Hansard

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

17 Jan 2013

Day Centre Reform (Glasgow)

Will Mr Doris explain why SNP councillors in Glasgow originally wanted to cut £220,000 from the social care budget in the budget proposals last year? That would have meant £220,000 less in that budget than Labour proposed. After the SNP conferred with the other groups on the c...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

24 Feb 2016

Budget (Scotland) (No 5) Bill: Stage 3

I think that other members have already made the point that this budget debate is probably the most important one that this Parliament has had since it was established some 17 years ago. During the devolution referendum, the people of Scotland endorsed two principles: first, ...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

10 Nov 2011

Scottish Executive Question Time · Welfare Reform

I associate myself with the concerns that Bob Doris expressed. In his answer to Bob Doris and when he gave evidence to the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, the cabinet secretary talked about the risks to the Scottish economy of the welfare changes, but I am concerned tha...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

23 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

My question is on that area—I do not know whether others’ questions are.The panel will have heard part of our previous discussion of the health budget. I hope that they also heard me say that investment in sport is something that we should do for its own sake. However, there i...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

The Scottish health budget is falling in real terms. Probably naturally, although perhaps not appropriately, people look at the special boards differently from the territorial boards. You mentioned that a budget cut is applied to your organisations and it is your job to find t...

Drew Smith Lab Chamber

03 Feb 2016

Budget (Scotland) (No 5) Bill: Stage 1

Given that Ms McAlpine quoted what Unison rightly had to say about the living wage for social care workers, does she agree with what Unison has said about the scale of public sector cuts and job losses that will come as a result of the budget? Why is there no task force for th...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

02 Oct 2012

Community Sport Inquiry

Clearly, the Scottish Government’s commitments to the Commonwealth Games Federation have implications for the resources that are available to you and how those should be spent. Obviously, the Commonwealth games are a huge priority. Can you say a little about the approach that ...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

17 Jan 2013

Day Centre Reform (Glasgow)

Obviously, I am aware of the concerns about the proposals to restructure Glasgow’s learning disability day services. Bob Doris is right to say that service users, their families and those who work in the service will be most affected, and perhaps it is they who are most concer...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

I realise that you might want to run down the service but if, in planning to build a new hospital, you know that you will still have to run your existing hospital, why would you be surprised by double running costs?NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is making significant investment...

Drew Smith Lab Chamber

19 Dec 2013

General Question Time · "Scotland’s Future: Your Guide to an Independent Scotland" (Promotion Costs)

That is about the cost of a trip to the golf. We understand that the Scottish Government took £800,000 from the Scottish Water budget to assist with the costs of promoting the white paper and spent about £12,500 on the launch event at the Glasgow science centre. We know that ...

Drew Smith Lab Chamber

24 Feb 2016

Budget (Scotland) (No 5) Bill: Stage 3

The Deputy First Minister was asked a question during the debate. We know that tens of thousands of workers have already left local government, and COSLA has estimated that 15,000 would leave as a result of this budget. Does he have an estimate, and will he share it with Parli...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

02 Jun 2011

Sport

Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am honoured to make my maiden speech in this our Scottish Parliament, as a member for Glasgow region.As with others on these benches, my feelings on being elected to this place were tempered by sadness at the loss of some good representatives fr...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Committee

21 Dec 2011

Section 23 Report

I will return to targets, but before I do so, I will go back to your initial discussion with the convener on the overall budgets. Clearly, there are some political issues, in that the Government’s commitment to maintain the budget has been met by putting money into the territo...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

14 Dec 2011

Section 22 Reports

The convener has powerfully highlighted the concerns that the committee would have about the management of some of these projects, particularly in relation to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Part of the reason for the cancellation of that project was a reductio...

Drew Smith Lab Chamber

05 Oct 2011

Welfare Reform

That is the choice of the Scottish Government. I am happy to have taken Mary Scanlon’s intervention, as she has been so keen to get in for so long.I see that Liam McArthur is back. It is interesting that there has been only one Lib Dem in the chamber for the entire debate. I d...

