Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good morning, everybody. I am not sure whether this is something to declare, but I note that I am the nature champion for the hen harrier.

That is in the Drugs Death Taskforce’s report, which speaks to the variation of services throughout the country and perhaps the need to roll some things into the national specification. Work is on-going with stakeholders, through the various working groups that are in place, to consider what type of more formal service specification would benefit people who rely on services, but we are pushing ahead with the roll-out of the medication-assisted treatment standards, which is one part of the national specification of treatment.

We are thinking about residential rehabilitation and we are working towards a national commissioning protocol for that, so that we can make sure that local areas are able to effectively get people on their journey into residential rehabilitation and then back into the community. It has proven to be quite difficult for local areas to do that. Scotland Excel, which those of us who have been in a local authority know—I see a lot of wry smiles here—is a body that helps with that kind of procurement work.

We are now at the point where we will be looking to go out to the tendering process, and organisations that provide residential rehabilitation facilities will be able to get themselves on to a national framework. That will provide a directory for local areas, but also a directory for individuals. As it stands, people do not know what residential rehabilitation is out there for them. They do not know what each type of service might provide for them, and we hope that bringing that under national oversight will mean that individuals’ journeys and their access to those facilities will be easier.

On the governance structures around that, a national specification, when we get to the point of understanding what the working groups are telling us, will help us to read across both spheres of government and all the partners and their individual responsibilities. That will help us to quantify what a national specification should look like in practice, with clear lines of accountability. I obviously have accountability on a national level, but we also need to look to local partners’ accountability, and a national specification will help us to do that.

I do not know whether Orlando Heijmer-Mason has anything to add.

I think that everyone in the room recognises that serious and organised crime is very harmful to our communities and is insidious. It is in every level of society, including places where people do not think that it will be. Although it would be for the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs to comment on the police’s funding situation and look at the issue across Government, I would seek to make sure that the police are resourced to respond in the areas that I am responsible for.

We need to recognise situations where we can interrupt county lines activity and, where we can, take vast quantities of drugs off our street by interrupting those gangs. We must also recognise when our police in Scotland can work with UK serious and organised crime professionals, and indeed those across Europe and beyond.

As the minister responsible for drugs and alcohol policy, I need to be aware of where the harms transfer to when supplies are interrupted. In my experience, when a huge quantity of substances is taken off the streets, we end up with harm being diverted to a different area. There is a dual aspect to that. I absolutely support the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs and colleagues in making sure that the police are resourced, but I also think about the unintended consequences.

That is an interesting question. There are a few parts to the issue. The smoking ban plays a part in terms of smoking indoors, but the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 prevents people from supporting the consumption of smokable substances. That shows how outdated it might be, because that was based on thinking about opium.

We know that there will be a challenge with how the consumption facility will operate, because more and more people are using crack cocaine and freebasing it. That will not be able to happen in the facility as it stands, but we also know that a lot of people are injecting cocaine. People who are injecting it would be able to do that in the facility.

I ask Suzanne Millar to say whether she has anything to add to that.

There are some complexities with regard to how broadening the firefighters’ role would operate in practice. We will consider the SFRS’s proposal on firefighters carrying naloxone. I am grateful for those firefighters who are carrying it voluntarily. Like the police force before that, there were a lot of things to work through to get the confidence of front-line workers to carry it. The nasal spray of naloxone has made that much easier for them to do.

I am very clear in my mind about the purpose of drug checking: its purpose is furnishing people with information. All of us recognise that information is power in every aspect of our lives.

I will always make robust representations when it comes to the portfolio and the individuals that my portfolio policy seeks to support across the country. However, at this point, I need to refute that there is any notion of reduction in budgets.

In the past budget as well. If we think about what happened last year, the money that was made available to ADPs never changed. As is fiscally prudent to ask any organisation to do when we are publicly funding it, we asked ADPs to make sure that any unspent reserves that they were carrying were used in the first instance and that they sought to draw down after that. Provision was made for any non-recurring spend that ADPs had perhaps earmarked against projects that they needed that funding for, but the full envelope of the money was there.

The total drugs and alcohol budget has steadily increased over the past few years: in 2021-22, it was £140.7 million; in 2022-23, it was £141.9 million; and, in 2023-24, it is projected to be £155.5 million. As I said, I will always seek to make representations in relation to my portfolio in the strongest of terms.

I also seek to reassure the joint committee that, as of next year, around two thirds of ADP funding will be baselined. That means that that funding is there and committed and that it will be recurring. I hope that that will allow ADPs to feel more comfortable in their long-term spending commitments and planning. I give you my guarantee that I will make robust representations in relation to the budget.

The 10 MAT standards came from the Scottish Drug Deaths Taskforce itself, and were created after a concerted effort and work with people with lived and living experience and other partners. If we think back to when the standards were first discussed, we were talking about an entire system and culture change to create services that would deliver at pace on the ground. That was made difficult from the beginning by the fact that ADPs and health and social care partnerships are all set up in different ways, so we started from a really difficult and complex position.

I will keep pushing for local areas to deliver on the MAT standards, because we need them to do that and we know that that will save lives, but the fact that two thirds of areas delivered standards 1 to 5 last year was a big step change. I am really conscious of the fact that standards 6 to 10 will be where we really start thinking about advocacy work, trauma-informed work, psychological and mental health support and how we start to embed the MAT standards within primary care, which will all be really tricky.

I will have to have robust conversations with local areas. Some areas have moved to monthly reporting, which is really important, but other areas where we have seen progress have gone back to quarterly reporting. Some specific situations will be tricky. There are some areas where drug deaths have not started to decline or where there are perennial issues, which means that I must have sit-down conversations with them. That will be very supportive, as opposed to me telling people what I think they should do, because that is not how we should work. We must ensure that we take areas with us. Despite progress not being as fast as I, or any of us, wanted it to be, we must recognise that people across the country have pulled out all the stops.

Also, because of the way that healthcare operates, we will find it tricky in our justice settings. Just last night, I met other ministers who are responsible for what healthcare should look like in a prison setting. We know that 76 per cent of those admitted to prison test positive for illicit substances and have significant substance use problems, so the MAT standards must work in justice settings.

I will continue pushing so that all 10 MAT standards are fully implemented by the end of 2025 and, by the time that we get to the end of this session of Parliament, the standards will be sustained and they will operate as business as usual.