Meeting of the Parliament 18 January 2017
It is a pleasure to contribute again to a health debate. I want to make four specific and quite focused observations in relation to the preventative health agenda.
The first is in relation to the baby box. When, during the last Scottish election, I was asked whether I could name a policy from another party that I wished we had come up with first, I said, “The baby box.” I think that it is a commendable idea, but imagine my disappointment on finding that the baby boxes are branded “A Gift from the Scottish Government”. The logical extension of that is that patients will wake up in hospital with a tattoo across their abdomen saying “Your operation is a gift from the Scottish Government”, and children at school will wear uniforms that say, “Your education is a gift from the Scottish Government.” The baby box is not “A Gift from the Scottish Government”: it is an entitlement that we have now offered to every new family in Scotland, funded by the taxpayer. If anything, it is a gift from the Scottish taxpayer and the Scottish people, so there should be no nascent SNP propaganda saying that it is “A Gift from the Scottish Government”.
My second point in relation to the baby box is that the reception for it has been pretty welcoming, but there have been comments on its contents. I hope that the Scottish Government will consult, on an on-going basis, other parties and the Health and Sport Committee as we evolve the contents of the box. However, it is a good idea and an early start, and I applaud it as part of the preventative agenda.
My second point relates to free school meals. I was surprised to be contacted by constituents in my area who discovered that under the council’s cashless card system in schools, pupils who did not take advantage of the free school meal nonetheless had the amount credited to their cashless account, and some were then using the sum that was for the free school meal to buy sweets and fizzy drinks elsewhere on the school campus. Now that that has been drawn to the local authority’s attention, it has acted to stop the practice.
However, I wrote to the Scottish Government asking whether the practice was more widespread and the response that I got was, “We don’t know—we don’t keep that sort of information.” I expected something a little more proactive than that, which might have been to add, “but we’re going to find out.” As a result, I have been sending freedom of information requests to other local authorities and am quite encouraged by the responses. Many authorities do not have cashless systems, and some are quite crafty and immediately withdraw the credit after the lunch period so that it cannot be used for anything else. However, it would be helpful if the Scottish Government were to be absolutely clear that the sum that is being credited to pupils for a free hot school meal is being used for that purpose and not for another, as was the practice in my local authority.
My third point has been referred to already. I suppose that it touches on the point that Neil Findlay made. I do not resile from the fact that income equality is at the heart of health equality, which is why we believe in a strong economy and in ensuring that people are in employment and able to secure dignity and the income that provides for that.
We have noted before that many of the things that affect the development of a child are apparent at age three. We have talked previously about the New Zealand study that has, since 1972, been testing the brains of 1,000 people at ages three, five, seven, nine, 11 and so forth. The latest survey, which was conducted in December 2016, confirmed that many trends can be identified at age three. Out of the entire population, people who scored low on language, behavioural, movement or cognitive skills at age three were responsible for 54 per cent of smoked cigarettes and 44 per cent of excess obese kilograms, were in receipt of 78 per cent of prescriptions, and accounted for 55 per cent of hospital stays and 66 per cent of benefit payments.
That is why Scottish Conservatives in our manifesto last year committed—we remain committed to it—to a universal general-practitioner-attached national health visiting service that offers genuine support to young families and children from ages nought to seven. I know that a few extra health visitors have been promised, and I am interested to know exactly how many of them are now in place having been recruited—