 The next item of business is a Scottish Government debate on the programme for government 2021-22, and I would ask all members who wish to speak in the debate to press their request to speak buttons now, and I call on Douglas Ross to open for the Conservatives. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. This is a programme for government that was delayed from last week because Nicholas Sturgeon prioritised taking green MSPs into her government over outlining her plans for the year ahead, and her priorities were wrong last week, and they're still wrong this week, because another independence referendum is front and centre of the First Minister's plans for the year ahead. In a statement that is 27 pages long, it takes to just the fourth paragraph for Nicholas Sturgeon to mention independence. It's right up there in front of all the other priorities that we should have. SNP members are heckling. This is a debate. I'm quite happy to take an intervention, and I will come to Mr Allen. I'm quite happy to take an intervention from any member who thinks that it's correct that, in the time of a pandemic, it's right for the First Minister to yet again prioritise independence over anything else. I give way to Alasdair Allen. I thank the member for giving way. He mentions all this as if it was never made clear, either in the manifesto or in the result of the election that the SNP is in favour of a referendum on independence. Douglas Ross. The election that Mr Allen references was one where the SNP failed to get a majority. Let's remember, Deputy Presiding Officer, Alasdair Allen, Nicola Sturgeon, Hamza Yousaf, all of the SNP MSPs, all of the Conservative MSPs, all of the Labour MSPs, all of the Liberal Democrats and all of the Greens said in the election that our priority for each and every one of the 129 of us would be Scotland's recovery from this pandemic, but that's not the priority of this First Minister who told the people to trust her to prioritise the recovery, who has put front and centre, paragraph 4 of her statement, another independence referendum. We've heard from the First Minister for well over half an hour, but we will hear more and I'm happy to give way. First Minister, we agree on the importance of recovery from Covid. I wonder if Douglas Ross would take the opportunity to comment on any of the 26.5 pages of the statement that set out bold, ambitious plans to lead Scotland out of this pandemic. It's his speech, but perhaps we can hear some of that in due course. Douglas Ross. We will hear some of what was totally omitted from the First Minister's speech, but I'll come on to that in a moment, because Nicola Sturgeon has put independence above Scottish jobs. Separating Scotland is the top priority for her Government, not our recovery. Her focus is on a referendum, not the future of Scotland getting through this pandemic. This Government should be pouring every single bit of time and effort into our economy, into tackling drug deaths and into remobilising our NHS, but no, it put independence at the forefront again. Instead, the Government will start work on a detailed prospectus for an independent Scotland, taking time and resources away from the priorities that it should be focusing on to another independence referendum. Nicola Sturgeon is giving us a new white paper on independence instead of a plan for jobs, instead of a plan to tackle drug deaths and instead of a plan for our NHS recovery. However, there are elements of this programme for government that we support on this side. Many of the elements that the Scottish Conservatives led on for the last year, we welcome the fact that the big headline policy trailed ahead of this document was wrapped around childcare. That's a policy that we, on this side of the chamber, announced would be in our manifesto for May's election sometime before the First Minister announced it would be in hers. Ensuring that parents can continue in their job, continue with secure employment—sorry, First Minister—I'll give way again, because the First Minister was chaptering away to her health secretary. We were asked—sorry, First Minister, when I'm standing, you have to sit. We were told that there was going to be a new style of politics, and it seems that First Minister likes to announce a new style of politics but not deliver it herself, so I will give way. First Minister. Douglas Ross wanted to know what I was saying to my health secretary. I was actually saying to my health secretary, was it listening to Douglas Ross, was it listening to, like, listening to playground politics and could we all raise our game? So now that he wanted to join me in that, perhaps we can hear some substance from Douglas Ross instead of what we've had five minutes into his speech. Douglas Ross. The irony, the irony, Deputy Presiding Officer, of Nicola Sturgeon accusing anyone of playing playground politics will not be lost on people watching this debate today. She asked for substance. I was saying that the Scottish Conservatives welcome the commitment to wraparound childcare because we can see how important it is to ensure that parents can continue in their job, continue with secure employment when their child moves from nursery and early years into primary school and that all children are able to benefit from extracurricular activities such as sport and music lessons, not just those who have the ability to pay. As the son of a school dinner lady, I welcome the continued roll-out of free lunches and breakfast in primary schools. Again, a policy first put forward from this side of the chamber and voted on in the Scottish Parliament last session. However, the positives in this document are far outwead by what we cannot agree with or the major areas of inaction. The First Minister describes her investment in the NHS as a record investment. However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies made clear during the Scottish Parliament election that a £2.5 billion increase over five years is less than the Barnett consequential's promise to the health service in England. That seems like far from record investment to me. We cannot see a repeat of this Government's previous tactic of siphoning off health funding for other priorities just as we saw during the time when Nicola Sturgeon was health secretary. We need to see a bare minimum of health funding increases to the Scottish Government being spent on health here in Scotland. We know from recent UK Government announcements that we will see hundreds of millions of pounds in Barnett consequentials delivered to this Government. That has given the Scottish National Party a second chance to do what we called for them to do in the election—to rip up the flimsy pamphlet from last month and produce a paper on NHS remobilisation, because that has to be a priority going forward. Give our NHS the support that it needs, not in five years but right now, this year. Give clinicians and healthcare professionals the funding that they need to end the backlog in treatments in hospitals, restore A&E waiting times, speed up our ambulance services and return to full, face-to-face GP surgeries. The First Minister has to confirm that every penny of this one-off injection will be put at the disposal of our NHS staff. Anything less would be a slap in the face to our brave health service workers who have done incredible work over the past 18 months. I want to come on to an area that the First Minister glossed over, and it is not surprising, because she has admitted herself that she took her eye off the ball with this. However, the statement that we have had today re-announces what the Scottish Government said they were going to do to tackle the drug-dest crisis in this country, when the figures were 1,264 last year. Now that has jumped to 1,339. What new policy? What new action? What change do we see from the Scottish Government? Nothing. In the programme for government is exactly the same that was outlined in January of this year, before the record number of deaths was announced this summer. If the First Minister listens, everybody would know, I think, that we have heard enough. Listen now, say it. Can I just say to everybody that we have a big long debate ahead of us and perhaps a bit of a camera approach on the part of everybody that would be helpful? What I was saying was that every day in Scotland, every single day, more than three people are dying from drug-overdoses, from drug abuse. The response from the Scottish National Party Government that has seen that increase for all of the seven years that Nicola Sturgeon has been First Minister is no change. The exact same plan and proposals from January of this year are the same plans that they have brought forward in this programme for government. I will give way to the drugs minister. Angela Constance. I am grateful to the member. Does Mr Ross recall the statement that I made in Parliament, this Parliament, on 3 August, where one example of a very new policy was the announcement that we would have for the first time a national rehabilitation recovery service for children and families backed up by £8 million worth of investment? I was responding to what the First Minister said herself. What the First Minister has put in her programme for government, and it is the exact same that has been announced before. Indeed, that announcement was only putting money back in that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP members voted to take out. I think that after seven years of increases in people losing their lives due to drug misuse in Scotland, we would hear more from the First Minister on this issue. However, we are not hearing those vital proposals, which is why Scottish Conservatives are going to bring forward our own plans for a right to recovery bill, to ensure that it is treated with the laser focus and the resources that this national scandal deserves. That programme was a chance for the Government to commit to our proposal, and it will be a disappointment to many both inside and outside this chamber, Deputy Presiding Officer, that the SNP has failed to do so. On social care, we had promises of a major centralisation towards a national service, stripping accountability and control away from local government. It is clear that this SNP Government wants to entrust councils with little more than bin collections, although looking at the state of Glasgow at the moment, I am not sure that Susan Nake can be able to deal with even that. On this side of the chamber, we will oppose this damaging reorganisation, which will see funding spent on administration rather than front-line care staff. The lack of support that this programme gives to our economic recovery is clear that the economy is not a top priority for this Government. We heard calls throughout the week in the lead-up to today from the CBI from the Chamber of Commerce to have the economy and our recovery from this pandemic prioritised by this Government, and they will not be happy with what we have seen. This document is a usual myriad of schemes, but we know from this Government's record on funds such as this, shown by the gross scheme in the National Investment Bank, that it is to announce a big number and then have no intention ever to pay out that money. Businesses across Scotland have already reacted with concern to the formation of this nationalist coalition between the SNP and the Greens, and today's programme for government was the First Minister's chance to reassure them, to show them that this Government still considered jobs and growth a priority, but they will have received no reassurance from the statement at all. A number of business representatives and organisations have called for a number of very specific priorities and policies and they have not heard them. All that we get from this Government is the news that they are going to press ahead with damaging policies such as the car park tax. The Government is continuing to press ahead with its proposals to make Covid laws brought in as emergency legislation permanent, and I am sure that we will be discussing this more later on this week. We also have heard on education a continued push by the SNP with the same failing agenda, which has seen Scottish education fall from being one of the best in the world to being considered internationally average, moving away from exams, away from courses that teach knowledge and away from rigorous standards. We welcome on this side the Government's continued move towards scrapping the SQA, but this alone is not going to undo the harm the SNP has caused a generation of young people. We have no confidence in an OECD review, which is entirely Government managed. I do not know if we get much extra time, Deputy Presiding Officer. Mr Ross, you can have a wee bit of extra time. Thank you. We took some interventions because this is a debate, and I was pleased to be able to do so. This programme confirms what we already know about this Nationalist coalition, that it is a Government that is being drawn away from the priorities of working for Scotland, drawn away from the priorities that really matter to people. There will be tens of thousands of SNP voters who no longer recognise the party that they voted for, who rejected Harvey and Slater's extremist views in the ballot box, only to watch in horror as Nicola Sturgeon let them walk through the front door of Bute House. We cannot support this programme because it puts another referendum ahead of our recovery from the pandemic. Not only does this disregard the essential support that we have seen over this period from the UK Government, but it is also totally the wrong priority. It is irresponsible and it is reckless. The fact that this Government cannot park its obsession when faced with countless problems facing Scotland today tells us everything that we need to know about Nicola Sturgeon and her priorities. When our NHS is on the brink of a fresh winter crisis and our economic recovery hangs in the balance, the SNP and the Greens would prefer to waste taxpayers' money on preparing for a second independence referendum. This is a programme for independence, not a programme for government, and so long as this coalition continues to put separation at the top of their plans, the Scottish Conservatives will continue to oppose this nationalist agenda. Thank you. Thank you. Mr Ross and I call on Anna Sauer to open for Labour. Presiding Officer, Scotland needed a programme for government that recognised the scale of the challenge facing our country, but instead it got a programme that was short on big ideas. This is not good enough, it is not bold enough and it won't do enough. Undoubtedly there are individual measures within these announcements that we can welcome and support. Anne's law is a good example of that, but this programme for government does not go far enough. A week goes by without someone from the Government's front benches declaring something mundane, rebased or self-serving as historic, but the drier truth