Hansard

When a major committee of this Parliament concludes that it is concerned that the Scottish Government has, so far, been unable to articulate and communicate a model of how some proposed new legislation would operate, that is hardly a ringing endorsement. It is worse still for something that is supposed to be one of the most important pieces of legislation that the Parliament has seen.

Both the minister, Maree Todd, and First Ministers Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf argued that the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill was to be a flagship piece of legislation. Indeed, in their words, it was to be

“the most ambitious reform of public services since the creation of the NHS”.

That is quite a pledge. I do not doubt the Scottish Government’s ambition, but, in the usual way with legislation, particularly given the flagship nature of this bill, we should have had the right to expect a well thought-out, wholly coherent and well costed bill. We should also have had the right to expect a fully watertight scrutiny process that would give committees and parliamentarians the maximum opportunity to engage in detailed scrutiny, but that has not been the case. It is not the case with the structure of the bill and it is not the case with the costings, which I will come to in a minute.

The first iteration of the bill faced considerable criticism from no fewer than four parliamentary committees: the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, the Public Audit Committee and the Finance and Public Administration Committee. There was no clarity whatsoever about the related costs, which is why, as Kenny Gibson rightly said, the Finance and Public Administration Committee would not accept the first financial memorandum. It was also why the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee raised concerns. Just as importantly, the bill faced widespread criticism from local authorities and health service stakeholders. In short, the bill was in deep trouble last summer, including in the view of some SNP MSPs.

Given those circumstances, Maree Todd was well told that there must be a major rethink. What did we get? We got three changes to the bill, two of them very major. There would no longer be any transfer of local authority staff and assets, and there would be no new care boards for each of the 32 local authorities. To accompany those changes, there was a second attempt at a financial memorandum, which was marginally better than the first but still did not satisfy the Finance and Public Administration Committee, as its members have made clear.

There are also issues regarding parliamentary scrutiny. The Scottish Government has made substantial changes to the accountability and governance provisions in the bill, but it has not provided detail in the legislation of what those changes will look like. The finance committee has particular concerns about the lack of detail on the new national care board. The minister tells us that the bill is only a framework bill and says that she will share the detail of governance and accountability provisions should the general principles of the bill be agreed to, but that is unusual territory and is not something that we feel makes for good legislation.

Framework bills have suddenly become quite fashionable here. If I was being charitable, I would say that that is because of the principle of co-design, which allows ministers and stakeholders to work together to design bills. I will come back to that idea. If I was being less charitable, I would say that the Scottish Government is finding it impossible, for whatever reason, to produce the detail that Parliament needs.

If, as someone who has been here for a long time, I may be allowed to say so, having too many framework bills on the statute book presents a scrutiny problem. That might be an important issue to consider when the Presiding Officer looks at parliamentary reform, because, as Jackie Baillie rightly pointed out, we cannot have bad legislation.

The finance committee remains very sceptical about the co-design process—not in principle, because there are many good things about co-design, but because of the lack of estimates to allow measuring of the economic benefits as set against projected costs. It is also sceptical about how to measure the co-design costs at all, given that that process is still on-going. We feel that the co-design process should have been completed before the revised bill was brought to Parliament.

We know that having a framework bill has been roundly criticised by stakeholders and Parliament committees because of the lack of detail about what would appear in primary legislation and what might appear in secondary legislation. That is not good enough and it is why, during the first iteration of the bill, committees put their scrutiny concerns on record, with the DPLR Committee making what I thought was a revealing comment when it said that the Scottish Government’s approach is

“unacceptable and risks setting a dangerous precedent, undermining the role of the parliament.”

I will say that again. It risks

“undermining the role of the parliament.”

I have said before that I can remember occasions when there were issues with financial memoranda. The Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 and college regionalisation are two examples, but they were not so out of kilter with the ambitions of the bill that was presented, so lacking in detail and so risky to taxpayers.

The Scottish Government, yet again, is guilty of negligence when it comes to the provision of baseline evidence to support the policy basis of a bill. One wonders how on earth ministers ended up in this situation.