that the issue should be the subject of a political spat.

Much of the literature that I have read on prevention focuses on early years intervention, which can contribute to beneficial outcomes across a range of policy areas—from health to justice to economic development. One of the best examples of such an approach comes from the Netherlands. The most recent United Nations Children’s Fund study of child wellbeing in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries ranks the Netherlands as top, with the UK at the bottom of the table. How does the Netherlands do it? It has an overall national policy, which is pushed through by the minister for children.

James Heckman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, has argued that returns from investments in early years greatly outweigh the returns from investments in any stage of education—school or tertiary—and that an optimal investment strategy is to invest less in the old and more in the young. The committee’s report points in that direction and I commend it to the Parliament.

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