is that, despite the SNP's rhetoric, the only historic thing today is levels of poverty on our streets, the numbers waiting for treatment in our hospitals and the depth of the economic crisis facing our country. In the face of those challenges, this is a tired and rehashed programme from a party that is clearly run out of big ideas. This disappointing programme for government shows that there is a lack of ambition from this SNP Government. Seriously, is that it? Is that as good as it gets? Is that the scale of ambition for this country? I don't think so. I'll make a bit of progress. This Government's record is defined by delays, broken promises and a gulf between spin and action, and it seems that we can expect more of the same. We are up against a global pandemic, a growing healthcare crisis, a jobs crisis and a climate emergency. There is no time to waste, and instead we get this piecemeal plan. That may surprise the First Minister, but there are ideas that are bigger than independence. I accept that the pandemic has changed all of our lives and that it has left a devastating legacy that we must confront, but it would be wrong to suggest that all of our country's problems are because of the pandemic, many of the challenges that we face predate Covid-19. We are all aware that the pandemic has not gone away. Cases are at record levels, the vaccine is working, but the overall progress is stalling and we have a Government that does not appear to have a coherent strategy for this phase of the pandemic. All of that holds back our nation and our national recovery. I see that the Scottish Government is proposing a Covid recovery bill, but this must be about embedding protections for our nation and not about embedding state control. There will be issues that we will be debating later this week, but it is clear that this is an attempt by a Government to look in control of a virus that is clearly out of control. Let us look at the big challenges that are facing our country. One in four children in Scotland live in poverty. That is over a quarter of a million. The First Minister on the first day of this Parliament said that fighting child poverty should be the driving mission of this Parliament. We set legal targets in the last Parliament without caveat and without condition. It is clear that the measures in this programme for government will not meet that ambition. Let us be clear that there can never be an acceptable level of child poverty. One child in poverty is one child too many. One night of a child in poverty is one night too many. We again call on the Tory Government to think again on its plan to scrap the uplift of universal credit. When we set that legal target in the last Parliament, it was without condition and without caveat. Over 100 organisations wrote to the First Minister demanding immediate action and the immediate doubling of the Scottish child payment. Every faith leader wrote to the First Minister demanding immediate action. We should be doubling the Scottish child payment immediately and then doubling it again next year. This simple act would cut child poverty by nearly a third, transforming 80,000 lives. If we do not do that, we will miss that legal target. It is bad enough to break the law, meaning hundreds of thousands of people are left on NHS waiting lists. It is another thing to break the law, abanding hundreds of thousands of children to live in preventable poverty. This is one of the most important issues that we face. Anna Sarwar's predecessor, as Scottish Labour leader, called on me to deliver a payment for children of £5 a week. We are already delivering £10 a week, so doubling what we were originally asked to do. We have given a commitment to double that again to £20 a week as soon as we can put the budgetary provisions in place. That is why I think that children in poverty need a Government that is going to do the serious work to deliver as quickly as possible the commitments that we want to deliver. That is very different to simply plucking figures out of thin air with no idea whatsoever how to deliver them. Frankly, I think that children across Scotland living in poverty deserve better than what Anna Sarwar is offering. I welcome the £5 payment when we had the £10 child payment. I am talking about the original policy, but the reality is that when we set that legal target in the last Parliament, it was not for a press release. It was not so that we could say, yes, this Parliament is thinking big. It was to set legal targets for this Parliament to act. If we do not take meaningful action, we will miss that legal target. That might be a bad news story for the Parliament on one day, but that bad news story means thousands of children still living in poverty across our country. That is why we need urgent action. However, this lack of ambition is not just evidenced in the child poverty targets but is also about the approach to the NHS. Across Scotland, 600,000 people or 600,000 are left languishing on NHS waiting lists. Even before the pandemic, that figure was 450,000 people in Scotland. Rather than publishing an NHS recovery plan that was dismissed as unrealistic by health workers, the First Minister could have shifted the machinery of the Government into tackling this crisis head on. We could have seen this programme bing forward a real NHS recovery plan that gets services back on track, prioritises dealing with the backlog in diagnostic services and care, and delivers a credible workforce plan. It could have rewarded so many undervalued staff by raising social carers pay to £15 an hour. Instead, we have seen a focus on rhetoric and a failure to confront the reality and no credible plan that will reverse the crisis in our NHS. The utter lack of ambition, though, is again not limited to poverty or the NHS but also in our jobs recovery and economic recovery. 30,000 young people in Scotland are unemployed. We are creeping towards the cliff edge of furlough and yet there is no coherent plan for how we provide a jobs guarantee and an economic development plan for all parts of our country to make sure that we have an inclusive, urban, rural, coastal and island recovery. Scottish Labour called for the most ambitious job creation scheme in the history of the Scottish Parliament to confront that crisis, guaranteeing a job for every young Scot by investing in a national training fund and a business restart fund. Instead, the only meaningful job creation scheme that we have seen in this Parliament has been for the First Minister's pals in this Parliament. Not quite what we meant by a focus on green jobs. In 2010, the SNP promised 130,000 green jobs by 2020, a laudable aim to help tackle the climate emergency. Instead, the number of people directly employed has fallen to just over 23,000. The Scottish Government's 100 million green jobs fund, which was announced almost a year ago, has yet to create a single job. We keep hearing about a just transition, but unless we act right now, we will not get in the buy-in from the communities that we need to give support. We need a truly workers-led transition so that this Government does not repeat the mistakes of the last Tory Governments when whole communities were left on the unemployment scrap heap. This programme of government could have put our climate, not the constitution, front and centre, with a focus on a real plan for a just transition, focus on developing the skills that are needed in a green recovery and protecting jobs and communities that are impacted by the transition to net zero. But also in education, there is not enough in this programme to support Scotland's Covid generation, but they were being failed long before this pandemic. The truth is that Scotland's pupils have been shortchanged by the First Minister, her attempt to promise the world and deliver very little. It is right that the failed SQA will be scrapped, but the scars of the pandemic will mark our education system for years to come. An entire generation of pupils will bear the weight of this disruption to do their education as they go through education, and it could, without serious action, weigh heavily on their life chances and life outcomes. Still, despite that, the action to support pupils and teachers to work against the disruption of the pandemic has been minor at best. The number of full-time equivalent teachers in Scotland's schools is 1,700 fewer than when the SNP came to office in 2007. More than 2,600 teachers have dropped or lost their professional registration over the past five years. That is a warning sign to this Government that keeps being ignored. Whatever action we take now, it will have to rebuild after more than a decade of SNP cuts and damaging our education system before the pandemic even hit. That is why we reiterate our call for an education comeback plan, including a personal tutoring programme for all ages and pupils, and a genuine effort—a genuine effort—to encourage people to come in work in our education system. Anything less is an abdication of responsibility to our country's future. I will end by repeating my plea to this Government. Focus on the challenges that are facing our country. On our country's priorities, not your priority. Scotland deserves a national recovery plan that meets our ambition to build a fairer and stronger Scotland together. Instead, what we have seen in this programme for government is just another example of a pattern that has defined the SNP Government approach. Promise big, never deliver, blame someone else and hope people have forgotten about it when they get round to promising it again. Frankly, Scotland deserves better. I now call on Alex Cole-Hamilton to open for the Liberal Democrats. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. After everything that we have been through, Scotland needs new hope right now. New hope in our fight against the climate emergency, where we take serious action on the way that we move about, the way that we build and heat our communities, and in the decarbonisation of our economy. New hope for young people that they might once again enjoy the world-beating education that they are used to, access to jobs of their choosing and get on the housing ladder if they wish, no matter where they come from. New hope for the health of this nation, where people can receive the care that they need in safely staffed settings, and where they are not lied to by a Government-sanctioned letter that tells them that they will be seen in 12 weeks when there isn't a hope that they will be seen in 50. In the pages of this programme, there is little in the way of that new hope to be found, but rather old hype reheated and, as Sarawaj has said, rebadged. Indeed, we have heard many of those assurances before. It has become something of a somber tradition for the Liberal Democrat response to the programme for government to highlight mental health waiting times. That will be the fourth year in a row that we have done so. Each year, the First Minister promises to bring down waiting times, but each year the waits for children, young people and adults all increase. The first time we raised it, 208 children were waiting more than a year. The next year, that number had more than troubled. That was something that the First Minister described as unacceptable, but last year we reached a new high of 1,500. Today, official statistics published this morning showed 2,138 children and young people waiting over a year for first-line care. Before the pandemic, the only thing that the SNP's waiting times recovery plan had delivered in three years was the longest queue in the national health service for our most vulnerable children and young people. Now, the SNP-Green coalition is promising to clear waiting times in two years. I welcome that. I really do, but I want to know how. The Scottish Government needs to immediately publish its working on this in full, because children and young people deserve access to the very best care. They must not be parked on medication or referred to inferior online interventions just because ministers have a target to reach. It requires proper investment. On top of the £120 million already secured by the Scottish Liberal Democrats in the last year's budget, and an ironclad plan to increase the workforce. A similar laser beam focus will be needed to tackle the drug deaths catastrophe that Anas Awad just mentioned. I sincerely hope that this is the last year that we have to raise these problems in this chamber. Laying aside those concerns, there are aspects of the I will to the minister. I thank Mr Cole-Hamilton for giving way. Since this Government came to power, there has been an increase in CAMHS staffing of almost 80 per cent. We will continue to do our best for young people across this country, but I say to him respectfully that it is not helpful when he calls some of the services that are being delivered inferior. Alex Cole-Hamilton If you are referred to a website called Beating the Blues when you have anxiety or self-harming behaviour, that is an inferior intervention. You may have invested in CAMHS work for us, but the truth of the reality of this was found in the statistics published this morning. You cannot ignore this problem minister. There are aspects of this programme that Liberal Democrats do welcome on school meals, on the child payment, on Covid business support. We welcome overdue expansion of funded childcare, but we will be playing close attention to the capacity strain in the sector and how flexibility is afforded to those needs of families who work irregular hours or have training needs. We also welcome the planned reform of the Gender Recognition Act, because the GRA is harming people every day. Reforms do not seek to endanger women or create an environment for predation. Instead, they will offer trans and non-binary people the dignity and freedom enjoyed by those countries such as Ireland and France, who have already reformed their gender recognition laws. Those are countries in which concerns about a suggested link between self-id and abuse have just not been realised. It is because this Government deferred parliamentary consideration of those reforms that this debate has become so toxic. Alex Cole-Hamilton will have seen that Police Scotland today accepted corporate criminal liability for events around the M9 crash in 2015. Obviously, the case is still alive, so I am restricting what I can say. However, this is clearly a significant case with consequences for both the police and the Government. Does he think that it would be appropriate for the Government to consider apologising for what happened? Mr Cole-Hamilton, before you resume your contribution, can I just also stress that this case is still alive and therefore you should approach the subject with caution? I will certainly proceed with that caution. Willie Rennie makes a very powerful point, but those are not matters for me. I am quite certain that he would have intervened on the First Minister earlier, had he