Drew Smith Lab Chamber

05 Oct 2011

Welfare Reform

Sorry, I want to make a bit of progress.It is only as a result of Labour’s amendment that we have an opportunity to state a view on legislative consent. The final decision on an LCM will follow committee examination, but the Government must return to the chamber with more info...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

08 Feb 2012

Budget (Scotland) Bill: Stage 3

Will the member take an intervention?

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

21 Mar 2012

Housing Benefit Reform

It is not possible to wholly separate the housing benefit issues from the wider programme of welfare reform. As a member of the Welfare Reform Committee, I have taken a close interest in the cumulative effect of the changes. Taken together, the package represents a serious att...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Committee

02 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

I apologise to Nanette Milne. My question is brief.Professor McLaren made a specific plea on research funding around the Glasgow effect, which I would certainly support. However, do we need a much greater understanding of what preventative spend is before we analyse a lot of t...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

02 Oct 2012

Community Sport Inquiry

I do not want to respond to Professor Mutrie as much as to pose a question on where that takes us. In consciously focusing its inquiry on community sport rather than on physical activity, the committee’s intention was to do a service to community sport in its own right and rec...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

18 Sep 2012

Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

As another member of the Health and Sport Committee, I too associate myself with the remarks that others have made about the clerking team and, as Jackson Carlaw did, pay tribute to Duncan McNeil for the powerful way in which he set out the committee’s approach in examining th...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Committee

23 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

I am a Glasgow MSP.

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Committee

30 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

On that issue, John McLaren made a point about the accuracy of the information that we had. However, if raising healthy life expectancy is genuinely our top target, it leads us to question why we do not have better information—although I do not know if that question is going t...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

30 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

That is useful, cabinet secretary.

Drew Smith Lab Committee

30 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

I have two brief questions. NHS Health Scotland, which is our national health promotion agency, and Healthcare Improvement Scotland would seem to be two special boards that have a particular role to play in preventative health. Why has Audit Scotland expressed concern about co...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

30 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

But does not the existence of a consistent problem suggest poor financial planning?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

30 Oct 2012

Draft Budget Scrutiny 2013-14

I will move on from a specific question to a slightly broader one. The Audit Scotland report identifies a concern around the nine boards that are relying on non-recurring funding to break even. To what extent does it concern you that that is still the case?We might accept that...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

28 May 2013

National Health Service Waiting Lists

I turn to some of the solutions that have been offered for the problem. We are aware of the action plan that is now in place to assist in getting people through A and E and through the rest of the hospital. However, the RCN briefing that we received this morning asks for more ...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

28 May 2013

National Health Service Waiting Lists

So it is new money outwith the health budget.

Drew Smith Lab Chamber

13 Nov 2012

Universal Benefits

I am delighted that the cabinet secretary has joined the anti-Angus Robertson faction in the SNP Government. The SNP has said quite clearly that the money would be spent on defence—on guns, soldiers and all those things—in an independent Scotland.I will tell a brief story. At ...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

07 May 2013

New Medicines (Access)

Clearly, if all the recommendations were to be pursued—although I understand that we are not agreeing that today—there would be implications for the amount of drugs that are prescribed in Scotland and, therefore, implications for the budget, which might go up or down. We can c...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

31 Jan 2013

Musicians Union Work not Play Campaign

I thank all those members who supported the motion for the opportunity to have it debated today. I thank particularly my colleague Patricia Ferguson for her support on the issue. She cannot take part in the debate as she is on parliamentary business at the Committee of the Reg...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Last week, when we had the financial directors before us, we had a discussion about brokerage. As you would expect, boards that had been unable to manage their budgets and which had relied on loans to break even were quite positive about the brokerage experience and felt that ...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

So you would want to dissuade financial directors from viewing brokerage as a flexibility mechanism. Instead, it is for exceptional circumstances and used to deal with particular problems.What is the balance between the money coming back to and going out of the centre?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Thank you very much. Should not boards that are replacing a service plan for double running anyway? I presume that that will continue. Is it now the case that whenever a service is redesigned or a new service is put in place and some double running is required, you simply ask ...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

So in Glasgow’s case, for example, you would not envisage there being a problem with the south Glasgow hospitals.

