Hansard

“Doing Politics Differently” is the headline of the report, and I think that we must all ask ourselves whether we are serious about doing politics differently. If we are, how we conduct ourselves not just in this afternoon’s debate, which I hope will be a very positive and pleasant debate, but in other debates and our wider public discourse must be fundamental to doing politics differently, as the report suggests.

As the cabinet secretary and Mr Lockhart have done, I thank all those people who have been involved in pulling together the citizens assembly, including the members of the assembly, its chair, the civil service team behind it and everyone else who, logistically, helped it to get to where it needed to get to. I thank them for all their amazing service. What the report shows us is that, when we give people the chance, they put forward ambitious, radical proposals to create a fairer and more equal Scotland. They also look at what we can unite behind, rather than what we can divide on. I think that many of the policies that have come from the work of the assembly mirror what I know are ambitions of my political party, and I know that many of them are ambitions of other political parties, too.

Producing the report was a huge commitment on the part of the people involved, and I offer a genuine thank you to them for what they have achieved. The test now will be whether our politics, our Parliament and our Government can rise to the challenge that the citizens assembly has set us with regard to our civic engagement and our political involvement.

The report makes bold proposals, and it is safe to say that some of those proposals are not matched by the outcomes that our Parliament and our Government have achieved. I want us all to commit, as the cabinet secretary has done, to pursuing the assembly’s recommendations. However, we should pursue not just their wording but the delivery of the principles and ideas that they embody. That is why, as our amendment suggests, a key part of the process should be a mechanism for regular reporting to Parliament on how the Government is actioning the recommendations and what progress is being made on them so that the report does not get put on a shelf and forgotten about but continues to be a relevant piece of work.

There have been lots of talking shops and working groups. In Scotland—especially in our Parliament—we love talking shops and working groups, but the citizens assembly cannot be one of them. If we are to be true to all those who made the commitment to get involved in it, the process must be about outcomes. We are talking about how we can build a better country, overcome the challenges that Scotland will face in the 21st century, particularly after Brexit, and make informed choices about the kind of future that we want to have, so let us rise to that challenge. The assembly operated on the principles of independence, transparency, inclusion, access, balance, cumulative learning and open-mindedness, which are all principles that we as parliamentarians can take to heart.

I turn to the assembly’s vision and its ideas. It wants to stop green jobs moving abroad. It also has ideas about affordable housing and how we should invest in our housing market; how we can address the chronic long-term underfunding in the NHS; how we can confront the pandemic and life after the pandemic; and how we can create fair work and build a fairer economy in our country. Those are all ideas that I think we should engage with.

There are also some fundamental principles in the assembly’s report to do with how we conduct our politics that I think we need to confront. We need to ask how we can have a politics of integrity, honesty, humility and transparency, and how we can be innovative in how we make our decisions. We must be true to that. We cannot just say that we agree with it; we must live and breathe it. We must ensure that public authorities have a duty to share valid, accurate, reliable and verifiable information that is accessible to all. It sometimes feels as though we are going backwards in that respect. We must go forwards on that.

As a Parliament and a Government, we should communicate with people in a respectful, honest and open way that is based on fact. On accountability, again, it sometimes feels as though we are going backwards. We must move forwards.

The assembly believes that we must be leaders in innovation, and that there should be an obligation to invest in people to create jobs, confidence, development and growth. That must be a fundamental principle that we think about when we come through Covid. We also need to think about how we properly resource our health and social care services and put communities’ health and wellbeing at the heart of the process. That is another fundamental value that has emerged from the work of the assembly, which we must get behind.

The report talks about how we improve living standards and opportunities for all by investing in training, support and our employment market. That is crucial. It talks about putting the need to challenge poverty at the heart of our politics. We need to identify the barriers that prevent people from accessing decent employment, education and housing. That is also a key issue.

The report talks about how we use our tax base properly and about how we make our tax base and our spend on it more transparent. The report includes big ideas about how we minimise tax avoidance and incentivise companies to adopt green values, and about how we tax the big economic winners from Covid appropriately in order to help our economy.

The report talks about education and growth opportunities, and it says that we should look at physical health as well as mental health, which is a crucial part of our NHS restart programme. Again, the report includes great ideas about that.

I was particularly struck by the comments in the vision statement and the recommendations about our apprenticeship schemes and vocational skills. There is a huge gap between our ambitions for our apprenticeship schemes and how we encourage people from more diverse backgrounds to take up those schemes and then pay them properly, so that we incentivise people to make a better future for themselves.

There is a lot of discussion in the report about what our devolution settlement should look like. There is a grown-up, mature and unifying conversation to be had about how we put the report at the heart of our politics. We should put the ethics and principles behind the report at the heart of our politics and change how we behave with one another. We should put ideas at the heart of our politics and think about how we build a recovery from Covid that works for everyone.

I say a sincere thank you to all those who were involved in the citizens assembly for the amazing work that they have done. I thank them for sharing their ideas, and I hope that they hold our feet to the fire—those of the Government and those of all politicians from all political parties, including my own—so that we can deliver on those principles and create a better politics and a fundamentally better country.

I move amendment S5M-24165.3, to insert at end:

“; welcomes the bold and ambitious recommendations put forward to tackle inequality in Scotland, including capping private sector rents, making energy efficiency measures more affordable and investing in green infrastructure, and calls on the Scottish Government to give an annual statement to the Parliament on what action has been taken in response to the work of the Assembly.”