been permitted to. Can I take this opportunity to offer the First Minister the opportunity to address his concerns by intervention just now? Alex Cole-Hamilton, please resume your seat for a second. Just on the point of clarification, the First Minister's contribution this afternoon was in the form of a statement, and the member will be aware that statements are given with no interventions or interruptions accepted. I think that Mr Cole-Hamilton will be aware that that is what the bureau agreed to. I am just making an offer to the First Minister to respond to Willie Rennie's point if she will be some way. First Minister, I think that it is particularly important that I behave responsibly in responding to this. I am not aware of the stage of the court case today, but it may well be a live criminal case, therefore it would not be appropriate for me to respond in substance as soon as it is possible for the Scottish Government to do so, however, we will. Alex Cole-Hamilton. In relation to the nature of the statement that the First Minister gave, is it not the case that the First Minister herself insisted that there should be a statement today with no interventions and not a case of convention or procedure of this Parliament? Mr Kerr, I have attended the same bureau meetings as you have attended, and we have discussed this matter and the bureau agreed that that was the way forward. I would also add, as the member will be aware, that issues concerning programme for government debates are always under review, and that will be the case as we go forward. I am very grateful to the First Minister for taking time to address Willie Rennie's concerns. The centralisation of Police Scotland, but also the careless manner in which it was rammed through will forever be one of the biggest mistakes of this Government. It was not just control rooms that descended into chaos, it was the target culture that went with it—stop and surge. The experience of botched rush centralisation of the police in Scotland is one of the many reasons that we in the Liberal Democrats are so worried about the planned ministerial takeover of social care. In today's statement, we see some further detail about those proposals for a national care service, but that term itself is deceiving. The First Minister has many talents, but she is not some 21st century Nye Bevan. The NHS, our most trusted national institution, was forged in the rubble and the poverty of war. It answered a need for treatment that was free at the point of delivery. It has established a template for socialised medicine the world over. To call it a national care service is disingenuous. There has been no suggestion that this will be a socialised model of care. It certainly won't be offered free at the point of delivery. This is a gimmick and a ministerial paragraph, as such Scottish Liberal Democrats stand with the RCN and other stakeholders who believe that those proposals will distract from and delay implementation of other important reforms. I want to address the centrepiece of the coalition government's agenda. I start with a reflection on their new partners. Only in Catalonia will you find another green party that seeks to blend environmentalism with separatism. Everywhere else, the international green movement is rightly dedicated to strengthening ties with neighbours as the logical and progressive route to addressing the global threats that face us all. The coalition agreement confirmed last week will be greeted with concern by those who vote green on the basis of the climate emergency. The Scottish Greens have hitched their wagon to an administration that has repeatedly missed its own emissions targets, in large part due to ministerial disinterest for anything unconnected to the constitution. You would hope that green ministers would relish the opportunity to uphold the SNP's feet to the fire on this, but far from anchoring the attention of Government to the climate emergency, where every nation in this world should be, that existential crisis that we all face inexplicably plays second fiddle once again to independence. Indeed, the First Minister had not drawn breath before the road map to that shared goal was laid out. She has clearly learned nothing from taking the independence referendum campaign off pause on the eve of a deadly second wave last year. The hour is late, the world is on fire, I don't have time. If the Greens won't step up and prioritise the climate emergency, then Liberal Democrats will, because the last thing that we need right now is the introspection of another referendum. Despite everything, this coalition will drive for and hold by one by legal means or otherwise, that despite platitudes around a new prospectus, they will likely ask these people to vote on a proposition in the blind. This land of milk and honey, this little right and be all right on the night approach, seems to be the central pillar around everything else is built. All this at a time when there are warning lights blinking across the dashboard of public policy, so I say to them, if you have civil service time for a new white paper, get them to focus on the business of going. Mr Cole-Hamilton, could you bring your remarks to the committee? I am just closing now, Presiding Officer, and there are many aspects of public policy crying out for your attention. Presiding Officer, Scotland does need new hope right now for the climate, for our patients, for our young people and our businesses. Mr Cole-Hamilton, have asked if you could bring your remarks to conclusion, please. To that requires each of us to set aside the battles of the past and work together towards a genuine and deep point of future. I now move to the open debate, and I would call John Mason to be followed by Annie Wells. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer, and I appreciate the opportunity to take part in the debate. It certainly looks like there is a wide range of issues coming up to build on the SNP's excellent record over the past 14 years. In passing, I welcome the abolition of the dental charges, the victims' commissioner, more affordable housing and mental health to be 10 per cent of the front-line health spending. However, for me, one of the highlights of any year is the budget. Although the actual bill will have its own timetable, there is now agreement that all of us in committees should be thinking about the budget all the year round. First, on the question of the budget timetable, I hope that Westminster will be more responsible this year and hold its budget first, preferably during the autumn, so that we can then set our budget in light of that, and local government, right across the UK, can then know where they stand for their own budgets. The idea that Westminster should hold its budget in March is frankly irresponsible. It is easy enough for us all to say that we want more money for this, or for that. Just this morning at the finance committee, we heard suggestions such as increased child payments and reduced business rates. However, there was reluctance to say where the money should come from. We have seen it again this afternoon from Anas Sarwar. We were told this morning that doubling the child payment would be some £220 million. Presumably, quadrupling it would be at least £440 million, and we need to know where that money might come from. It is more challenging to say that there should be more money, for mental health, but, to balance that, there would be less for hospitals, or to argue for more for colleges, but less for universities. That is the responsible way of looking at things. I say both to the Opposition parties and to the committees of Parliament that I hope that, as we go through the budget process, if they have different priorities from the Scottish Government, they will say so. It would also make the budget process and scrutiny more meaningful, and I think that the public would engage more if we had some more realistic alternative proposals, with higher expenditure in some areas and lower in others. The committees in the past have been reluctant to say that any sector should get less money. However, it seems clear that sitting on the finance committee, and especially referring to a spice briefing that we had this morning, that, quote, tough spending and taxation choices await. I would encourage committees to seriously consider bringing recommendations if they are reducing in one area and increasing in another. Then I would like to move on to the plans for the national care service. There have been lots of very good aspects of care up until now, including in-care homes, at-home and other aspects of care. However, there have also been aspects that could be improved, one of which has been traditionally low pay for care workers, many of whom have tended to be women. We, as a Parliament and as a country, have some choices to make. Do we want a more localised approach with different fees, different standards and different wages all over the country, which some people would call a postcode lottery? Or do we want a more consistent approach in fees, standards and wages, but some people would call that over-centralisation? Those are serious questions that we are going to have to grapple with. John Mason will agree with me that setting some type of national care service is hugely ambitious, something that Mr Sarwar refused to acknowledge in his comments earlier on. I think that politicians have tried to dress that up and pretend that they can have both consistency and local decision making, but in reality they have to prioritise one of those, more centralisation and consistency or more localisation. We are also going to take seriously consider the cost of any national care service. If there are consequentials from Westminster, that is well and good. However, that should not be funded by national insurance increases. NIC is a regressive type of income tax and kicks in for the lowest paid workers some £3,000 earlier than income tax does. Income tax is not perfect by any means, but it is more progressive and means that those who are more able to pay do pay more. By contrast, NIC increases hit the less well off hardest. COSLA has said that the national care service is a distraction, and I certainly do not agree with that. However, it will come at a cost and we need to tackle that. It was obviously difficult to prepare this speech with very little knowledge of what it would be in today's statement, so can I just finally mention one or two other issues? The gender recognition bill is likely to be interesting. Views on it are very polarised, and I am not sure if we can find middle ground that we can all agree on, or if it is inevitable that one side will defeat the other. However, I do hope that we can handle this bill within Parliament in a civilised way. On the whole, I felt that we dealt with same-sex marriage fairly calmly within Parliament, even if feelings were running high outside, and I hope that we can do the same again. Some of us have signed up to the RSE Young Academy of Scotland charter for responsible debate, which talks about debates being informed, respectful and inclusive. So while we can disagree on issues like self-identification, I hope that we can accept that there is a range of views held, and we can be respectful even while we disagree. To come to the conclusion, there are many other topics in this statement, which I look forward to debate and discussion on, the not-proven verdict. There is to be a consultation, and I hope that one of the options will be having two verdicts that are proven and not proven. I welcome the fireworks bill, which will help the dogs trust, based in my constituency, with the terrible time that dogs and other people have with the fireworks. The minimum income guarantee and, of course, a referendum on Scottish freedom. So in conclusion, it is great to be back after the summer recess. I look forward to a busy year ahead. I think that this programme of government offers many opportunities, and I look forward to getting into more of the detail in the months ahead. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Since last year's debate on the programme for government, it is certainly true that much has changed. With more and more Scots protected by the vaccine roll-out, we can look to turn our attention to the major challenges that are facing us all, and how we address those challenges as a nation will define us for years to come. As Douglas Ross has already outlined, securing Scotland's economic recovery and creating jobs must be a top priority for this Parliament. That is why, on those benches, we have called on this programme for government to ditch plans for an unwanted second independence referendum and tackle the economic emergency facing us all. However, given the nature of my brief, I hope that you will indulge me as I would like to focus on our NHS, which is at crisis point. Even before the pandemic, Audit Scotland warned in 2019 that Scotland's NHS was under increasing pressure with rising demands and costs, while it was struggling to make key waiting time standards. Moving forward to 2021, the immense pressure brought forth by the pandemic has exasperated those challenges. Throughout the pandemic, health workers across Scotland have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of adversity. However, it is important that we are clear on the scale of the pressures facing our NHS as we head into the winter. As many services are at risk of completely spying out of control, we have got bodies such as the Royal College of Nursing have made clear that staff are exhausted, burnt out and demoralised following months of acute pressure. Several of the steps that are announced by the First Minister in her speech today are indeed welcome, not least the investment in our front-line services. However, those commitments are, frankly, long overdue, given the scale of challenges our services face. Take accident emergency, for example, which is on its knees. Last week, figures showed that Scotland recorded its third consecutive week of record lows for any performances. That means that more Scots, with nursing and medical staff pushed to the limit, are being forced to wait longer for emergency care. As staff working on the front line have acknowledged, those are the kind of figures that we typically see in the harshest winter months. That is not sustainable nor is it acceptable. Those pressures are having a clear knock-on effect on other emergency services that people rely on in times of need, such as the ambulance service. As many in this chamber will be aware of through their constituents, we are hearing cases of vulnerable people waiting hours in end for ambulances to arrive, in one case a staggering 16 hours. Nor, Presiding Officer, did the First Minister mention long Covid in her speech this afternoon, an awful aspect of the disease in which horrible symptoms can linger for weeks, even once on end. With figures pointed to around 70,000 suffering with long