Hansard

The saga of what we are now calling the Care Reform (Scotland) Bill is a microcosm of this SNP Government. It started with a vainglorious press release and the applause line for the leader’s speech—light on detail, certainly, and quickly unable to marshal any detail at all. Absent leadership and political incompetence led to financial chaos, all resulting in messy, watered-down law that will achieve none of the lofty ambitions that were declared at the outset. The Government then moves on and hopes that nobody will notice—rinse and repeat, year after year.

This legislation will not lead to a single extra carer being employed. It will do absolutely nothing to ease delayed discharge, and there is nothing in it to fix the crisis in social care in Scotland, despite the expenditure of tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and untold public resources being applied. From start to finish, the bill has been a total calamity.

A succession of ministers have been unable to answer basic questions about the legislation that they were meant to be steering. On 8 November 2022, the then minister responsible for the bill, Kevin Stewart, was aghast at COSLA’s estimate that the bill would cost more than £1.5 billion. He defiantly stated to the Finance and Public Administration Committee that

“COSLA has made assumptions that we do not recognise”.—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 8 November 2022; c 18.]

Lo and behold, on 23 January 2024, a little over a year later, Scottish Government officials told the Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee that the cost of the bill that Mr Stewart was talking about would have been £3.9 billion—a truly astronomical figure, which is more than double the figure that the minister did not recognise and equal to the entire annual transport budget. Critically, there is absolutely no way that the country could have afforded that. Of course, by that point, the legislation had rightly and mercifully been blown entirely off the SNP’s course towards bankruptcy. One of the principal reasons for that was that the Parliament’s finance committee had rejected the financial memorandum as utterly incoherent and entirely incompetent.

Just a fortnight ago, minister Maree Todd and her officials returned to the finance committee with updated financial information on the unrecognisable legislation that we are debating today—or, rather, the minister came with some of the information. The public are left cross-referencing the most recent document with the original financial memorandum from 2022 and the updated version from 2023, which are three large financial documents with different timescales. Some sections measure costs across five years, some across seven years and some across 10 years. That is comparing apples not just with oranges, but with broccoli and spuds as well. At the last moment, the committee received an update, but there was an error in the updated financial information that had been received—utterly shambolic.

Deciphering the true cost of the bill has been compared with assembling a jigsaw in the dark, which, frankly, is an unfair comparison. In this case, we are perhaps assembling five different jigsaws. The pieces are all different sizes and the people who made them are not even sure that they gave us all the pieces in the first place. From start to finish, there has been a total lack of transparency and myriad documents that are littered with errors, making it absolutely clear that neither civil servants nor—particularly—ministers had the first clue what they were doing.

That chaos, incompetence and direct negligence has come to typify every significant piece of legislation that has passed through the Parliament in this session: the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill, the Circular Economy (Scotland) Bill, the Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill and the Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill. It is no wonder that Scotland’s budget is in such a mess and the SNP’s legislative agenda for this session is in tatters.

Ultimately, the legislation that will pass this evening will result in some very modest gains that have been wrung out of the process by stakeholders—and I am glad that some of those stakeholders are with us tonight. Scottish Labour amendments have strengthened Anne’s law, which will give care home residents the right to visits, and the right to breaks for carers. However, that did not need a process this long and at such expense to the Scottish taxpayer.

The bill will not deliver the lasting and positive legacy of fit-for-the-future, high-quality care that Nicola Sturgeon promised back in 2020. With her anti-Midas touch, this landmark legislation has turned to mud. Next year, Scots can call time on the incompetence, chaos and failure of the SNP by joining the people of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse in electing a Scottish Labour Government that will set a new direction for Scotland and get our health and social care system back on its feet.