First Ministers Questions unpicked October 03 2024

The Scotsman

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

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Politics Show for this Thursday. We're

00:04here to unpick and unwrap First Minister's questions. Notable Alistair Grant because

00:11it is the first that Russell Findlay is featured as the new Scottish Tories

00:15leader. I want to get to what your opinion was of him and how he went but

00:19firstly National Care Service. It led the questions. There was an admission from

00:25the government earlier this week that I think it's already cost 30 million pounds

00:30and there's a lot of pressure on them over it and whether it will actually be

00:34approved. Yes this is something that both the new Scottish Tory leader Russell

00:38Findlay and the Scottish Labor leader Anna Sarwar went in on their questions

00:43to John Swinney the First Minister. Both big questions about the National

00:47Care Service, questions about its future, questions

00:51about its viability. We've already seen that council leaders in the form of

00:55COSLA, the kind of council umbrella body, have withdrawn their support for the

01:00National Care Service. Trade unions don't support it either. There's huge

01:04question marks actually to be honest over whether it can actually go ahead

01:07without the support of a council body like COSLA. I think the Scottish

01:12government said it's going to continue working with individual councils but I

01:15think its whole future is kind of hanging in the air and the point that

01:19both Russell Findlay and Anna Sarwar were making, although they're coming at it

01:23from slightly different angles, was that, like you say, there's a huge amount of

01:27money that's been spent on this already. I think it was about 28 million pounds.

01:30That money could instead be directly invested to frontline services. There's

01:35obviously big problems with delayed discharge across Scotland as it stands.

01:39There's concerns over whether the National Care Service will address

01:43these things. Anna Sarwar, obviously from the Scottish Labour's point of view,

01:47they have long supported the National Care Service in theory but their whole

01:51argument is that the Scottish government's basically messed it up and

01:55the National Care Service that the Scottish government is

01:58implementing is not going to work and it's not what Labour wanted. So yeah,

02:04huge questions over this. Alastair, is it fair to say, I mean, the original estimate

02:10was up to 1.26 billion pounds for this and then some are suggesting it could be

02:15even up to 2 billion. Now, these are big numbers when you're discussing

02:19spending cuts in a lot of other areas. Do you think that's added to the pressure on the

02:23government? Not only the lack of support now from COSLA, but the fact that if they

02:27press ahead, it's going to suck up a lot of money. I think it is. We obviously live

02:32in tight financial times. I think from the government's point of view, John

02:35Swinney today arguing in the chamber that, you know, we see across Scotland

02:39there's huge disparity when it comes to delayed discharge problems. I think he was

02:43pointing out that in some areas in Scotland it's ten times worse than in

02:46other areas. So there clearly is a need to kind of address that problem. His

02:50argument is that National Care Service would create this overarching structure

02:54across Scotland that could try to level out some of those problems, try to create

02:59a system that addresses some of that. We obviously had a big report that was done

03:04as well, the Feeley review into care services. And one of its recommendations

03:08was to form a national care service. I mean, people might remember thinking back

03:13to COVID times in Scotland, there was lots of conversations that were had

03:16about the state of care services across Scotland, the problems of delayed

03:21discharge and the impact that had on care services. So it's not like the

03:25system at the moment is good, it's not. I think everyone accepts that something

03:28needs to change. And really the argument is about the best way to go about that

03:32and the best way to move forward. And obviously the Scottish Conservatives

03:35would say that the investment should instead just be pumped into frontline

03:39services and to let councils and the kind of existing structure essentially

03:44deal with this by investing in them. But yeah, huge problems to deal with.

03:49Alistair, how did Russell Finlay go? We've got so used to Douglas Ross standing

03:54up and having a go at the First Minister and sometimes provoking some angry

03:58responses. What did you make of Russell's first outing?

04:02I thought it was pretty solid, to be honest. I thought it was a pretty solid

04:05performance. You wouldn't have known necessarily that it was his first

04:08First Minister's questions as a new Tory leader. I thought it was quite low energy

04:11at first. He took a while to get into it. But yeah, pretty solid. I think he'd be

04:15quite happy with that. But of course, it took less than seven minutes for John

04:19Swinney to bring up the fact that Russell Finlay backed Liz Truss to be the UK

04:24Tory leader. And obviously we saw the disaster that that led to. So he's

04:29clearly got a little bit of baggage there. But I think he will be coming out

04:32of this performance quite pleased. It could have gone a lot worse.

04:36And we saw at UK Tory conference, Liz Truss is someone that actually no one

04:40wants her endorsement out of the current UK leader candidates. So yes, you'd want

04:46to keep that one at bay. I'm going to ask you just lastly about mental health,

04:49because you've reported on it this morning, separate to the FMQs, but some

04:53surprising and worrying figures out this morning.

04:57Yeah, so these are figures that came out in the Scottish Census, actually. They're

05:01figures about people self-reporting having mental health conditions. And it's

05:07comparing the census in 2011 to the one in 2022. And the number of people across

05:12Scotland who say they have a mental health condition has more than doubled.

05:15But that is largely driven by young people. So people between the ages of I

05:19think it's 16 and 25, there's been a sixfold increase in the number of young

05:24people who say they have a mental health condition. I think there's probably a

05:27number of reasons for this. I think awareness of mental health conditions is

05:31obviously having a massive impact in this. People are much more aware of

05:34things like ADHD, even depression than they were maybe a decade ago. So I think

05:40that does have an impact. But I think maybe perhaps COVID will have played

05:43into it as well. A lot of young people, people who, when their last couple of

05:47years of school or starting university or college, during the pandemic,

05:52obviously, those lockdowns had an impact on their mental health and maybe a

05:56lasting impact for some of them as well. So I think there's probably a number of

05:59issues playing into that. But yeah, quite eye opening figures, really, I thought.

06:04You can read that story at scotsman.com along with all our other politics

06:09coverage. Alistair, thanks for joining us. Thanks to all our readers and viewers

06:13for coming on and learning what happened at FMQs today. Please follow us on

06:18Facebook, X and Instagram and go out and buy a copy of the paper tomorrow.

06:22Thanks, everyone.

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