Covid in Scotland, it has a debilitating impact on people's physical and mental health. A failure to act also places further undue pressure on our NHS. That is why, with my colleague Dr Sandesh Gauhani spearheading, we have been demanding the Government treat long Covid with the seriousness it deserves. However, if the NHS recovery plan is anything to go by, we will have a long way to go. As part of our suggested— If the NHS recovery plan is anything to go by, it has a long way to go. Does she recognise that her party, the UK Government, has copied our NHS recovery plan? It is also looking to increase by 10 per cent. I would like to point out that our £1 billion investment is higher than the £600 million investment that Annie Wells says that the Tories will commit to NHS recovery. I was talking about long Covid and the £600 million that I spoke about was just to deal with the backlog that our NHS is facing and to help those front-line staff to achieve what they are being asked to achieve. However, as part of our suggested response, we have called for the establishment of specialist long Covid treatment clinics to offer the vital support to those who are worst affected. I recognise that the Government has set aside funding for research and innovation, but we are clear that urgent practical support is needed for long Covid assessment, treatment and rehabilitation. Put simply, with so many Scots suffering long Covid, many cannot afford to wait any longer for help. Over the years, we have sadly become accustomed to the shocking statistics on deaths linked to alcohol and drug addiction. Not only were alcohol specific deaths last year the highest they have been in 12 years, but drug deaths in Scotland have soared to record levels, with 2020 representing the seventh annual increase in a row. Given those awful records, and as Douglas Ross pointed out earlier, people rightfully expected new measures to form a key part of the NHS recovery plan. Yet again, we have been found wanting, with nothing new contained in the document to address alcohol and drug-related deaths. With that being a clear public health emergency, having significant implications on victims on the NHS, the Government must make that a top priority. With the backing of recovery groups, the Scottish Conservatives will bring forward a bold and ambitious right to recovery bill to Parliament. With additional funding targeted to residential rehab, we want to make sure that everyone can access the necessary treatment that they need to survive and get better. I recognise that our country has been gripped by the pandemic. Ensuring our healthcare system is match fit will be one of the greatest challenges that any Government will face. However, I remain concerned in several areas that this programme for government, at least in substance, fails to respond properly to the array of the greatest challenges that we face. I now call Jenny Minto to be followed by Pam Duncan-Glancy. It is a great privilege to speak in this debate on our programme for government for this parliamentary year. I spoke last week about the amazing natural larger that Argyll and Bute has, and I am very pleased to see that a good food nation bill will be laid before this Parliament. The link between diet and infection has been emphasised during the pandemic. That will be a most welcome piece of legislation. However, today I am going to concentrate on another of Argyll and Bute's natural resources, its wind, its water and its geography. All three of those combined to make Argyll and Bute a renewable energy powerhouse. By 2030, the Scottish Government aimed to generate 50 per cent of Scotland's overall energy consumption from renewable sources, helping Scotland to become a net zero economy. COP26 in Glasgow is our opportunity to limit global warming to 1.5 per cent. Onshore wind, solar and hydro all operate the length and breadth of my constituency. The proposed development of W1 will bring in offshore wind, and I am sure that it will not be long before the power of the tide in the sound of Islay will be captured. Over the summer, I have visited 11 islands across Argyll and Bute, many of which have invested in community, renewable energy schemes. When I first moved to Islay, I was part of a small team who established a community wind turbine. With the feed-in tariff regime that was available then, our turbine, as well as generating renewable energy for the grid, also created funds for our community. It is expected to raise around £2 million over its 20-year life, a local initiative with positive effects on the wealth, wellbeing and environment of the islanders. There are opportunities in the programme for government for islands to lead the way to reaching net zero emission targets by 2045, introducing 100 per cent renewable energy, creating circular economies, making homes and buildings greener to heat. Tackling waste and introducing sustainable transport. I have a few islands in my constituency that I know would be perfect to pilot that. Iona Renewable Energy has developed a local energy roadmap that lays out a vision for how a community-led scheme can work towards owning, generating, storing and using energy on the island. It is in discussions with the Scottish Government just now to take it to the next stage. While East Contire Renewable Energy Group is highlighting the socio-economic implications of wind farms and maximising community benefit to the community for agreed developments, it is also exploring the opportunities for community shared ownership in new developments to help fund projects that are identified in their local area plan. A circular economy is important to make this work, and I cannot leave Contire without mentioning CS wind. The situation is so disappointing for the Campbelltown community, with a highly skilled workforce and a factory sitting empty, both unproductive. I will work with the community, high and the Scottish Government to try to get a resolution to this story state of affairs. Throughout Cowell, hydropower schemes are dotted across the landscape. Many are micro, but lost driven, built in 1950, is still providing power. That was infrastructure investment 70 years ago, and I welcome the establishment of a national infrastructure company to deliver for the public good. On Friday, I had the pleasure of attending the official opening of the Glen No Hydro scheme. With a capacity of two megawatts, it can provide sufficient renewable electricity to power around 1,400 homes each year. The scheme will also be investing £3,000 into the local community every year. The work was completed using Scottish contractors, and NatureScot has complemented the regeneration work that has embedded the scheme perfectly into the landscape. It is clear that one size does not fit all, but to reach net zero by 2045, we need to be flexible in our sources of energy. Harnessing our natural energy, looking at the best schemes for the environment and investing appropriately in our workforce to enable a just transition are all key elements of the programme for government. I say that the programme for government pledges to increase annual native woodland creation target to 4,000 hectares. That is welcome. However, she will know that the biodiversity strategy has a target of between 3,000 and 5,000 hectares, that she is sharing my concern that we could be seeing an actual decrease instead of an increase. I thank the member for that intervention, and I will cover that later on in my speech. Our garland butte is at the centre of a perfect storm for renewable energy, for this to work for everyone, we need to ensure that communities are properly informed and consulted by the power providers about changes to hardware in their area and find the best solutions. I look forward to the consultation on a new onshore wind policy statement. Our garland butte holds another very important natural asset in combating climate change, the carbon sink that is the Celtic rainforest. I have to declare an interest here, as the Parliament's champion for these amazing places. Yesterday, I had the pleasure and educational experience of visiting one near Crinin. Plant Life Scotland's website explains that the combination of high rainfall—there is a lot of that in our garland butte—and stable mild temperature make the woodlands very humid, allowing the growth for some really special residents, the lichen, mosses and liverworts, fungi and fherns. It is these species that really make the Celtic rainforest what they are. Not only do they help to maintain the humidity in the forest but they also give the forest that mysterious and magical feel. They certainly do. Those are of worldwide importance and I am pleased that there is an investment of £500 million by the Scottish Government to expand those natural habitats as a nature-based solution to the climate emergency backed by a natural environment bill. I am going to end on a very personal note. In 1999, I sat in my office in BBC Scotland watching the live broadcast of the reopening of the Scottish Parliament. I watched with pride and confidence as my home country took a major step on the road to be in charge of its own destiny. Little did I expect then to be standing here now representing our garland butte in the Parliament session, where a bill on a second independence referendum will be debated and I believe passed. The people of Scotland will soon have the opportunity, the right to vote on who they believe are best to lead Scotland to economic recovery and growth. Pam Duncan-Glancy, to be followed by Oliver Mundell. There are some announcement in today's programme that I and many will welcome, a national care service that ends non-residential care charges, a disability equality strategy and a bill to reform the GRA. I will work with the Government where I can on all of those matters and, in particular, where they reduce poverty and progress the quality in human rights. I am, however, really disappointed as some of the crucial things that I had hoped through today are missing. 26 per cent of children live in poverty in Scotland today. That is one in four children. One child is too many and one day too long. That is why I am deeply disappointed that the Government has not committed to doubling the Scottish child payment immediately. Doing that would make a massive difference to families right across Scotland right now. It would lift at least 10,000 children out of poverty. As it stands, we are set to miss the child poverty targets that we set ourselves in law. Targets agreed unanimously by this Parliament before the pandemic and without caveats. That is why not only are we disappointed that there is no commitment to increase the payment right now, but we are also deeply disappointed that the ambitions outlined on child poverty in the programme, ending which is something that we will be laser-focused on on those benches, do not go nearly far enough. The chamber will be aware that we in Scottish Labour believe that the Scottish Government must go further and faster. It must double the payment now and again within the year. An increase to £40 per week is the best chance that we have of meeting our interim child poverty target of 18 per cent. We did not pluck that figure out of the air. The IPPR and the De Joseph Rowntree Foundation have modelled that. In one action, we could lift a further 50,000 children from poverty and make a real difference to lives right across this country. I urge the SNP Green Government to recognise the urgency and the need to act now to tackle the scourge of poverty in the country. I am very grateful to the member for giving way. As the First Minister has said, the Government wants to increase the child payment as early as possible, but would the member recognise that there is a wide range of other actions that will reduce household costs and make a significant contribution to tackling child poverty from rents to school uniforms to public transport costs and many more? Yes, there are actions in the programme that will do that, but none of them alone or even together will reach the targets to reduce child poverty to 18 per cent in the time that we have. Also, 18 per cent of children still living in poverty is still a lot of children, so we need to go much harder and much faster on all of those things. With 260,000 children in Scotland living in poverty, there is no more time to waste. In 2019, the SNP announced the payment as a game changer, but it is only a game changer if the game has changed and action delivered. Announcements alone do not do that. Not only has the Government not delivered a doubling of the payment yet, not all children who should get it yet. There are currently 125,000 children missing out on the Scottish Government's bridging payments as a result of discrepancy in the eligibility criteria between the Scottish child payment and free school meals. I know that the Government is aware of that and I am still waiting for clarification as to what it intends to do about that. It is not good enough for children to fall through the cracks when we all know that they are there and we know that immediate actions are needed to fill them. Because those gaps are not just abstract concepts in parliamentary speeches, they are real children, real families and real lives. The Scottish Government must act now to get payments to those children and work towards full roll-out to all six to 16-year-olds. It has to do all it can to ensure that families who receive the Scottish child payment and are able to receive it and those who are not able to receive it yet get it. That is why we have repeatedly called for a full roll-out and automation. Beyond increasing it, it should introduce a supplement for lone-parent families and families with a disabled person in them, too, groups that are disproportionately in poverty. We also know that if the cruel cut to universal credit goes ahead and our colleagues at Westminster and other on these benches and others here will do all that we can to oppose that, some families in Scotland will lose their eligibility for the Scottish child payment. We have asked, and I ask again, that the Scottish Government commit that it will continue to pay the Scottish child payment to those families who currently get it. We cannot simply blame that on the Tories and Westminster and move on. We have to act here, too. We have the powers and the Scottish Government must use them to get money in people's pockets. Members in the chamber will have heard me say time and again, please do not fall into the trap of believing that there is nothing we can do. In my experience, when people say that they cannot, it is because they have not seen your potential to act. In Scotland, we have that potential. We are just not using our powers to their full potential. The things that we have not heard in the programme for government show that. Right now, all that we are doing with the powers that we have on disability benefits is improving the administration of them, implementing a real book passed down from the DWP. The programme that I outlined today includes no plans for changes to eligibility requirements for or adequacy of those payments. The Scottish Government could have made a truly radical new system. Instead, it has ignored calls to reform that part of it. We must be ambitious. We are here to transform lives. Tackling poverty is a mission, then he is all of government focused on it and Parliament. It should be a national mission. That is why we on those benches will push the Governments, both of them, to use all existing powers and go hard and fast to do it. As we come through the pandemic, we must think bigger and bolder than before. We cannot simply go back to normal. We have to go forward to something better. Where there is a will to really do this, there is always a way. We can increase the Scottish child payment with a supplement for families with a disabled person in them right now. We can write our own real book on eligibility for and adequacy of disability payments right now. We can reform the Scottish welfare fund so that it actually acts as a lifeline for all who need it. We can reform carers allowance so that more of the hundreds of thousands of carers who do not get any financial help get some. If this Government is serious about ending child poverty, progressing a minimum income and genuinely making Scotland the best place to grow up and live in, it will do these things and it will take action now. Thank you, Ms Duncan Glancy. I now call Oliver Mundell to be followed by Mark Ruskell. