Meeting of the Parliament 23 November 2023
That is one of the reasons why I am conflicted about the bill. I understand: legislation is permanent—it is there on the statute book and it creates a compulsion for Government to act, whereas strategies, motions and debates are fleeting, and although an issue might be at the top of the agenda today, tomorrow it might be forgotten.
I worry that by not agreeing to the bill, we might just be giving the Government a pass to move on. I know that the Government has a lot of other competing issues to deal with, and it does not dispense its responsibility lightly, so I worry about that.
Fundamentally, however, the bill is flawed. We understand that the landscape is conflicted and confusing, and that there is a lot of overlapping legislation. However, the evidence that the committee heard, as Liam Kerr set out, was pretty clear: witnesses thought that the bill would make the situation worse. There is no point in pussyfooting around that—it would make things worse. The last thing that we need is to make the situation worse, and set people and organisations back on the plans that they already have in place.
Pam Duncan-Glancy and Martin Whitfield are right that the issues of diagnosis, scope and costings can probably all be sorted out. However, the fundamental problem is that all the legislation is already in conflict, and the bill would make it worse. That is why I cannot, in all honesty, support the bill, but I suppose that it is a warning from the Parliament to the Government that, if we are back here again in five years’ time, we will be pushing for legislation.
The minister referred quite clearly, in her letter to the committee, to
“duplication and overlap of key aspects of existing legislation”.
Why is the Government not sorting that? It should have put forward its own bill to sort out the overlap and the duplication, if it is already worried about that. I know that addressing that would be complex, because it would involve looking at all the other pieces of legislation. Nonetheless, the Government should be looking into the existing landscape to try to bring some clarity to that, so that we can move forward with a bit more purpose.
We should return to the matter if the Government does not produce the strategy or if it is not effective, or if I visit the Diamond Association again and find that the parents there are just as ferocious as they were back in 2006.
I will give one final example. I visited the Usual Place in Dumfries, which many members will have heard of. It does fantastic work in training people with disabilities and getting them on the employment ladder, and passing them on to other employers who can see the fantastic individuals who have been moulded by that organisation. It is a great cafe and visitor centre—it is a tremendous place. However, it almost closed this year. We should not be facing a circumstance in which organisations such as the Usual Place, which are getting it right, are closing due to a lack of funding.
Why do we not have a funding stream—almost like that for the apprenticeships scheme—that guarantees funding for organisations that do such work? They have to beg and borrow; they have to go from one block grant to another; and they have to go from one charity to another to get the funding to keep going. The Usual Place should be guaranteed a future with guaranteed funding, so that it can guarantee young people a decent transition. That is what this is all about—it is about priorities for people.
We should be giving greater priority to a group of people who—to be blunt—have been let down. We can look at the figures. Enable provided the figure that, of 175,000 people with a learning disability in Scotland, only 7 per cent have paid employment. That is a shameful position for Scotland to be in.
I will not support the bill, but let us resolve to come back and hold the Government’s feet to the fire so that we are not back here in five years’ time contemplating whether we should have such a bill.