Seòmar agus comataidhean

The move to separate autism spectrum disorder assessments from mental health services is more than a simple clinical distinction. I understand the motivation for separate pathways that the minister has set out, but I have been working with a young boy who has been on the child and adolescent mental health services neurodevelopmental waiting list since January 2023. The details of his case are distressing, but there is no diagnosis in sight. Does the minister recognise that that wait is far too long? There are deep consequences for my constituent’s wellbeing that are overwhelming both him and his family.

Does the member recognise, though, that the number of housing completions is at a record low—the lowest level since records began—and that supply is critical to ensuring that people have houses that they can buy or rent and, frankly, to live in?

When I was elected in 2021, I was undecided on the issue of assisted dying, although I knew that a decision was likely to be made on it in the current session of Parliament. Over the five years of this session, I have learned from colleagues and constituents that being a member of Parliament is far more about listening than it is about speaking, and I have listened to the voices of my constituents who have sat at bedsides and suffered as relatives have died the most difficult of deaths. Those families have our empathy and our sympathy, and it is a privilege to be entrusted with their stories.

Today, I believe that MSPs must listen to those who know the messy, emotional, painful and inevitable business of dying best of all—those who have seen thousands of deaths rather than our terrible handfuls, and who have the duty of seeing the aggregate as well as the individual. We should acknowledge together that those who would be most involved in delivering the process of dying that we will vote on today are asking us to vote against it, from the patient’s trusted general practitioner to the psychiatrist who assesses for capacity, the pharmacist who provides the drug and the palliative care staff who are there at the end. All of their esteemed professional bodies have considered the bill and are asking MSPs to vote against it tonight.

Like many Dundonians, I have said goodbye to beloved family and friends in Roxburghe house, which is an outstanding palliative care facility in the verdant shadow of Balgay Hill in Dundee. This morning, I was struck by the testimony of Dr Martin Leiper, who was the lead consultant physician in palliative medicine in Tayside and who led that hospice during his 35 years in our NHS.

Of our vote tonight, he said:

“I’m really worried about the effect that it might have on my former place of work … Whether its staff would be willing to work in an environment where palliative care was delivered and also there was the option for life to be ended. I worry that some staff, fantastic staff, would no longer go into work in that sort of environment.”

I know from speaking directly with staff that that would be true and that a delicate balance would be broken.

Instead of improving palliative medicine, which we all have agreed must improve, the bill risks harming it. The Government reiterated just yesterday that the costs of the bill will be high and that no new money is available to our NHS.

Beyond principle and practicality, there is a lack of safeguards and a fear of coercion in our deeply unequal society, in which the vulnerable and the disabled might easily see themselves as a burden and in which women suffer daily at the hands of men. On top of all that, expert caring staff are opposed to the bill because there is a huge hole at its heart where protection for those dedicated professionals and their care of patients should be. Ceding the process to backroom officials is an unsafe dereliction. It is the job of elected representatives to hear the voices of the people, to balance competing claims and to act in the public interest.

We have exhausted scrutiny of the bill, which the vote at stage 1 allowed to happen. However, to those who agreed with the principle and must now judge the practicality, I say, please, not this bill.

18:56

Will the minister confirm how many building remediations have been completed and whether he is satisfied with the progress rate?

I say to the minister—gently, if I can—that £100 million came to the Scottish Government to spend on remediation programmes. The Government has not applied that to remediation. It has spread it across other parts of its budget to fill the gaps and holes in that regard. This Government’s management of the capital programme in this country has been a disaster for years, and ministers should reflect on that.

On that basis, I close my remarks.

18:08

On 4 September 2024, John Swinney said:

“Keeping residents and home owners safe is our priority, and we are taking action to protect lives by ensuring that the assessment and remediation of buildings with potentially unsafe cladding is carried out.”—[Official Report, 4 September; c 26.]

At that point, seven years on from the Grenfell disaster in which 72 of our fellow citizens perished, remediation had been completed on precisely zero buildings in Scotland. Based on the latest available statistics, from November 2025—and the minister refused to demur from those statistics today—that figure still stands. Eight years and nine months on from that fire, not a single building remediation in Scotland has been completed. In contrast, in England, 1,938 remediations had been completed by November 2025. That shows the Scottish Government’s utterly shameful record of incompetence.

The reason that work has not been completed on a single building in Scotland is not that we do not have a building safety levy. The Scottish Government has failed to spend even a fraction of the almost £100 million provided by the United Kingdom Government for the purpose of cladding remediation. The Scottish Government has now admitted that those funds, which were intended for such remediation, were used to fill budget gaps across Government. It is up to the Scottish National Party Government to explain why it has taken so long to act, leaving people in Scotland at risk of fire and death in their own homes. If we wound back the clock to the day after the Grenfell disaster—15 June 2017—I do not think that we would imagine that our country could possibly be in this position.

There are specific structural differences in the housing and building sector in Scotland that make remediation challenging—that is without dispute. If the SNP wants to do something to speed up the process, those are the areas on which legislation could be brought in, and the Parliament should be looking at them. An additional tax on house building will not change any of those differences—none of them.

The critical point is that this levy comes at the worst possible time. Scotland is still in the grip of the SNP-made housing emergency, which the Government acknowledged nearly two years ago but has done precious little about since then. More than 10,000 children are still stuck in temporary accommodation, and house-building rates are at record lows.