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Okay, thank you.I will ask two questions together for brevity. How do you, as departments, deal with the scale of unidentified efficiencies within both health boards and the special boards. When bodies come back to you with unidentified savings, what checks do you make? Could ...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

That is one of the things that Audit Scotland has identified as being of concern. What is the maximum level of savings that should come from non-recurring funding?My other question goes back to the point about unidentified savings and savings that are identified as being high ...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Thank you. Will you say a few words about the relationship between unidentified savings and high-risk savings? How do you monitor what moves between the two?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Do you have a sense of what the relationship has been in previous years?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

I am sure that you will have had the chance to review the evidence that we received last week from NHS Education for Scotland. I should point out that there is a certain amount of frustration in the committee; it understands not only that the NHS is facing cost pressures and b...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

25 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

But is there not a tension in all of that? Should you not be doing all those things anyway? A lot of those costs are waste and we should be eliminating them as much as possible. Of course, we will be learning as we go along, so it is not necessarily a matter of blaming people ...

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

I want to return briefly to the pharmacy issue and then move on from that.I really want to understand the issue around the cost per patient for prescribing. I think that you described that as a weighted cost per patient. What does the weighting involve? There is a lot of publi...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Are the costs of treatment and medication taken into account?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Clearly an innovative new medicine will cost more, so why would we want to drive down access to those medicines if a separate part of the health board was saying that it wanted to increase access to them when it can, because they are new and innovative and it thinks that it wi...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

I understand that, but part of the issue that we are discussing is variation in the access that health boards give to medicines, because different decisions are being made. If we compare boards purely on the basis of cost per patient, how do we take into account the fact that ...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Okay. Could I ask Mr James about the £24 million that he mentioned? Was that an annual figure?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Could you give me some indication of what you spent the £24 million on once you had saved it? Where did it then go?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

What I am asking, I suppose, is whether you can give me a rough percentage for how much of the money stays in medicine. For how much of the money do we say, “This has come off patent—”?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

That is helpful.Bob Doris mentioned the Audit Scotland report, which looked at 2011-12. One of Audit Scotland’s big concerns was about recurring deficits. It criticised a number of boards for relying on one-off payments in order to break even through the year. Is that likely t...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

As you say, Ms Ramsay, you have been through that process and have seen it from both sides. What flexibility is required? My question for Mr O’Brien is about whether, if you needed a loan to break even this year, you would also need a loan to break even next year and for the f...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

When the Scottish Government loans money, do you provide information to it on your assumptions about future property sales and so on? Can the Scottish Government bank on the fact that you will do that?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

I have one final question. I suppose that this is quite a general point, but another concern that Audit Scotland raised in its 2011-12 report is that 20 per cent of the savings that boards identified were high risk. Can you give us a flavour of what a high-risk saving means to...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

The problem is, though, that it sounds like that is the job of directors of finance anyway.

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Could you take another £800,000 out of your organisation next year with no impact on anything that you do and no need to divest from anything?

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Quite.

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

You said that, by 2014-15, NHS Education for Scotland will not be able to find more of the kind of savings that it is finding at the moment, so the savings will then have to come from the training side and how we facilitate and ensure the training of doctors.

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

I am confused. You say that there is a set number of doctors, which makes sense, and we know broadly how much that costs. You also say that you would find it difficult to identify more savings from the other things that you can do, but you expect that you will continue to be a...

Drew Smith Lab Committee

18 Jun 2013

NHS Boards Budget Scrutiny

Thanks very much.

Drew Smith (Glasgow) (Lab) Lab Chamber

29 May 2013

Chronic Pain Services

This debate has taken us two hours or so this afternoon, but for the chronic pain sufferers in the public gallery and those in our constituencies and regions who are following our proceedings, the debate about the need for proper support for and treatment of chronic pain has t...