 The next item of business today is a member's business debate on motion number 11329, in the name of Clare Adamson, on home safety kits. This debate will be concluded without any questions being put, and I would be grateful if those members who wish to speak in the debate could press the request to speak buttons as soon as possible. I also remind guests leaving the gallery that if they could do so quietly it would be much appreciated. I thank the members of the Parliament who supported this motion and who will speak to the debate this afternoon. It is a stated wish of the Scottish Government that Scotland be the best place in the world to grow up, an ambition that I am sure is shared across the chamber. If we are to achieve that ambition, we must first acknowledge and tackle the areas in which Scotland's report card could be better. As a councillor in North Lanarkshire, I was nominated on to the Scottish Accident Revention Council Home Safety Committee. It was in that role that I became aware that in the area of non-intentional injury that Scotland's record could be much better. Indeed, the European Child Safety Alliance's country report card made for challenging reading at the time. The latest report in 2012 is produced as part of the tools to address children trauma injury and children's safety, the tactics project. A large-scale multi-year initiative that is working to provide better information, practical tools and resources to support the adoption and implementation of evidence-based good practice for the prevention of injury to children and youth in Europe. The European Public Health Alliance and partners in over 30 countries are involved in this project, as are ROSPA, the Royal Society for the Vection of Actons. One of the objectives of the project is to review and expand a set of child safety action-planned indicators to continue to monitor and benchmark progress in reducing child adolescent injury as countries moved from the planning to implementation. We are often fond of comparing ourselves to Nordic countries, but in the latest European report card it shows that injury is a leading cause of death in children and adolescents aged 0 to 19 in Scotland. In 2009, 106 children and adolescents in this age group died as a result of injury. If that rate of injury death in Scotland could be reduced to the level of the Netherlands, one of the safest countries in Europe, it is estimated that 47 of those lives might have been saved. I would also like to evidence the recent report by the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health why children die, death in infants and children and young people in the UK are a policy response in Scotland. In the section on reducing deaths from injuries and poisoning, the recommendation from the Royal College is that local authorities and health boards should prioritise children's safety and through utilising resources such as health visitors and home safety equipment schemes educate and equip parents and carers to keep their children safe with a focus on water safety, blind-cord safety and safe sleeping. In the light of what is undoubtedly a social justice issue, I was delighted to learn earlier this year about a Scottish Government project in conjunction with ROSPA, which sought to tackle some of those issues in Scotland. I take this opportunity to welcome to the gallery some of the staff from ROSPA Scotland today and take the opportunity to put on record my thanks to them as the secretariat of the cross-party group on accident prevention and safety awareness for the continual support to the group. Scotland's home safety scheme was a pilot project that aimed to provide home safety equipment to families across specific areas in Scotland. It was based on the success of a similar scheme in England. The original project was created by ROSPA and resulted in 66,000 families in England receiving safety education equipment. The project in Scotland supplied and fitted home safety equipment to 800 families. Each family also received a resource pack of information that helped to raise awareness of accidents and how they could be prevented. That awareness raised complemented the equipment provided by the scheme, including safety gates, windy restrictors, non-slip bath and shower mats, fire guards, locks for kitchen cupboards, corner cushions, blind cleats and drawer dams. Investment in the scheme will contribute towards the health and wellbeing of young children by providing families with skills and knowledge needed to make informed decisions on injury prevention. It would allow children to develop in a secure environment, ensuring a healthy and safe future. The areas involved in the project include the Western Isles, Edinburgh, East Lothian, West Lothian, Mid Lothian, East and Bartonshire, West and Bartonshire, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverclyde. In all those issues, how do you prove if something works? How do you prove the negative of an accident having been prevented? I am delighted today to highlight some of the key findings of an independent evaluation of the scheme, conducted by SMCI associates, on behalf of Rossba. In the area of prevention, Scotland's home safety equipment was a preventative scheme. It reached 841 vulnerable families and a total of 1,616 vulnerable children under the age of five over the course of 13 months. Each family had an average of nine items of safety equipment, and the cost of delivering the scheme ranged between £295 or £153 for each child. Compare that to the most recent available data on the cost of non-fatal hospital treatment for home accidents in children aged up to four, which is estimated at £10,000. 