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Far from offering a bold and ambitious plan to help us rebuild and recover from the pandemic, this SNP Government is simply offering more of the same. Back to the tired arguments peppered with grudge and grievance. This approach did not cut it pre-Covid and it certainly does not cut it now. Unless, of course, we are talking about the street cleansing in the First Minister's home city of Glasgow, where cuts seem to be the SNP's only answer. The truth is that it does not matter how any shiny new policies and initiatives Nicola Surgeon sets out, because the people of Scotland know the reality. They know, just like in previous years, the promises that are made are not kept. They know that the gap between the rhetoric and what happens in our communities is growing with each of the SNP's 14 years in office. Worse still, the level of ambition has dropped, and the SNP's promises this year seem even less noteworthy than last. Yet another sign of a tired Government that is out of new ideas. Nicola Surgeon might believe that she pulled off a great contract in bringing the Greens into her Government to spruce it up, but I suspect that she will come to see that being anti-jobs, urban-centric and wanting to break up the UK are the very things that stood between her and the SNP majority that she craved and expected. She did not really need the Greens to help with that. The sad reality is that nothing that we have heard today takes away from the fact that we have a nationalist Government here at Holyrood that is more interested in a referendum than in recovery. How those in power expect people to believe that a referendum is possible in the first half of this Parliament while simultaneously claiming that it will not take place until after the pandemic is beyond me? That is a nonsense claim that hangs like a dark cloud over this programme for government. Worse still, it is a betrayal of the many sacrifices people across this country have made during the last 18 months. Surely to goodness we deserve a break and a chance to focus on the things that really matter. That means not just talking about the challenges, but having the will to take forward the policies that are needed without any distractions and the inevitable division. Take education, an area where past promises loom large. Whatever happened to closing the attainment gap, why can ministers still not tell us when they expect to see progress? What happened to the promise to make education the top priority? Perhaps the Government could remind us what happened to the planned education bill in the last Parliament. Silence, Presiding Officer, because rather than sort out any of the issues the SNP have created on their own watch and admitting that they have got things wrong and that their decisions have caused standards in our education system to decline, this SNP Government would rather paper over the cracks with a combination of new policy initiatives that sound nice in theory but do very little in practice and more radical reform that makes it hard to measure outcomes at all. The fact that we had to wait for a report from the OECD for them to admit that anything was wrong is depressing. The criticisms in the report are even more shocking when you realise just how hard ministers worked to influence the findings and the limit that they put on dissenting voices even taking part. It shouldn't have taken international concerns for the SNP to agree to act. Parents, teachers and educationalists here in Scotland as well as Opposition parties in our national Parliament have been voicing concerns for years. Surely anyone who cares about Scottish education would actually want to work with people to make things better, not simply ignore them. As I said last week and I ask again now, where is the big vision? Where are the plans to turn education around? When will we see a return to the tried and tested methods that we already know work? Silence, Presiding Officer, because instead all that we get from this SNP Government is the galling sight of the First Minister patting herself on the back for the belated decision to reverse SNP cuts to teach her numbers, cuts to teach her numbers that left us so badly short during the pandemic. No apology for doing it in the first place and no apology to the young people who have already been let down. So they plough on making the same mistakes over and over again. We see this today in terms of today's announcement on childcare. It is something that we on these benches support and called for. But, once again, where is the detail? Where is the practical, evidence-based work on how this pledge will be delivered in practice? It comes at a time when existing early learning and childcare settings are struggling to recruit the staff that they need in order to fulfil existing plans. As is so often the case with this SNP Government, providers feel most annoyed not about the substance of what is being announced and set out in this Parliament, but about the fact that no-one took the time to seek their views. There must be a better way to do Government than this. In closing, this is not a programme for Government that rises to the challenge of the day. It is merely a PR exercise that tries and fails to repackage the SNP's tired thinking and policies as something new and bold. Perhaps too much focus over the summer has been on getting the Greens on board and backing up their extremist plans rather than looking right across this chamber and right across our society to build a forward-looking coalition based on new ideas that respond to the challenges of today, rather than dragging us back to the arguments of the past. I now call Mark Ruskell, who will be followed by Paul MacGlennan. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Green MSPs warmly welcome this programme, coming on the back of our truly historic agreement with the Scottish Government. This Parliament was designed from its very first day to share power across the chamber and with the people. Since 1999, every major political party, except one, has entered government at Holyrood. Now, more than ever, it is the right time for the Scottish Greens to step up. While we are the first generation to witness the catastrophe of climate change, we are also the last generation who can address it. Those who deny the need for stronger action on the climate, when our world, our home, is literally burning down our betraying future generations. The transition that we have to make must be just, it must leave no one behind. For sectors like oil and gas, there must be more than a vague hope that the new jobs will appear soon. That is why I am delighted that we have launaslaters drive an expertise at the heart of government, someone who understands the industry from the inside out, who knows how to use the toolbox to deliver that transition. A new deal to double the capacity of onshore wind energy, support for marine and offshore renewables, a £500 million transition fund for the North East, and a requirement for just transition plans for sites like Mossmorran are really just the beginning. That deal will deliver transformative change. Take housing, a basic human right, but it is a disgrace that many tenants and their families now pay more each month in rent than it would cost to pay a mortgage on the same property. We urgently need a new deal for tenants, and I am absolutely delighted that Patrick Harvie, as the first-ever minister for tenants' rights, will be leading on the delivery of new rights, rent controls and regulation. If I can get a time back, I will take a brief intervention. Does the member accept that, despite perseverance, rent controls have failed in Sweden and have only created a second hand market of sublet properties? I think that there is international experience that shows that we can learn and move forward. I think that the green deal and the commitment to tackle this issue, because of the poverty that we see in our society—it has already been pointed out in this debate—means that we will come forward with a package that will work and will deal with this crisis. Our agreement commits to building new, better homes and the retrofitting of existing homes at a pace and scale that has never been seen before. Over £2 billion of investment in warm homes with standards that will keep the bar high is a green new deal for housing, where public investment leaves us in private investment, creating new jobs in the supply chain, tackling the climate change and fuel poverty. We need more homes, but they need to be affordable and future proof. They must form neighbourhoods that are designed for people to safely get around by foot, wheel or cycle, connected to local services and green space. Our reforms to planning and road safety will start to deliver that vision. While a travelling of investment in active travel will allow the biggest reprioritisation of road space seen in generations, to put it simply, places will need to put people first instead of cars. Investing in the links between our places will continue to be important, but those investments need to deliver on traffic reduction, safety, community benefits and climate adaptation first and foremost. The days of simply investing in roads that lock in car dependency are over. We expect a strategic transport projects review to deliver a step change unless I can get the time back. I thank the member for giving way, but does he understand that my constituents and many across rural Scotland are concerned to hear plans to halt road building? Does he recognise that there are some parts of the country that are not well served at the moment? Mark Ruskell? I think that the member needs to recognise, as I live in a rural area as well, that some roads will be absolutely necessary for the reasons that I have already pointed out, for safety issues, for climate adaptation, for connectivity, but these days of unlimited growth of roads is just a waste of public money. There are better priorities for us to invest in now, and we expect that to come, Deputy Presiding Officer, through the strategic transport projects review, a step change, £5 billion investment in rail, with a public operator running rail services in the public interest, a new funding for councils to develop models of public bus ownership and the delivery of free bus travel for under-22s. There will be a strong future for these public services as well. Under this agreement, our debt to the natural world will start to be repaid. Legally binding nature targets will be set to restore nature and drive the reform of planning, agriculture and fisheries policies that have led to catastrophic collapses in biodiversity in the past. The nature restoration fund, which was established by the Greens under the last budget, will be dramatically increased to drive action. Nature networks of Atlantic rainforests, pollinator superhighways and kelp forests can now be planned, paid for and protected. Our connection with the natural world will be strengthened with a third national park in Scotland. Our human rights to a healthy environment, the need for environmental courts to deliver justice and a future generations commission will all be advanced, while we work with the Government to reform driven grass mowers, crack down on wildlife crime and even properly bring back the beaver. This is a Parliament where we must not hold back on the rights of the most vulnerable groups. No one should be made destitute because of their immigration status. Trans and non-binary people deserve as much dignity, equality and inclusion as the rest of us, while we need to double down to eradicate hatred and misogyny wherever it rears its ugly head. Covid has brought into sharp relief the need for action to address the mental health crisis, the staffing issues in our schools and the need to provide care as a basic human right. Our agreement will give Parliament the foundations for change in those areas. More availability of mental health services in our communities, 5,000 new teachers with a stronger additional support needs workforce and the first step next year to establish that pivotal national care service. In closing, the Scottish Greens are a party in a hurry. We will stretch the powers of this Parliament up to their limits and then we will ask the people if they want to complete the journey to independence. We look forward to working with all those who share our vision. I am extremely proud to be talking about the programme for government in the next six minutes or so, but I want to start with a quote. It is politics is not a game but a serious business. Who said that? Didn't know other than Winston Churchill. Indeed, it is a serious business. The SNP won an overwhelming victory in May. Don't forget that with a manifesto that deals with serious issues that we face now on climate change, Covid and of course Brexit. One of those in normal times would be difficult enough. Having all three requires a programme for government that deals with all those issues. Although those challenges are all daunting, they still present us with an opportunity to do things differently. We have heard Tory Benchys complain about support for business, yet they supported the Brexit withdrawal in the middle of the pandemic. Look at the impact that we are facing now in Scotland. Empty shelves and massive drops in exports. At this time, we need a steady hand, a steady government to