Hansard

I am pleased to close today’s debate on the Promise on behalf of the Scottish Labour Party. We have heard from colleagues today, including the minister, Rona Mackay, Foysol Choudhury and, as Martin Whitfield has reminded us, from care-experienced young people, why this debate and, indeed, the Promise and its delivery are so important.

In that spirit, and with that delivery in mind, Scottish Labour will support cross-party collaboration to ensure effective implementation of the Promise. We welcome the Government’s commitment to introduce a Promise bill in this Parliament, and we look forward to working with it to ensure that the bill is the best that it can be. The fact is that the thousands of children and young people to whom it is crucial need action—and they need action at a pace and scale that, unfortunately, the Government has not yet delivered, as colleagues including Roz McCall, in her motion, and Oliver Mundell, Nicola Sturgeon and Gillian Mackay, in their speeches, have all highlighted.

Scotland is almost halfway through the 10-year plan to implement the Promise, but I am sad to say that the first phase of implementation is not quite on track. It is not just me saying that. We on the Education, Children and Young People Committee heard the same when we met young people with experience of care, who, as Willie Rennie has told us, are angry.

For example, when we asked them whether the Promise would be kept, one told us that

“I strongly feel that the Promise won’t get kept”,

whereas another said:

“After 2030 it will keep getting pushed back and pushed back until they say it’s unachievable.”

Most sadly of all, one young person said:

“They promised too much; they should have promised half of it and then they would actually achieve it and would be able to add more in 2030.”

I do not share that information to bring down the mood; I share it, because it reminds us of the importance of the Promise that we have all made. We do acknowledge some progress—all of us have; Labour does, too—but concerns about progress are impacting not just on young people every day. They now seem to be impacting on their belief in change and their aspirations, and that is something on which we must act.

For them—and, therefore, for us—there is an urgent need to deliver actions and, along with them, we ask the Government to ensure that keeping the Promise remains a non-negotiable priority, without delay or compromise, and that a relentless focus on action is its next step. Simply repeating the same words does not make something happen, and it does not keep promises. As Who Cares? Scotland has said, although it is encouraging to see various pieces of legislation being proposed that will benefit care-experienced people,

“it feels like Scotland is stuck in implementation purgatory. Decision makers need to ensure that they don’t continue to create legislation that isn’t fully implemented.”

Who Cares? Scotland is right. On a lot of things, we are, I am afraid to say, in implementation purgatory, and we must move on from that, particularly for care-experienced young people. Indeed, years on from the publication of the independent care review, almost halfway through what is supposed to be the transformative period, there are many frustrations at the pace of progress. Who Cares? Scotland, the Promise oversight board and Barnardo’s Scotland have all said that they welcome the progress but that more needs to change.

We need investment, not diversion of resource to plug gaps elsewhere. On housing and homelessness, as my colleague Katy Clark has pointed out, there must be high-quality accommodation and support before, during and after transitions to adulthood, yet one young person told the committee that

“When you leave care, there’s no support after. I was made homeless for 3 weeks.”

As for whole-family support, the young people who spoke to the committee told us that, despite some progress being made, too often they are still separated from their siblings. We have heard about such cases today. Indeed, in some cases, that separation was for more than four years.

On education, the attainment gap across Scotland is stark. However, for young care-experienced people, less than half of young people with experience of care have even one national 5 when they leave school. They are several times less likely to be able to access higher education, and they have much poorer rates of entering positive destinations after school—and that is if the Government knows where they are. We have just heard the points about data.

Such outcomes for care-experienced young people are not inevitable. The outcomes are this way, because of a failure to make the systemic change that is needed—a failure that puts a ceiling on opportunity. We have to change that—and through deeds, not through words. We cannot tolerate cuts to local authority budgets and programmes such as MCR Pathways that literally turn lives around for young people with care experience. We cannot have a system that means that young people miss out on school to attend social work meetings, which has an impact on their education, and we cannot have a system that means that care-experienced young people are at greater risk of chronic illnesses, as Gillian Mackay just pointed out. Those outcomes are unacceptable—and they are not inevitable.

We must, as young people with care experience tell us, listen to them and their families. We must change how we collect data. We must change how we speak about care experience. We must ensure that there is a laser focus on action to recruit and support the workforce—a workforce that I would like to thank today. Crucially, we have to take action to address the systemic barriers that those young people face.

The era of repeating words has to be over; now must be the era of action and of spreading opportunity for all. I believe that all of us across the Parliament will collectively reassert our commitment to the Promise, as we should and as we must. It is now for the Government to get on with the job, because—and the final word will go to a young person from Who Cares? Scotland—

“People need to see it happening to believe it”.