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First Ministers Questions unpicked October 03 2024
The Scotsman
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03/10/2024
Dale Miller and Alistair Grant discuss the goings on at First Ministers Questions in the Scottish Parliament and the debut of new Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay
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00:00
Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Politics Show for this Thursday. We're
00:04
here to unpick and unwrap First Minister's questions. Notable Alistair Grant because
00:11
it is the first that Russell Findlay is featured as the new Scottish Tories
00:15
leader. I want to get to what your opinion was of him and how he went but
00:19
firstly National Care Service. It led the questions. There was an admission from
00:25
the government earlier this week that I think it's already cost 30 million pounds
00:30
and there's a lot of pressure on them over it and whether it will actually be
00:34
approved. Yes this is something that both the new Scottish Tory leader Russell
00:38
Findlay and the Scottish Labor leader Anna Sarwar went in on their questions
00:43
to John Swinney the First Minister. Both big questions about the National
00:47
Care Service, questions about its future, questions
00:51
about its viability. We've already seen that council leaders in the form of
00:55
COSLA, the kind of council umbrella body, have withdrawn their support for the
01:00
National Care Service. Trade unions don't support it either. There's huge
01:04
question marks actually to be honest over whether it can actually go ahead
01:07
without the support of a council body like COSLA. I think the Scottish
01:12
government said it's going to continue working with individual councils but I
01:15
think its whole future is kind of hanging in the air and the point that
01:19
both Russell Findlay and Anna Sarwar were making, although they're coming at it
01:23
from slightly different angles, was that, like you say, there's a huge amount of
01:27
money that's been spent on this already. I think it was about 28 million pounds.
01:30
That money could instead be directly invested to frontline services. There's
01:35
obviously big problems with delayed discharge across Scotland as it stands.
01:39
There's concerns over whether the National Care Service will address
01:43
these things. Anna Sarwar, obviously from the Scottish Labour's point of view,
01:47
they have long supported the National Care Service in theory but their whole
01:51
argument is that the Scottish government's basically messed it up and
01:55
the National Care Service that the Scottish government is
01:58
implementing is not going to work and it's not what Labour wanted. So yeah,
02:04
huge questions over this. Alastair, is it fair to say, I mean, the original estimate
02:10
was up to 1.26 billion pounds for this and then some are suggesting it could be
02:15
even up to 2 billion. Now, these are big numbers when you're discussing
02:19
spending cuts in a lot of other areas. Do you think that's added to the pressure on the
02:23
government? Not only the lack of support now from COSLA, but the fact that if they
02:27
press ahead, it's going to suck up a lot of money. I think it is. We obviously live
02:32
in tight financial times. I think from the government's point of view, John
02:35
Swinney today arguing in the chamber that, you know, we see across Scotland
02:39
there's huge disparity when it comes to delayed discharge problems. I think he was
02:43
pointing out that in some areas in Scotland it's ten times worse than in
02:46
other areas. So there clearly is a need to kind of address that problem. His
02:50
argument is that National Care Service would create this overarching structure
02:54
across Scotland that could try to level out some of those problems, try to create
02:59
a system that addresses some of that. We obviously had a big report that was done
03:04
as well, the Feeley review into care services. And one of its recommendations
03:08
was to form a national care service. I mean, people might remember thinking back
03:13
to COVID times in Scotland, there was lots of conversations that were had
03:16
about the state of care services across Scotland, the problems of delayed
03:21
discharge and the impact that had on care services. So it's not like the
03:25
system at the moment is good, it's not. I think everyone accepts that something
03:28
needs to change. And really the argument is about the best way to go about that
03:32
and the best way to move forward. And obviously the Scottish Conservatives
03:35
would say that the investment should instead just be pumped into frontline
03:39
services and to let councils and the kind of existing structure essentially
03:44
deal with this by investing in them. But yeah, huge problems to deal with.
03:49
Alistair, how did Russell Finlay go? We've got so used to Douglas Ross standing
03:54
up and having a go at the First Minister and sometimes provoking some angry
03:58
responses. What did you make of Russell's first outing?
04:02
I thought it was pretty solid, to be honest. I thought it was a pretty solid
04:05
performance. You wouldn't have known necessarily that it was his first
04:08
First Minister's questions as a new Tory leader. I thought it was quite low energy
04:11
at first. He took a while to get into it. But yeah, pretty solid. I think he'd be
04:15
quite happy with that. But of course, it took less than seven minutes for John
04:19
Swinney to bring up the fact that Russell Finlay backed Liz Truss to be the UK
04:24
Tory leader. And obviously we saw the disaster that that led to. So he's
04:29
clearly got a little bit of baggage there. But I think he will be coming out
04:32
of this performance quite pleased. It could have gone a lot worse.
04:36
And we saw at UK Tory conference, Liz Truss is someone that actually no one
04:40
wants her endorsement out of the current UK leader candidates. So yes, you'd want
04:46
to keep that one at bay. I'm going to ask you just lastly about mental health,
04:49
because you've reported on it this morning, separate to the FMQs, but some
04:53
surprising and worrying figures out this morning.
04:57
Yeah, so these are figures that came out in the Scottish Census, actually. They're
05:01
figures about people self-reporting having mental health conditions. And it's
05:07
comparing the census in 2011 to the one in 2022. And the number of people across
05:12
Scotland who say they have a mental health condition has more than doubled.
05:15
But that is largely driven by young people. So people between the ages of I
05:19
think it's 16 and 25, there's been a sixfold increase in the number of young
05:24
people who say they have a mental health condition. I think there's probably a
05:27
number of reasons for this. I think awareness of mental health conditions is
05:31
obviously having a massive impact in this. People are much more aware of
05:34
things like ADHD, even depression than they were maybe a decade ago. So I think
05:40
that does have an impact. But I think maybe perhaps COVID will have played
05:43
into it as well. A lot of young people, people who, when their last couple of
05:47
years of school or starting university or college, during the pandemic,
05:52
obviously, those lockdowns had an impact on their mental health and maybe a
05:56
lasting impact for some of them as well. So I think there's probably a number of
05:59
issues playing into that. But yeah, quite eye opening figures, really, I thought.
06:04
You can read that story at scotsman.com along with all our other politics
06:09
coverage. Alistair, thanks for joining us. Thanks to all our readers and viewers
06:13
for coming on and learning what happened at FMQs today. Please follow us on
06:18
Facebook, X and Instagram and go out and buy a copy of the paper tomorrow.
06:22
Thanks, everyone.
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