guide us through the next five years. People in Scotland overwhelmingly voted for the First Minister and this Government to take Scotland forward. The programme for government quite rightly focuses on the recovery from Covid but also on sustainable recovery looking to the future. I want to focus on a few key areas. As we emerge from the pandemic, we will strengthen and improve our health and social care system, so that everyone gets the care that they need while recognising and repaying the efforts of staff given the toll that the pandemic has had on them. On health, we will see the NHS benefit from a £2.5 billion increase over the term of this Parliament, an increase of 20 per cent. That will help the health of Scotland to recover from the pandemic. The creation of the national care service will also mark the biggest reform of health and social care since the creation of the NHS and will help to ensure that every patient's care journey is focused on their individual journey. The Scottish Government is already investing record amounts in our NHS, but that 20 per cent increase will help to transform the way that we deliver services and ensure that the system is ready to meet the challenges that still lie ahead. As I said, the recovery from Covid-19 across all of society is the Scottish Government's first and most pressing priority. I know that the programme for government will allow our health service to continue managing Covid-19 and our longer-term population health challenges. Primary care funding will go up by 25 per cent over the course of this Parliament, with half of all front-line health spending invested in community health services. I know and I know that discussions by my constituents are extremely important. It will include investment of £29 million to provide an additional £78,000 diagnostic procedures, £78,000, as well as increasing in-patient and day-case activity by 10 per cent in 2022-23, and out-patient activity by 10 per cent in 2025-26. I look forward to working with the health secretary and to seeing the benefits of that at East Lothian community hospital. I also welcome the additional £250 million investment and increasing investment to tackle the drugs issues that we face on Scotland. I also want to touch on families. We heard Douglas Ross say that the recent agreement was anti-family between the Scottish Government and the Greens. I want to warmly welcome the introduction of free-rapper and care for low-income families. Nearly 1,800 families in my constituency benefit from the Scottish child payment, but are now set to be hit by the universal credit, set to be imposed by the Tories and supported by the Benches Opposite. We hear silence on this—complete silence—and the regional MSP, which I competed against, supported it in a radio interview just a few weeks ago. Free-rapper and care will be much, much welcome. We will give family support and the ability to access services that works for them. On top of the 1140-hours early learning childcare, it shows this Government's commitment to families. Then we have the £500 million whole family wellbeing fund, which is very welcome also. I am aware that I have only got six minutes, but I want to welcome the announcement on gender recognition reform. It is much needed. The announcement on tackling misogyny is also much welcome. There are measures on tackling climate change and, of course, the ability of people in Scotland to be given the chance to decide on its own future with the pro-independence majority—I have to make progress. That is a programme for Covid recovery, supporting families and investing in our health recovery. I look forward to delivering on the programme and the benefits of my constituents. We will feel and he is nodding. Mark Griffin will be followed by the final speaker in the open debate, Emma Harper. Mr Griffin, you have around six minutes. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I draw members' attention to my entry in the register of interests, which shows that I am an owner of a rented property in North Lanarkshire. Presiding Officer, today we learnt research by Shelter Scotland put the cost to councils of housing. Those made homeless due to evictions to manager rears at £28 million in the year before the pandemic. Perhaps anticipating that research, the sector reiterated the statement that is signed with the Government in June to say that it does not evict those who are working on a repayment plan. Edinburgh Council's SNP housing community, after the council decided to end its short-lived eviction ban, also said that we will only ever go to court as an absolute last resort, but tellingly the council does go to court and in the ad words to prompt engagement with tenants. If we ever needed an example that our housing system is broken, a press comment from a housing community charged with overseeing a council's homelessness service, telling the press that uses court proceedings to shunt tenants to pay ar rears, is just one. The Shelter, in its understanding the true cost of evictions in Scotland report, said that just 20 per cent of social rented evictions result in the property being recovered. The cost of eviction when it happens isn't just financial. The process can be highly stressful, potentially damaging to both mental and physical health and has lasting impacts on the mental health of children. I welcome today's confirmation that work is well underway on the rented sector strategy. This programme for government will leave tenants waiting for years. There will not be a housing bill this year and we don't yet know when we will see legislation on rent controls and a new private rented sector regulator, as the Government ambition is only to introduce legislation in a quote by the end of the parliamentary sessions. No legislation for rent controls mean vital data won't start to be collected. Unlike the planning and transport bills in the last session, their implementation is then put into the next session of Parliament. Of course, the SNP and Toys threw out the chance to legislate for a fair rent bill in February in the previous parliamentary session. No housing bill means the homelessness prevention duty is also unlikely to become a reality until the second half of this Parliament. That means tenants will have to rely on promises rather than rights in legislation. In meetings that I have had over the summer, I was told that the bulk of housing to 2040 must get under way in the next 18 months if it is to be a success and that includes the rented sector strategy. Before the summer, we debated at length the need for an extension to the evictions ban in the coronavirus extension bill and 10 weeks on the promise grant fund has not been launched. We are told that the Government is working at pace but it will be the end of the year before hard-up tenants even get access to the fund. Many no doubt, including the four and five unsuccessful under the loan scheme, will be well into the six months notice period by now. Already, evictions are up in the social sector by 500 per cent. The premise of that loan fund was woefully inadequate at success rate dismal. More than twice as many as were successful were rejected and many of those were because they failed as a result of a credit check. Rather than the revolving door of threatening court action and then having to rehouse those who are homeless, it was symptomatic again of a broken housing system. It is not unreasonable to comprehend that tenants who were struggling to pay their rent, who were in arrears and in such a dire financial position, were then seeking support from the Government and might not have satisfactory credit records. Our homes have never been worth so much to us as they are now. They are the first line of defence from Covid but the summer has exposed a gulf between the halves, comfortable enough to own, possibly working from home, making renovations, with house prices shooting up at the fastest rate in 14 years compared with the number of households and temporary accommodation, the highest on record, and they are now staggering 199 days. Meetings with stakeholders have discussed that there is no true understanding of housing affordability, private, social or otherwise. In fact, nor does the Government know how to define it. It does not have or collected data, it needs to be able to determine what affordable is. Is it any wonder that those organisations out there describe the system as broken? At a plethora of commitments, including getting to EPCC in all our housing stock, I welcome, but we are a long way off tenants and owners understanding their responsibilities or the costs ahead. Those reforms are not in substantial, they strike right at the heart of tenants' rights and housing affordability in general because it is tenants and owners, not the Government, who will fund those changes. I was told repeatedly over the summer about the pressure on tenants' rents, which funds new builds and is becoming considerable. Although affordable supply grant looks set to increase, tenants' costs should be stretched further by funding those changes to energy efficiency and decarbonisation. Citizens Advice Scotland, in discussion with landlords and letting agents, have found that their support of greater energy efficiency is a perceived lack of financial and technical support to inform decision making. If we believe that housing is a human right, we should be affirming those rights for tenants in law before substantial housing reforms are implemented. We had the opportunity to pass a fair rents bill towards the end of the last session of Parliament, but we will not get the opportunity to pass a fair rents bill until the end of this session is a glaring omission from this programme for government. Before I call Emma Harper, I remind all members who participated in the debate that they need to be in for the closing speeches that we will move to very shortly. I call Emma Harper for around six minutes. From the outset, I want to join the First Minister in recognising the impact that the pandemic has had on every part of our society, in particular on the physical and mental health of our fellow citizens. My condolences go to everyone who has lost a loved one to Covid-19 and, equally, my thanks go to all those health and social care staff in the community and in hospitals who are working every day to keep us safe, healthy and well. I remind members that I am still currently a registered nurse. This programme for government will work to protect families, businesses and communities across Scotland and is focused on the recovery from the pandemic. Since being elected in May, the Scottish Government has already taken positive steps to support our NHS and health and social care workforce. The Government has published an NHS recovery plan, setting out how it will achieve a 10 per cent increase in activity and key services. As a member of the Health and Sport Committee, we heard from Cabinet Secretary Humza Yousaf today about the plans that are in place to address many of the health needs identified, including non-communicable diseases, which has been highlighted in the British Heart Foundation's report that was published yesterday. A 4 per cent average pay increase this year for NHS agenda for change staff has already been implemented and was seen in pay packets in the staff. In June this year, the Government is already increasing direct investment in mental health services by 25 per cent over the course of the Parliament. That is particularly welcome, given the impact of the pandemic and its restrictions that have had on health and wellbeing. The Government has also begun the consultation on legislation to establish a national care service, and I look forward to closely engaging in the progress of the legislation. The first three rapid diagnostic test centres for cancer have already opened. One is in Dumfries and Galloway in the new DGRI building. That is good news and good progress. However, I want to raise an issue of cancer pathway arrangements across Dumfries and Galloway. Currently, those with cancer across D&G and in particular Wigtonshire are required to travel to Edinburgh, a 266-mile round trip for types of cancer treatments such as radiotherapy instead of going to Glasgow, which is closer. That is because D&G is part of South East Scotland cancer network and not West of Scotland network, which is closer. NHS D&G says that patients are offered a choice of place to attend, but constituents tell me that they are not. Additionally, unlike other rural parts of Scotland, such as the Highlands and Islands in Ayrshire and Arran, patients across D&G do not automatically receive reimbursement for travel, which is over 30 miles. The reimbursement that can be accessed is means-tested. I, along with Dr Gordon Bair, Dr Angela Armstrong and Galloway community hospital action group, have been calling for changes to those issues, i.e. place of treatment and travel costs. I will be grateful for action on those points as we progress this ambitious programme for government. The programme for government also commits the Scottish Government to building on our already world-beating environmental policies in the face of the global climate emergency. In doing so, I welcome that the Government has committed to protecting outdoor green spaces and promoting and enhancing biodiversity. We know and we have… Yes, I will, thanks. I thank the member for taking intervention. As a rural MSP, she will no doubt recognise that the R100 programme for national digital infrastructure was announced in 2017 with a commitment to be completed by 2021. It is now not expected to be completed in the centre and south of Scotland areas by 2024 and 2025, respectively, not until 2027 in the north. Does the member agree that our SNP Government is great at big announcements and even regurgitated ones, as we have heard today, but terrible at delivering an affaring rural Scotland? I thank Finlay Carson for that intervention. What I would say is that I am really keen to progress the work that is being taken forward to use whatever digital technology that we can to enhance everybody's access to the internet. We know that that is really important, as we are planning our recovery from this pandemic. I would like to continue, Presiding Officer, and to talk about the PFG, the programme for government, which outlines a specific commitment to establish a new national park in Scotland. I want to highlight the work of the Galloway National Park Association, who are lobbying for it to be located in Galloway, particularly through their new campaign, It's Got to be Galloway, which I support. The programme for government also makes a commitment to implementing the STPR2, which will improve road rail and infrastructure across Scotland. In response to Oliver Mundell's intervention on Mark Ruskell about roads, Patrick Harvie last week said on ITV Representing Border, the minister said that he does not impose improvements on the roads, on the