Hansard

I will speak to my amendment and offer support to both the Labour and Green Party amendments.

I welcome Shona Robison to her post. Shona is an excellent politician and it is great to see her back in the Cabinet, in front-line politics. I worked very well with her when she was health secretary and I hope to do so with her again in her current brief, which is a very important one.

About three years ago, a story emerged about a little boy in Glasgow whose teacher had noticed him taking tomato sauce sachets from the canteen. He was taking the sachets home, squeezing the ketchup out of them and adding boiling water to make soup. He was doing that because there was literally nothing else for him to eat in the house. Thankfully, that was spotted and there was an intervention and a referral to a food bank, where parcels would include tins with ring-pulls on them so that the little boy could open them himself. He was starving in 21st century Scotland.

There are countless reasons why families find themselves in such situations, such as delays built into universal credit, insecure work and no recourse to public funds. We could debate any one of those catalysts for poverty for hours and I hope that, over time, we will give each of them that attention. However, that particular boy was facing such hardship as a direct result of his parents’ mental ill health. The Liberal Democrats and I have been talking about the links between mental ill health and poverty for many years. That is one of the reasons why transformational investment in mental health is so important to us.

The case that I have just described is symptomatic of one of the biggest, yet often overlooked, contributors to poverty in our country, which is Scotland’s mental health crisis. That is one of the reasons why, in February, the Liberal Democrats succeeded in asking the Scottish Parliament to declare a national mental health emergency. Everyone deserves the opportunity to work hard and to build a good life for themselves, their family and their community. Mental ill health is one of the biggest barriers to that—it disrupts people’s education, training, and entry into and progression within work. It does that to their families and those caring for them, too.

Although mental ill health does not discriminate as such, in that it is classless, it undoubtedly walks hand in hand with poverty. Suicide rates in Scotland increase with increasing deprivation. The rates in the most deprived areas are double those of the Scottish average. It is one of the most devastating health inequalities in the country and it is directly and inexorably linked to poverty.

My amendment also covers education as a route out of poverty. Over the past year, much of the discussion surrounding education has been focused on university students and exam-level school pupils—rightly so, because they have been severely let down by the Government. That matters because education provides a ladder to social mobility. Education could be a leveller and should offer opportunity, but far too often a broken society means that it serves only to widen the gap between our richest and poorest young people. At the age of five, children in families in the highest 20 per cent of earners are around 13 months ahead in their vocabulary compared with children in families in the bottom 20 per cent of earners. We know that that situation has worsened in the pandemic.

The only route to stable mental health and life-changing education is through appropriate and decent housing—it is the rock on which everything else is built. If someone’s home is making them sick, keeping them up at night or collapsing around them, none of the routes out of poverty will be available to them.

My amendment acknowledges that three of the five evils that Beveridge first identified more than 70 years ago still hold sway in our society. Want of education, want of decent housing and want of sound health—particularly mental health—are destroying lives and perpetuating poverty. Getting those issues right could be the antidote that we all seek, but only if the Government takes action and uses the powers that it already has. As such, the Scottish Government cannot blame the full extent of the poverty that exists in this country on a Government that operates from another city. It cannot do that when it has been empowered for years to address poverty but still elects not to.

I move amendment S6M-00263.2, to leave out from “urges the UK Government” to end and insert:

“notes the risk that Scotland’s 2024 interim child poverty reduction target, unanimously agreed by the Parliament, could be missed and agrees therefore that families cannot afford for any delay on the part of either the Scottish or UK governments for additional action, backed by stronger fair work principles and a social security system that operates on a human rights basis; believes that poor mental health, the poverty-related attainment gap, and insecure and substandard housing are among the factors that prevent people from achieving their potential and getting on in life, and calls for urgent interventions to therefore include an immediate end to the scandal of thousands of children and adults waiting over a year for mental health treatment as the first step towards meeting the 18-week targets for the first time ever, the extension of funded early learning and childcare, Pupil Equity Funding and in-class support for children and young people, and the building of at least 40,000 new homes for social rent during the current parliamentary session as part of a plan to end homelessness and raise the standard of housing in Scotland.”