Hansard

I will never ignore the pen, Presiding Officer.

I thank Monica Lennon and the Labour Party for lodging this important motion. Monica Lennon and I attended a demonstration outside the Parliament last week, which involved the care home relatives Scotland let us visit campaign. It was one of the most compelling demonstrations that I have attended outside the Parliament building. We heard real human stories about anxiety and loss.

Since those weeks of high infection rates, in early March and April, when we had to pass emergency Covid-19 legislation, I have been deeply concerned about the psychological impact on constituents. Whoever you are, these are days of high anxiety. At a time when all of us most need a hug, we are denied it.

Nowhere are the privations of human contact that have been caused by lockdown more keenly felt than in those care settings that are at both ends of life’s journey: our neonatal wards and care homes. Among all the angst, people have been told that they cannot do the most natural thing—hold the hand of a premature baby or an elderly parent. They have been denied that for over 200 days. That is a dark situation.

It does not have to be like that. I believe that we can harness what we know about the virus to better inform our public health policy so that we can allow care home residents to receive family care as well as keep everyone safe. The motion mentions Canada, and we have heard a lot about it. In Ontario, family carers are treated in a similar way to agency care staff. They undertake the same hygiene measures and are allowed to safely continue to provide the care that they provided before the outbreak, which is a vital part of the care package. I want to see that happen in Scotland.

We know that family members will stick to the rules because they do not want to jeopardise the safety of their loved ones. We also know that allowing family carers to come in can improve outcomes in homes. They are informal carers and will pick up on corners that are being cut or changes in their family members that might have otherwise been missed.

I am sure that we can all agree that it is distressing to have a sudden change in your care package, but that distress is especially acute for those who are in the early stages of dementia. I find unsettling the sight of everybody around me in masks; I cannot imagine what that must be like for people who are struggling with dementia.

Often, friends and relatives have been caring for a resident for many years, so they can pick up on early signs of deterioration. The people whom we met last week are witnessing those during the Zoom calls and the conversations through windows that they are having to make do with.

Even if care is top rated in the home and it is run very well, anxiety and separation can only exacerbate conditions and reduce life outcomes. A few months ago, we all enjoyed seeing photographs on social media of drive-by hellos at care homes, where residents sat outside in gardens and waved. It was lovely, and it meant so much to so many of them, but it is not summer any more. Autumn will soon turn to winter, and—after all, we live in Scotland—those outdoor meet-ups will just not be practical. Behind those images, as we heard at the demonstration, was also the reality of residents with dementia clawing at the screens between them and their loved ones, trying to touch or even hear their families, because it was so difficult.

We can do a lot of this through testing, and it is very important that we expand our testing operations. While we are seeing local spikes, we can box clever with adequate testing. Applying the same rules to family carers as we apply to bank and agency staff will ensure that we can allow family carers in. Willie Rennie has repeatedly called for a test for everyone who can make care homes a safer and controlled environment. We have staff tests up and running; why can we not expand that to family members?

I will come on to the Government’s amendment briefly, before I close.

One positive outcome is that people who are fortunate enough never to have been in a hospital, to have been carers or to have needed care are, for the first time, properly valuing what the social care sector means for this country. I echo Alison Johnstone’s thanks to our social care workers. They deserve the claps that we all came out and delivered to them on Thursday afternoons as much as anybody else in our health and social care system. We are relieved to know that they are there when we need them. As a country, we have been taking them for granted for far too long. I welcome a review of pay structures. Careers in social care are not only vital but in high demand, and that is only going to become more true. The number of carers needs to rise exponentially with our ageing population, so we need to make social care a profession of choice.

I will close by covering the national care service. Liberal Democrats absolutely support the national review on the formation of a care service. The sector fundamentally needs reform; however, we have grave concerns about controlling that entirely from the centre. Accountability for the delivery of social care should always have a link to the communities in which it is rooted and be responsive to regional variation.

However, that is not what today’s debate is about. Therefore, although we have some difficulty with the wording of the Government’s amendment, we want to embrace the spirit of consensus that is being forged across the majority of the Parliament today. We want to recognise that the motion and the amendments around it speak to the very needs of the families that Monica Lennon and I met on a cold day outside the Parliament last week. It is their love that keeps them going, and they want to keep their relatives going by extending that love and extending the care. They will do that not by visiting—they are not just there to hold a hand—but by being there to provide care and to be those informal inspectors who can pick up on problems. Above all those things, first and foremost, they want to provide the human contact that has been denied to so many of our most vulnerable constituents and residents of this country since the start of the pandemic.