grounds of safety and efficiency. He is specifically noting the A75 and the A77. I certainly cannot wait to hear what investment will be announced when the STPR2 is announced later this autumn. It is full of progressive commitments for the programme for government, including the doubling of the carers allowance, and it is established in the Neurodiversity Commissioner. There are improvements in tennis rights and protecting health. I look forward to the programme for government being implemented. The Conservative benches finally continually say that the Scottish Government is prioritising independence over recovery from the pandemic. I would instead argue that independence will aid our recovery. I will give Parliament full control over our finances, criminal justice, reforms to drug policy, employment law and equalities. Without full control over them, the Parliament is restricted in what we can do. Yes, independence is required to deliver the fair, progressive and equal Scotland, and I want to be part of that. Ms Harper, we now move to the closing speeches before we do so. I note that John Mason does not appear to be in the chamber, although he participated in the debate earlier on. With that, I will call Sarah Boyack for around eight minutes. It has been an interesting debate today. There are some elements of the programme for government that the Scottish Labour will welcome, but we want to be a constructive opposition. Where we think that the Scottish Government is getting it wrong and is not going far enough, we will be absolutely clear and hold them to account. We will suggest the alternative routes that they need to take. For example, we will support Anne's law. We will support the pardon for minors. It is long overdue. We will support the principle of a good food nation, but I would ask the Scottish Government to look at the work that my former colleague Elaine Smith and my current colleague Rhoda Grant have been doing because it is not the headlines that matter. It is the detail, the ambition and the delivery. I also want to welcome in that spirit the commitment to a new Edinburgh eye pavilion. It is something that was a major issue in the election. It became a cross-party issue. I am glad to hear that it included in today's commitment, but it was a one-liner. We want to know the details. We want to know what is going to be properly funded by the Scottish Government. We want a timescale because the old building is not now fit for purpose. There have been plans for NHS Lothian to replace it for years. It is not going to be enough to announce headline announcements. We need legislation that makes the difference our constituents need. The national care service is a case in point. The funding will be absolutely vital to make sure that it delivers. In the last Parliament, we saw patients stuck in hospital without the opportunity to access care, to step down care and years of underinvestment in care and adaptations to people's homes. However, a top priority has got to be to reinvest. It has got to make sure that we keep people who work hard as care workers, who have been through really difficult circumstances supporting their own families and the families that they work with during the pandemic. That is why Jackie Baillie's campaign, which is strongly supported by the Scottish Labour Party, to campaign for increased pay and national terms of conditions for all our care workers, is absolutely vital. That is the first action that is needed. We want to see the detailed commitment to that. The value of our care workers is making sure that they can develop their skills and making sure that we reverse the increases that we have just recently seen in delayed discharges, rising again, bad news for patients and their families. It reinforces the need for wider care in our community, which is something where we need proper local planning. We do not want a centralised national care service. We want our councils funded and empowered to work together so that we get the future demand met that we need to see addressed. We want to see a reverse to cuts in Edinburgh. At the point where we are seeing an increase in delayed discharge, we are seeing the proposal to close council care homes. Without a proper analysis of what is needed, without a look at future need and demand of the people who need that. In the closing speech from the SNP Government, I would be very keen to hear how the £800 million promised by the First Minister will be spent to make sure that we see the transformation in care that we need across our country, not just in terms of payment for care homes and care staff but also support for unpaid carers. Mark Griffin rightly highlighted the need to invest in our local councils so that they can deliver the investment in community services that people rely on, whether it is schools, whether it is the new housing that is needed. It is so fascinating to hear the First Minister offer £1.5 million for libraries across Scotland, especially given the proposed cuts in her own city. Our arts and cultural services are vital to the wellbeing of our recovery. That goes right across Scotland, and we need that investment. There is an irony that the Scottish Government is putting centre stage, the demand for more powers for themselves while centralising power from local councils. Fourteen years on, from the promise to scrap that it described as the unfair council tax, we have seen zero progress on that, even when there has been cross-party willingness to work with the SNP Government to come up with better solutions to enable our councils to be properly funded. We still have no idea what the Scottish Government would be proposing, so, again, more work needs to be done. Pam Duncan-Glancy and Anas Sarwar spoke passionately about the need to tackle child poverty. Even with today's announcement, we will still see children living in poverty. Exacerbated by the Tory Government's dangerous cut to universal credit, we need to be clear that the pandemic has pushed our country backwards. It has put people on low incomes under even more pressure. We need to make sure that our school students get a comeback plan so that we see the long-awaited action and educational attainment gap delivered. We need to see the new teachers not just as short-term commitments to appointments but as the promise of a career to make sure that we have on-going support for our schools and to make sure that we eradicate the inequalities that our school children currently experience. It was disappointed in relation to poverty not to hear any reference to fuel poverty in the First Minister's statement, because it is another example where the cost of living is rising, the cost of energy is rising. Mark Ruskell made some very important points in his speech about the importance of investing in existing homes, but it needs to be a joined-up strategy to invest in our communities, to eradicate fuel poverty and to create new jobs, to create the new income for our communities. That is why, again, I was disappointed not to hear about the development of community-based and community-owned heat and power networks and companies that will not just enable a transition to low-carbon heat and power but will also see the profits reinvested in our communities, see local jobs created in our communities. We need to make sure that this is not a top-down plan for our country. It needs to be investment in our communities, led by our communities, a partnership of respect between the Scottish Government and our local councils, and that is something that is long overdue. We did not see it in the last Parliament and it is absolutely vital that we see it in this Scottish Parliament, because the irony of hearing the discussion about the journey to independence, when we still have major problems in the run-up to COP26, I very much welcome the First Minister's commitment to invest in active travel. We do need that investment, but it has got to be for safe, dedicated routes so that those young children that are getting their free bikes, their parents are not going to worry about them using those bikes. We need safe routes, and that means that we do not just need to invest in existing roads where we have seen deteriorating quality and we see the cuts in their councils taking place of pottles, we need to see new dedicated routes. Today, just as we all sat down for this debate, the irony of hearing the Minister for Transport justify cuts in ScotRail services at a point when we want people to get into using trains to have a better choice so that they do not have to use their cars and we are actually going to see train services removed. I know people who will have to shift from trains into cars because their local community will no longer have a service that they can use. How can that make sense when we are trying to have a just transition? If we look at buses, it is worse the cuts have been going for years. We have been losing buses in the last Parliament, we saw reductions in bus services. While I welcome the increase in free bus travel, we need to have services that every bus user, whether they are a young person who is encouraged to use that service because it is free and we would have gone to more young people getting access or to older people, everybody needs to be able to access those services. They need to be there for them and they need to be locally driven and locally accountable. That is why we need to see the powers that we amended in the last Parliament's Transport Act to deliver are implemented. We see more local community-led bus services like Lothians. It is a success and it could be replicated across Scotland, but it needs the political effort, the everyday effort. That is why it is disappointing to hear that, yes, we are going to have the SNP diverting political energy and the work of civil servants from what should be the top priority of not just getting through this pandemic but recovering from the pandemic, recovering from the steps backwards that we have seen on poverty and people losing their jobs. Let us make this Parliament successful, let us not pull our country apart, let us work together, because even the SNP supporters of independence have warned about the decades that it would take to recover from leaving the UK and the fact that it would be 10 times worse than Brexit. Let us think about that and let us focus on what this Parliament has set up to deliver. It is that time of year programme for Government. It is generally when the Government and its backbenchers get quite excited about its plans for the coming year, it tends to whoop itself into an energetic frenzy, self-congratulatory most of the time, but there did not seem to be much of that this year. We listened from the mooted response from the centre benches today, but it is more important about what happens outside of the bubble of this chamber, because the programme for government actually tells the people of Scotland what the direction of travel is for the Government of the day. In this case, a new Government, a new energetic Government, just look at them. It tells the people of Scotland where their priorities really lie, and I am afraid that listening to today's debate, the prognosis on that is deeply worrying for all of us, because Scotland faces significant and huge challenges as we try to rebuild from Covid-19. We have heard from members right across the chamber on some of the severe challenges that we face, and I am going to go into some of those, but the programme announced today is as unfortunate as it is disappointing, because we are now essentially governed by a tired nationalist party with no new ideas. Made worse now, backed up by a radical nationalist party with all the wrong old ideas and what a dangerous mix I think that will prove to be for our country, because few people, including I suspect many in the SNP itself, truly believe that this green pact is either good for government or indeed good for Scotland. The proof is in the pudding. Today's programme for government did not even try to pretend that Covid recovery is front and centre of the Government's priorities. Why? Because we didn't get past the first page of Nicola Sturgeon's speech before the words independence referendum crossed her lips. Three pages it took before she mentioned the NHS, education, mental health, ferries, roads, businesses or, God forbid, jobs. Three pages of Scotland's First Minister talking up why she thinks it's a good use of our civil service time to draft a new white paper on separation. When I think and I believe most sensible MSPs think that every minute and ounce of their fibre should be tackling Covid recovery and the real world issues that real people face outside of this building. Of course, there are bills announced and announcements made today which we should welcome, such as those tackling fireworks, mesh removal and even the good food bill, which is finally, for the fourth time, made an appearance in the programme for government. There are policies that have cross-party support that many have been pushing for years on childcare, on school meals, on achieving net zero. Those do command cross-party support and rightly so in my view. However, there are headline announcements like the five-line Covid recovery bill or the national care service, which are sorely lacking in detail. Of course, the issue of health and social care has been at the forefront of all of our minds these past 18 months. We have all been in this chamber throughout this process, but today's speech was inexplicably silent on the issue of the economy and jobs. Why is that? It is important because the two are interlinked. A strong economy pays for strong public services. You do not need a white paper to tell you that. A strong economy leads to better health and social outcomes. The two are interlinked. However, that requires a boldness, the likes of which we have not seen for a very long time in the Scottish Government, bold targets on economic growth, bold statements on job creation, bold ambition on new business start-ups, on apprenticeships or on reshaping our high streets. I am afraid that economic growth for too long has been a dirty concept in the corridors of the Scottish Government. The CBI called on the Government today to use its announcement to make good their promise to prioritise our economic recovery. That failure to do so today surprises no one. Histories and litinies of failures and similar speeches that we have heard in years gone by from the First Minister. On R100, the target missed and re-announced, house building, the target for 50,000 affordable homes missed and for Scotland's island communities. A huge issue for them is the disastrous ferry procurement and manufacturing process being overseen by this Government. Where in today's speech, First Minister, was your plan to build two dozen ferries that our island needs? Nothing, not a peep, no plan, no mention of it, and it's a disgrace. I also have concerns about the influence that the