It is estimated that the levy will add an additional £3,500 to the cost of building a new home. In evidence to the Finance and Public Administration Committee, house builders were clear that the levy will render house building unviable anywhere outside Edinburgh and the Lothians. Those are the repercussions that nobody on the Government benches or, in particular, the Green benches seems to be willing to tackle. On that basis, and in an unprecedented step, as Liz Smith described, the committee made no recommendation on the general principles of the bill. That gives a clear indication of the committee’s serious misgivings about the viability of the levy in its current form.

I am sorry to say that the bill has not been greatly improved by the amendments lodged either at stage 2 or at stage 3, and the minister has refused to support many sensible amendments that sought to analyse the levy’s impact on the house-building market and to introduce exemptions in specific cases.

The minister has also repeatedly failed to commit to the independent sensitivity analysis of local areas that the committee recommended and on which several members lodged amendments. That does not give confidence to the Parliament, the sector or the thousands of Scots who are without a home to call their own that the SNP Government takes seriously the mess that it has made of Scotland’s housing system and the further damage that the levy could do if it is not introduced carefully.

17:52

Will Patrick Harvie give way?

We on the Labour benches are unequivocal that the horrors of Grenfell must never be repeated. It is incumbent on Governments across these islands to ensure that people have safe homes to live in and that lives are not needlessly lost through the neglect of Government and industry, which failed in their duties to the 72 residents of the Grenfell tower.

At the start of his contribution, Patrick Harvie set out many things that I agree with in relation to where responsibility and culpability for those areas lie. We have had a public inquiry that drew stark conclusions. To take that a step further and seek to demonise anybody who is involved in the building of houses as some kind of malignant force in Scotland is a jump too far.

There is the issue of some of the language that has been used in relation to this bill and around the polluter-pays principle. Of course, there are members of the house-building industry in Scotland—small family firms, for instance—that have never built a building above two storeys or taken on any of the projects that are involved in this issue, and they are worried that they will be affected by a general levy across the sector. It is right that we make sure that we get the language for the specific Scottish sector correct in that regard.

Mr Harvie will be aware that there are already specific taxes in this area on the house-building industry. The minister was right when he set out that we have a challenge in funding the large gap between the requirements in Scotland and what we need to raise, and we have to find vehicles to do that. I say to Mr Harvie that the nub of the debate today has been about whether, in the current circumstances of a housing emergency—which he has some culpability for—there is a mismatch between the need to raise that money and the vulnerability of a housing sector that is in a terrible, absolutely dreadful state.

We also have to ensure that we do not lose sight of the fact that there are two forms of social good in this work. Yes, there is the safety of people who are in high-rise buildings that require remediation, but there is also social good in people having decent houses to live in. It should not be the case that more than 10,000 children—a record number in Scotland—are living in temporary accommodation, so we must have a housing market that works. That is absolutely critical.

On Ivan McKee’s point, it is slightly odd that the minister seems incapable of understanding that we should have Scottish answers for Scottish problems. Through stages 2 and 3, he has been keen to talk about what the Labour Government elsewhere is doing in this policy area. My job here—and the job of the Scottish Parliament—is to come up with answers for Scotland that are specific to the Scottish challenges that we face. That is the position that Scottish Labour takes with regard to the legislation that we are looking at today. It is absolutely critical that we deliver the right resources to ensure that we get this work done, and we have to do that timeously.

When I was elected in 2021, I was undecided on the issue of assisted dying, although I knew that a decision was likely to be made on it in the current session of Parliament. Over the five years of this session, I have learned from colleagues and constituents that being a member of Parliament is far more about listening than it is about speaking, and I have listened to the voices of my constituents who have sat at bedsides and suffered as relatives have died the most difficult of deaths. Those families have our empathy and our sympathy, and it is a privilege to be entrusted with their stories.

Today, I believe that MSPs must listen to those who know the messy, emotional, painful and inevitable business of dying best of all—those who have seen thousands of deaths rather than our terrible handfuls, and who have the duty of seeing the aggregate as well as the individual. We should acknowledge together that those who would be most involved in delivering the process of dying that we will vote on today are asking us to vote against it, from the patient’s trusted general practitioner to the psychiatrist who assesses for capacity, the pharmacist who provides the drug and the palliative care staff who are there at the end. All of their esteemed professional bodies have considered the bill and are asking MSPs to vote against it tonight.

Like many Dundonians, I have said goodbye to beloved family and friends in Roxburghe house, which is an outstanding palliative care facility in the verdant shadow of Balgay Hill in Dundee. This morning, I was struck by the testimony of Dr Martin Leiper, who was the lead consultant physician in palliative medicine in Tayside and who led that hospice during his 35 years in our NHS.

Of our vote tonight, he said:

“I’m really worried about the effect that it might have on my former place of work, whether its staff would be willing to work in an environment where palliative care was delivered and there was also the option for life to be ended. I worry that some staff—fantastic staff—would no longer go into work in that sort of environment.”

I know from speaking directly with staff that that would be true and that a delicate balance would be broken.

Instead of improving palliative medicine, which we all have agreed must improve, the bill risks harming it. The Government reiterated just yesterday that the costs of the bill will be high and that no new money is available to our NHS.

Beyond principle and practicality, there is a lack of safeguards and a fear of coercion in our deeply unequal society, in which the vulnerable and the disabled might easily see themselves as a burden and in which women suffer daily at the hands of men. On top of all that, expert caring staff are opposed to the bill because there is a huge hole at its heart where protection for those dedicated professionals and their care of patients should be. Ceding the process to backroom officials is an unsafe dereliction. It is the job of elected representatives to hear the voices of the people, to balance competing claims and to act in the public interest.

We have exhausted scrutiny of the bill, which the vote at stage 1 allowed to happen. However, to those who agreed with the principle and must now judge the practicality, I say, please, not this bill.

18:56