Hansard

I rise to support the motion in the name of Jackie Baillie.

Presiding Officer, there is an element of ministerial cosplay at work here. If you listen to the minister and her predecessor, Kevin Bevan—that is, Kevin Stewart, who evoked the name of Nye Bevan—you would be forgiven for thinking that they imagine themselves in the rubble and poverty of 1940s Britain, in which the NHS, our much loved national institution, was first forged.

However, we are not in 1946. Apart from the nomenclature, that is where the similarities end with the reality of the national care service. The bill will not give care free at the point of delivery. It is, in fact, a ministerial power grab. What lies before the Parliament to debate on Thursday, if the motion to defer it is not successful, is merely a framework, but it is one that will cost in the order of £2 billion. For what? It will be for a vast and unnecessary ministerial bureaucracy that strips power from our communities and gives it to the centre.

Let me be clear from the outset that my preference would be not just to defer the bill but to scrap it entirely. The Liberal Democrats are clear that it represents little more than a mammoth bureaucratic exercise that would waste time and money that would be far better spent elsewhere.

However, I support the bill being referred back to the committee today, because the call for stakeholder evidence went out and responses came back more than a year ago. That evidence was geared towards the first iteration of the proposed legislation, but what is being put before the Parliament this week is a different version of the bill altogether. Indeed, there was a lot of instances of “This is no longer happening” in the convener’s remarks. That should surely give us cause to think and say that the parliamentary process has been derailed and must be started again, if it must continue at all.

The landscape around the legislation has fundamentally changed, and so, too, have the proposals in the bill. During its consideration of the bill, the committee did not have the full detail of what has been proposed—we just heard in the convener’s remarks what the so-called national care service would look like, and stakeholders have not seen that detail, either. The committee’s report says:

“One of the challenges the Committee has faced with this Bill has been the lack of available detail at the start of our scrutiny.”

That is a fundamental problem with any piece of legislation going through a democratically elected Parliament. Members of the Finance and Public Administration Committee, who said publicly last year that the numbers did not stack up, still say today that they harbour grave concerns. That is just not the way that we should be doing business in the Scottish Parliament. It is absurd that we should begin the legislative process in this context.

The minister was clear that people are telling her that we need change. They are right—we need change in our social care system, but not the kind of change that she has in mind. When people talk about reform and change of the care sector, they want to be sure that, when their gran needs help, she will get it, it will be cheaper than it has been and it will be given by reliable staff and that we can all access it in every part of the country. People are not imagining a ministerial power grab that will asset-strip our communities and put power in the hands of ministers—rather than social care partnerships—to direct their care entirely. That is a bureaucracy, and it will cost a lot of money.

The reason why Liberals oppose the plan in its entirety is that we fundamentally believe that power always works best when it is closest to the people that it serves. Nothing about the bill will deliver that, and nothing about it resembles in any way the national health service, of which we should all be rightly proud.