Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2014
Many in the media have been saying that politics in Scotland is changing; after listening to the opening speeches, I think that that much is clear. We have had the Labour Party advising Scottish National Party candidates on their leadership bids and the Labour Party praising the Tory Boris Johnson. We also have the Conservative Party agreeing with the Labour Party’s motion and the SNP amendment. In fact, I had to read the motion and the amendment a few times; when I found myself agreeing with most of what they said, I went along the corridor to my friend Alex Johnstone. I had assumed that I would get a huge amount of disagreement, but even he agreed with most of the motion and the amendment. I hope, therefore, that in my five minutes I will be a bit more consensual than the previous two speakers.
I thank the Labour Party very much for bringing to the chamber this debate on the living wage, and we commend the contribution that the Scottish living wage campaign has made to the lives of thousands of individuals and families in Scotland. We, too, welcome the rise in the living wage to £7.85 per hour from April next year.
However, I want to return to a point that I have been raising since about May 1999 about the Government’s subcontracting to the care home and childcare sectors. After all, whenever we in this Parliament talk about low wages, we tend to talk about care workers and childcare workers. For too long now, people have been highlighting the low pay in these sectors, and I think that, alongside that, there is a lack of valuing the people who work in them.
At a meeting that I attended prior to the referendum, I heard that private nursery providers can be paid as low as £2.71 per hour per child to provide childcare. The person who made that point came from Aberdeen and was highlighting the difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, not just because of oil jobs but because they themselves were limited in the amount that they could pay. I thought that that was untrue, so I asked the Scottish Parliament information centre for a briefing.
According to SPICe, the National Day Nurseries Association Scotland has stated that
“nurseries are making a big loss on local authority funded childcare places, losing on average £1,032 per child, per year on funded places for three and four-year-olds”
and
“there is currently not a level playing field on per child cost allocations between public and private provision.”
In her speech, the cabinet secretary said that where the SNP has power to act it will act. I simply highlight that because the National Day Nurseries Association Scotland went on to say:
“Inadequate funding for nursery partner providers for three and four year old places is getting worse and varies widely across the 32 local authorities - the lowest rate recorded being £2.71 per hour per child. The knock on effect is a rise in the cost of parent paid for hours as nurseries are forced to make up the losses they incur”.
I understand that the costings for the current expansion of pre-school provision to 600 hours include an assumption, based on a particular recommendation, that partner providers will be paid £4.09 per child per hour.
As well as that sector, I want to highlight the situation in the care home sector. I saw Richard Simpson nodding when I mentioned the issue earlier—I know that he, too, has raised it in the past. The independent and voluntary care home sector is limited in the amount that it can pay care workers because of the funding that it gets from Government. When, some months ago, I made a freedom of information request, I found that many councils still fund council care home places at a significantly higher rate than they pay the independent and voluntary sector. Some in the independent sector received about £480 per person per week, while the figure for a council care home place was over £800.
My point is that we can all agree that it is right to pay employees the living wage.