Green Party will have on our rural communities. I want firm commitment from this Government today that not a single promised infrastructure project for rural Scotland will be canned under pressure from Green Ministers. If they drop a project, they will have to explain not just to the chamber but to the electorate on why that happened. It doesn't take much to listen to some wise advice. I believe that the former member of this place, Alex Neil, recently was right when he said that this Government has significantly increased the centralisation of decision making, detrimental to our poorer and remote communities. He is right because their track record on this is so poor that why should we trust that anything will now change. I will also address some other issues that I have talked about today. I have to say that I will start with this one. If last week's protests outside the Parliament are anything to go by, then the debates that we have around complex issues such as gender recognition and form have already turned quite toxic. We have a really poor track record of contentious debate in this place. It doesn't bode well so far. The Hate Crime Bill, the offensive behaviour at football legislation and the name persons bill are all a testament of how not to legislate. Let history not repeat itself. On that note, I agree entirely with John Mason who made a very good point that respect must lie at the heart of our deliberations of these complex and rather divisive issues. They will on our side and I hope that the Government will do the same. I really do have a lot to get through, but I do agree with your statement there. Mr Mason, let's talk about education, because that apparently was the Government's number one priority in the last session. He was right. Where in the programme for government does it have any bold and radical changes? Why is it so right now, after 14 and a bit years of government, that a quarter of pupils are starting secondary school with poor literacy and numeracy? Why have the SNP failed to deliver their 2007 manifesto commitment to reduce class sizes to 18? Why do they shelve their education bill and why is it not in this programme for government? We set the gauntlet now, First Minister. Now is your chance to truly reform Scottish education and put it at the top of every damn international league table imaginable where it should be. We shouldn't settle for average, we settle for average for too long, now is the time to listen and now is the time to act. Let's talk about that, because, as the First Minister said in her statement today, she is protecting Police Scotland's resource budget. However, of course, let's not forget that that's after having sought to make £1 billion of savings by 2026. She talks a talk when it is supporting victims of crime, but let's not forget that it was her Government that cut legal aid and has spent double the amount of cash on offender services than on victim services. Of course, it's typical SNP. You create a problem and then you rush in and save the day with your own solution. It was her Government that oversaw tens of thousands of court backlogs stretching our justice system to breaking point long before Covid, I should add. It was her Government that oversaw a record number of prisoners on remand, a right of one and four. It's been dubbed a human rights tragedy and it's under her watch that officers confiscated 7,300 illegal drugs in our prisons, up thousands and thousands year on year. It remains a fact that people are entering our judicial system without a drug addiction and leaving prison with one. Domestic and violent crime are on the rise. The list goes on and on and on. We don't need long grass endless consultations on the dual role of the Lord Advocate or not proven or victims' rights. We need action. Let me conclude that this is not day one of a new Government. This is the 15th year of an old one, one that has failed to tackle Scotland's gravest problems. Our drugs and alcohol travesty, our ferries fiasco, our lagging economy, the life expectancy gap between Greenock and Giffnock. Having listened to endless promises of billions of pounds in today's statement of rehash fund after fund after fund, one has to wonder why neither the First Minister nor a single member of her backbenchers might have stood up and acknowledged where on earth all this money is coming from. Nothing is free, First Minister. Every giveaway you announced costs money, there was not a peep in the statement and the acknowledgement of the role the UK Government has in supporting Scotland and supporting the Scottish Government. Perhaps your new honest white paper and independence might eventually tell the people of Scotland where all those billions of pounds are coming from, because it is not going to be oil money if Patrick Harvie has got anything to say about it. This programme for government is more of the same, the same timid and tired managerialism that we have come to expect from a tired Government. I say this depressingly. If this is the height of the Government's ambition for Scotland, then we have a very long five years ahead of us. Thank you, Mr Greene. I now call on the Deputy First Minister to wind up this debate. Mr Swinney, you have around 10 minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I welcome this opportunity to close the debate for the Government and my apologies that I cannot do it in person due to the requirements of Covid self-isolation. It is fair to say that the programme for government debate on anio basis serves up a series of positive and negative reactions. We have heard many positive remarks made about the programme for government, comments from Sarah Boyack and Pam Duncan-Glancy, and from a number of the Government's members in the chamber. We have also heard some negative reactions from Douglas Ross, Anasawa, Alex Cole-Hamilton and Jamie Greene. We have heard them from Oliver Mundell. What those comments ignore in all the spilling out of all the things that are the source of negative reaction, the one common theme of all those comments to which none of them were referenced, was the outcome of the election. The outcome of the election, of course, was that the SNP gained ground, the Green Party gained ground, the Labour Party lost ground, the Liberal Democrats lost ground and the Tories were flattered as a pancake. My encouragement to the commentators that I have talked about there is that the strategy of endless negativity of always talking down what are genuine achievements by Government in Scotland is a strategy that is getting those three parties precisely nowhere, because it has not advanced their electoral cause and indeed the public have handsomely supported the SNP and the Green Party, which has led to the very positive discussions that we have had over the summer and the creation of the partnership agreement. Mark Ruskell gave a very clear and strong explanation of the merits and the strengths of sharing power across Parliament and with the public. Indeed, he cited that as the part of the foundation of the Parliament about the importance of sharing power across the Parliament and with the public. That is exactly what our partnership agreement is designed to do. One of the fair comments that Alex Cole-Hamilton made was that in his survey of international co-operation agreements in which the Green Party had been involved, he said that the Green Party had participated in progressive Governments around the world, while I am glad that we have added Scotland to the list of those areas of progressive co-operation. The First Minister, in her statement, made it abundantly clear that the programme for government was focused on a number of key themes, the challenge of Covid and addressing that as the Government's immediate and highest priority, the addressing of deep-seated inequalities in our society, the confronting of the climate emergency, mitigating the consequences of Brexit. We had absolutely nothing from the Conservative Party about the dire implications that we are now facing from Brexit and the importance of shaping our choices about our economy and our society by giving people in Scotland the choice about their constitutional future to which I will return later in my comments. The programme for government is focused on the immediate challenges of Covid recovery, but it is also about setting the direction of travel for Scotland to be able to take the decisions that matter about the future of our country. A number of specific issues that I want to comment on in summing up for the Government, the first is on the question of child poverty. This is an example of where the Government wants to act more and act further and faster than we have been able to go so far. Pam Duncan-Glancy said that the Government must do exactly that, and Patrick Harvie, in his intervention, made it clear that there were a range of measures that the Government has taken and is taking around school clothing grants, free school meals, around the abolition of core curriculum charges to name but 3, where we are significantly reducing the cost of schooling and therefore family budgets and making an impact on child poverty. That is in addition, of course, to the early steps that we have taken on the child payment. As the First Minister said earlier on, the whole question of doubling the child payment and the aspiration that the Government would wish to achieve at the earliest possible opportunity is one of the decisions that we have to take in a budget process. The opportunity is there for the Labour Party to engage constructively with us about how we make the hard financial choices that will have to be made if we wish to progress on this agenda at an earlier and faster rate, which the Government is intent on doing. The second issue is about energy and climate change, where Jenny Mintle made a powerful speech about the renewable capacity of Argyll and the Islands and Mark Ruskell, set out some of the elements of the programme for government that emerged from the partnership agreement with the Greens to ensure that we are able to deliver the investments in energy-efficient housing that will strengthen the ability of the country to tackle the aspirations of achieving net zero and to do that in a way that supports families in overcoming poverty into the bargain. I am absolutely certain that the contribution of Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie to the Scottish Government and the partnership agreement that we have reached with the Scottish Green Party will help us significantly to advance on those questions and to ensure that the aspirations that are broadly supported within Parliament can be taken forward in an effective way across the whole of this parliamentary term. The third issue that specifically I want to talk about is the national care service, which will be the subject—I am certain—of a great deal of substantive debate, a bold and significant reform to the way in which we deliver care services in Scotland. John Mason accurately highlighted the challenge that will lie at the heart of this debate, because there are, at times in Parliament, demands for there to be much greater consistency in the standards of care that are delivered around the country. Indeed, there has been an enormous parliamentary pressure on ministers on many of those questions, but one person's demand for there to be less variability and therefore more consistency is another person's rush to centralisation. If Parliament wishes there to be more consistency, if Parliament wishes there to be much less variability so that in every part of the country our citizens can be assured of the quality of care and the standards that they should be entitled to expect, what comes with that will be some of the requirements that are inherent in a national care service in the way that we experience that around a national health service. We cannot duck that particular issue and sensitivity about the importance of what lies at the heart of the decision making around a national care service because it is integral to the decisions that we take about consistency of service provision around the country. The Government will, of course, engage constructively with our local authority partners on all of those questions, but if Parliament wishes to see progress on consistency of care services around the country, Parliament has to be prepared to will the means of how that comes about, which is the rationale behind a national care service. The final issue that I want to talk about is the question of the independence referendum that has dominated a number of contributions from members across the political spectrum. I want to agree very much with the point that Annie Wells made about this whole question. Annie Wells said that how we address the challenges of Covid will define us for years to come. I think that that is absolutely correct. I do not want the response to Covid to be defined for my country by Boris Johnson and the people that he surrounds himself with in the UK Government. I do not agree with the direction of travel that the UK Government represents, but I agree with the right of the people of Scotland to make their own choices, make their own decisions and define how they wish to take forward the steps that Scotland makes from Covid recovery. We will be in a situation where the decisions that we take now will affect the economic opportunities in our society and the way in which we tackle inequality or the extent of which we tackle inequality. I certainly do not want to be in a situation where we do not do everything in our power to tackle the fundamental inequalities that have bedeviled Scottish society, which has been exacerbated by Covid. I want the Scottish Parliament and the people of our country to have the powers to determine those issues and to do that by taking the power into their own hands to a referendum on independence. That is the promise of this programme for government, alongside a range of other significant priorities, not least of which protecting the country from the effects of Covid. That is the mission to which this Government is committed and we look forward to doing that in the spirit of the partnership that we have constructed with the Scottish Green Party in which we are determined to sustain for the years to come. For the benefit of those who are watching our proceedings, can I ask you to make it clear that it is not possible for any of us to intervene on speakers who are virtual? Clearly, there were many things that were just said by the Deputy First Minister that some of us on those benches would like to have asked him about, but it is not possible to do that because he is not here for a good reason, but it is important that the watching public understand why there was no debate on the substance of what the Deputy First Minister just said. I thank Mr Kerr for his point of order. It is indeed the case that the Deputy First Minister is currently unable to attend Parliament for whole