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The alcohol and drugs policy budget is facing a 1.6 per cent real-terms cut, despite the fact that the latest figures still show a significant level of drug-related deaths—I think that the figure was 1,017 in 2024. I am worried about why that is being cut in real terms. What impact do you foresee that having on the alcohol and drugs partnerships?

At one of the joint committee meetings on drug-related deaths, we heard an analysis of the Thistle and its on-going performance. I know that there is a budget allocated to that pilot, but it emerged in discussions that there has been a change in use and in patterns of street injection, from heroin to cocaine. Because that involves much greater frequency of injection, the facility is more likely to be needed overnight. There was discussion about the fact that it would be beneficial to change the business operating model of the Thistle to have overnight provision or to move towards 24-hour provision. Obviously, that would have financial implications.

Will the cabinet secretary undertake to at least engage with the Glasgow city health and social care partnership about the prospects of such an adjustment to the service, given the complaints about needle discards and other issues that are associated with more frequent usage overnight because of the move to cocaine? That is an example of how we need to be agile in adapting service provision to meet changing behaviour, but we could be constrained by financial issues if there is a cut to the budget.

The CCPS has told me that there has been no discussion and that it has been completely blindsided by this. I take the point about the need for visas to support the demographic challenges in Scotland, but there is a pool of 40,000 workers in the care system who are unallocated or unsponsored and who could be absorbed at any point in time. The issue, though, is that £12.82 an hour is the minimum for a social care worker visa sponsorship, while the minimum adult wage for social care workers in Scotland is £12.60, which only demonstrates further how uncompetitive pay rates are in the sector. Again, I am not clear how the uplift can be funded by these providers, because they are just not set up to cover the gap.

I also take your point about ENICs. Perhaps I would not have agreed with that approach, but there is a trade-off here. If you raise tax revenue, you spend it on having better public services. Where is the extra uplift here? Surely it should have been used to at least cover the gap.

On the regulatory boundaries, what is the Government’s response to concerns that the distinction between the respective scopes of the bill and the order might not be clear, particularly in relation to the technical thresholds of procedures? Will the Government commit to fund appropriate training for local authority officers so that they can navigate the technical challenges with enforcement?

How will the Scottish Government ensure that local authorities can develop clear and workable guidance? There are concerns that it can be challenging to distinguish the thresholds relating to microneedling depth and chemical peel penetration, so it will be challenging for those on the ground to distinguish procedures that are covered by the bill from those that are covered by the order. How can we be confident that there will be clear and workable guidance on those technical thresholds?

I want to raise the issue of preventative spend and the interdependence between social care and acute care, in particular the issue of differential pay settlements. We have seen that play out already in hospices, where issues with differential pay were affecting capacity.

How are social care providers who are already eating into their reserves able to cover underfunded contracts? Will that not just further exacerbate issues with the recruitment and retention of staff and reduce service availability? We have already seen a significant decline in the number of care beds across Scotland, which has a direct impact on delayed discharges. Does the cabinet secretary recognise that as a significant risk?

I would like clarification on the cabinet secretary’s perspective on wholly publicly funded service providers in social care delivering public services wholly through taxpayer funding. How can they possibly pay for a gap in uplift of pay for staff? I inferred from what the cabinet secretary said that the employer should meet that gap through reserves or some form of revenue generation. If we are talking about councils, COSLA and charities, I am not sure how that is possible.

Can the cabinet secretary elaborate on his expectation in that respect? After all, this marks a change in approach from the Government, because pay uplifts for front-line staff and those contracts were previously covered by Government pay policy.

That is helpful. I also want to ask about a method of escalation for officers in local authorities. Could a central expert panel or some sort of troubleshooting service be established, or could there be an early introduction of the enforcement mechanisms so that, if there are borderline procedures or other uncertainties, they could be referred to some sort of expert adjudication?

I have a fairly extensive set of amendments in this group—there are 18 in total, I think—encompassing a number of organisations.

I will start with amendment 99. The rationale for omitting some major public bodies from the list of relevant public bodies seems to be unclear, as colleagues have already expressed. Amendment 99 would insert the Scottish National Investment Bank; a national park authority established by virtue of a designation order under the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000; Scottish Forestry; Forestry and Land Scotland; and Crown Estate Scotland. There is a strong rationale for the Scottish National Investment Bank, national park authorities, Forestry and Land Scotland, Scottish Forestry and the Crown Estate in Scotland to—

The amendments in the group are generally useful and add great strength to the bill, so I commend them to the committee.