Hansard

Yesterday, I met the First Minister and his officials and intimated that there now stands an agreement between our two parties on the passage of the budget. In a Parliament of minorities, it is incumbent on all of us to act responsibly and to seek common ground wherever we can.

After several rounds of productive negotiation and consultation with stakeholders, we have arrived at the position where, today, I have publicly committed the support of the Scottish Liberal Democrats for the Scottish budget in its transit through the Parliament. All in all, Scottish Liberal Democrat priorities will now be backed by hundreds of millions of pounds of Government investment. They would not have been included without our involvement. We have done good work today.

I will focus now on the extra steps that we have persuaded the Scottish Government to take, which are over and above the commitments that we secured in our first round of talks, as intimated to the Parliament, on the draft budget that was placed before the Parliament in early December.

I declare an interest at this point. Before being elected to Parliament, I worked for eight years for the children’s charity Aberlour, which is in large part a beneficiary of today’s announcements. Before politics, I worked with Aberlour as a youth worker.

A fortnight ago, I told the Parliament about the time when I was introduced to a medical device known as a Tummy Tub. They are, essentially, buckets that are filled with body-temperature water, which simulate the womb to comfort babies who are going through withdrawal because they have been born addicted to drugs. Since 2017, research by my party has shown that 1,500 babies have been born with neonatal abstinence syndrome and show signs of drug addiction through uncontrollable trembling, hyperactivity and distressed crying.

I am pleased that, today, we can announce further investment in drugs and neonatal services totalling £2.6 million, with a special focus on creating new services to help babies who spend the first days of their lives withdrawing from drugs. That will mean new residential beds for mothers and their babies, and new intensive perinatal services. Scotland has been in the grip of a drugs emergency for years. It desperately needs world-leading services, and the announcement today is one step closer to that goal.

There is £3.5 million for colleges to help them to deliver the skills that our economy and our public services need. What difference will that make? It is about creating a pipeline of a skilled workforce for offshore wind. It can kick-start regional training hubs throughout the college sector. There will be a special focus on Aberdeenshire, Ayrshire, Forth Valley and the Highlands and Islands—the communities where our renewables revolution is set to begin. We know the importance of seizing the big opportunities in renewable power in paving the way for economic growth, and we know about the need to take special care of the communities and regions that must be at the heart of the just transition.

The new investment in colleges that we have secured will create a new care skills partnership to increase the number of new entrants to the care sector and to widen access to caring careers. That is absolutely vital if we are to answer the challenge of delayed discharge in our hospitals, which causes an interruption in flow throughout the whole health service.

We know about the challenges that the care sector faces. The Accounts Commission has shown that unmet need is rising, vacancies are at a record high and a quarter of staff leave their jobs within the first three months. Recently, record numbers of people have been stuck in hospital because there are just not the required community care packages or care places to receive them—they are well enough to go home, but too frail to do so without wraparound support. The requirement to do much more to fix our care sector could not be clearer.

Members will have seen the widespread coverage last week of Corseford College and the worry among all those who use it. We have heard the families talk about everything that the college does and about how, without opportunities such as it offers, students would be left at home feeling isolated. They would miss out on vital opportunities for learning and social interaction, because mainstream colleges are not in a position to deliver what the young people there need and to meet their quite significant learning needs.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats were not willing to stand by and see young people with complex disabilities lose access to learning, so, in our talks with the Scottish Government, we have secured support of £700,000 for those young people, with the prospect of at least the same amount being provided next year. A review is already under way to explore how the funding will best be spent and, whatever happens, my party is determined that nobody should be left behind.

Our agreement also means that there is another £1 million for hospices.

There is an agreement to focus ScotWind revenues on growing the economy, creating jobs, tackling climate change and driving forward reform.

On the pipeline of capital projects, we have persuaded the Scottish Government to look much more closely at replacing the Gilbert Bain hospital in Lerwick, Kilmaron special school in Cupar and the Newburgh railway station in Fife.

The significant uplift in ferries funding will enable Orkney Islands Council to finalise work on the business case that it requires ahead of new vessels being procured. Meanwhile, the ferries task force will continue to work at pace to prepare the procurement process.

The details that I have set out today are on top of what we secured before the budget was published in December. I do not have time to go through all that now, but I am sure that Willie Rennie will talk about it in his closing speech.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats have been vociferous critics of the SNP for many years, but sometimes we have to sit down and talk if we want to get things done. The budget that the Parliament will pass in the coming weeks is not a referendum on the performance of a Government, but a means of achieving change and fixing problems in our society. We are doing our job by working to improve the budget. There is a long list of policies and projects that we have won for our constituents and for Scotland as a whole, so we will support the budget in its transit through the Parliament.

I move, as an amendment to motion S6M-16237, to insert at end:

“; notes that Scottish Liberal Democrat priorities have been reflected in the first draft of the Budget through the inclusion of the reinstatement of a winter heating payment for pensioners, extra funding for social care, additional funding for local healthcare to make it easier to see a GP or NHS dentist, funding for new specialist support across the country for people with long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome and other similar conditions, the right for family carers to earn more without having support withdrawn, business rates relief for the hospitality sector, funding to build more affordable homes, enhanced support for local authorities operating ferry services, and the resumption of the work required to replace the Belford Hospital in NHS Highland and the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion in NHS Lothian; calls for further investment in drug and neonatal services, hospices, support for the young people with complex and additional needs attending Corseford College, and colleges, so that they can deliver the skills that the economy and public services need, and further calls for local authorities to receive a fair share of the money for additional employer national insurance contributions when it is received by the Scottish Government.”