99 per cent of all families engaged considered that their home was safer. The majority of professional stakeholders, including family support practitioners, health visitors and fire officers, considered that the scheme helped to make children safer and healthier at 85 per cent, prevent accidents and unintentional injuries in the home at 67 per cent and prevent accidents and unintentional injuries to children under the age of five at 75 per cent. With one of the parents who contributed to the report, I had been stressing about getting safety gates and other equipment in my home for a while, but could not afford it. I was overjoyed when I heard about the scheme. The scheme also helped to identify risks. It built an individual home safety risk assessment into its delivery model, targeting the project to each individual family. The home safety risk assessment included a prescription for provision and professional installation of the equipment throughout the scheme, ensuring that boxes did not remain unopened and uninstalled in homes. All 841 clients and equipment fitted with an average of nine items per family. The scheme also offered a very important home fire safety visit conducted by Fire Scotland. Awareness of home safety was also a key element in the delivery. Most of the people who were involved became more aware of the risks around their home. This is a valuable pilot project. I thank the chamber once again for the opportunity to highlight it today and look forward to the debate. I am very interested in hearing from the minister how the future of home safety scheme will develop in Scotland. I now call Dr Richard Simpson to be followed by David Torrin's speeches of around four minutes. I begin by congratulating Clare Adamson on securing this member's debate on home safety kits. An issue that we can all agree needs our attention and consideration. In order to prevent accidents or in some cases death in the home, many of these accidents are totally preventable with simple safety awareness, understanding and equipment. I also put on record my personal admiration for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, whose tireless work in trying to prevent accidents around the home has been saving lives for over 100 years. The success of the Scotland home safety equipment scheme does speak for itself, and Clare Adamson has referred to some of the statistics. Certainly the professionals, including family support practitioners, fire officers and health visitors all believe—or 85 per cent of them certainly believe—that it helped the child to be healthier and safer, and 75 per cent certainly believe that it prevented accidents to children under five. The families themselves will almost 100 per cent of them felt safer as a result of the project. I want to briefly emphasise the area of health visitors because of the contention that there is at the moment about the named personal legislation that was built on GERFEC, which was a labour administration set of proposals to get it right for every child. In my view, the named person is not there, as some of the people in the court today are talking about. I won't talk about the actual court case, but the view that has been expressed to me is that there is an interference with the family. This is another example of where health visitors going into the household can put households in contact with groups such as ROSPA and others who could supply appropriate equipment to make sure that homes are fit for purpose for young people. Scotland does not have a good record in terms of child deaths, as Clare Adamson has said. At least 47 of those would be preventable if we were able to reach the best if the European countries, which Clare Adamson reminded us, were Netherlands. That is not just about the families and the children, it is also about the cost to the NHS. Our NHS is under massive pressure, and anything that reduces that has to also got to be welcome. I welcome the fact that the Government has now finally announced that we are going to have four major trauma units, and that will actually prevent some of the most serious accidents that have resulted in death. The major trauma units in England have demonstrably reduced deaths mortality for these 1,200 expected serious accidents in Scotland, but they have been reduced by 20 per cent in England. The current cost of the scheme is about £235 per household or £153 per child, because there were 1,616 children in the scheme involving the 800 vulnerable families. The cost of treating a home accident of a child under five in hospital can be as much as £10,500. That is yet another example where the investment in the situation following an assessment is something that is highly worthwhile. I want to spend a little of the time left speaking about the campaign that my colleague Gordon Banks has been supporting in Clackmannanshire. That is the banning of loop blind cords. Tragically, in 2008, a two-year-old girl in Clackmannanshire became tangled in such a cord at her home, resulting in loss of life. At the time that was estimated, two people died every year as a result of getting caught in looped blinds. America has already realised the dangers to children of looped blinds and banned these 15 years ago. Gordon has been supporting the parents of that young girl who have been campaigning tirelessly to have the same rules applied here in the United Kingdom. I do not know whether that can be dealt with under reserved or devolved powers, but it seems to me to be an area in which Government action might be helpful, at least in further raising of awareness. It can never be acceptable that with a simple remedy to prevent the death of children that we as a nation should delay in taking action. I am pleased that the campaign has had some success with new rules to improve the safety of blinds. Those have been announced by the European Commission, but I know that Gordon Banks continued to fear that until looped blind cords are designed out fully by the industry, then the threat cannot be removed completely. The cost of investing in such schemes or campaigns far outstrips the potential costs that is barely being incurred by the public purse, but, more important, the effect upon all those families. Those home safety kits, which on average contain as few as nine pieces of equipment, often quite simple equipment, which is then professionally fitted, reduce the risk of injury greatly. The fact that 99 per cent of the families felt safer is a testament to the success of the scheme, I would encourage the minister to look at what further possibilities are available to roll the scheme out further and to ensure the assessment by health visitor and the named person of every household and the application of those pieces of equipment in order to reduce Scotland's rather poor record in child deaths. Many thanks. I now call David Torrance to be followed by Alex Johnstone. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thank Clare Arneson for bringing forward this motion for debate. In doing so, I highlight an important issue that affects thousands of young children and their families in Scotland every year. Although the number of deaths attributed to accidents in the home has decreased dramatically over the past 20 years, there remain far too many young children being killed or injured in accidents that are often easily preventable. A few simple pieces of equipment, backed by education for parents and how to identify hazards, can be all it takes to make a difference between life and death for many of the children in their homes. For this reason, I am supporting the roll-out of Scotland's home safety equipment scheme across the country. There are a number of hazards in the average family home that may not initially appear particularly dangerous but can potentially cause severe injury or even death. Young children under 5 are particularly vulnerable due to their natural and causative nature, combined with the fact that children in this age bracket tend to spend more time at home. A home is constantly the most common place for children under 5 to have an accident. Anyone who has experience with toddlers knows only too well how much mischief a little one can get into when their parents back is turned, even just for a moment. The appeal of a kitchen cupboard or a flight of stairs can prove very tempting for a young child with a sense of adventure who has not yet fully developed a natural instinct for danger. In some instances, that can result in a poison, choking, suffocation, falls, burns or scouts. NHS Fife, which serves my constituency, recorded 132 emergency hospital admissions for children under 5 years old as a result of an attentional injury in the home in 2010-11. Many of those accidents could have been easily preventable with just a few simple measures. Equipments such as door jammers, safety gates, fire guards, line cleats and window restrictors can be all it takes to make your home accident proof. However, many families lack either a knowledge to prevent home accidents or the money to buy the safety equipment required. That is why Scotland's home safety equipment scheme has been so valuable to so many disadvantaged families in pilot areas. In addition to most of the obvious advantages of home safety kits, their potential can save lives, and there is a much wider benefit to be gained from their implementation. Reducing the number of accidents in the home means an easing of a burden on the NHS in terms of emergency treatment and follow-up care. That is a key consideration at a time when acute services are under increasing pressure and budgetary restraints. Another positive outcome of the scheme is the reassurance that it provides to parents and carers by equipping them with their acquired knowledge and understanding to identify hazards in the home. The tools to help to prevent accidents from occurring. It is very hard to offer peace of mind that a family home is as safe as it possibly can be. I applaud the Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents for the creation of their initiative home safety equipment scheme in England, which provided inspiration behind the pilot project in Scotland. I also commend the efforts of the Scottish Government in conjunction with Rossport in Scotland, the local authorities involved in the pilot areas, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the collective commitment in making the scheme a success. Fife was not chosen in the pilot area in which to trial a scheme, which is unfortunate as I feel that it would have been extremely advantageous to many families within my constituency. I believe that a scheme should now be rolled out across the whole of Scotland so that every disadvantaged family can receive assistance to protect their children from preventable accidents in the home. I once again thank Claire Addison for helping to raise awareness of home safety kits by bringing her motion forward for debate today. I look forward to reading the forthcoming evaluation, reporting Scotland's home safety equipment scheme. I hope that this can be used as a tool for improving and enhancing the scheme with a view to expanding it across Scotland in the very near future. I thank the cabinet secretary and I now call Alex Johnston. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I would like to congratulate Claire Addison on having brought this matter before Parliament today and to take the opportunity to offer my support and principle for the objectives that lie behind this motion. I would also like to congratulate Rossba for the work that they have done over the years. In fact, Rossba was an organisation that I first became aware of through their involvement in the production of public information films, which used to be shown on television back in the 1960s in the days when we only had two channels and there was not much exciting on. However, the series of falls, scalds and electrocutions that took place in those films were a lesson to a young child that there was danger in the home. In fact, it became increasingly obvious that there was no shortage of evidence to support the claim often made and known to be accurate that the home is one of the most dangerous places or environments that we can experience. Yet, I also have to say that there is an important role still for awareness and individual awareness both in adults and children for the dangers that we face in the home. Increasingly, new dangers come along. While everybody now seems to be fairly clear that if you have a young child in the house that your first priority is to get the fire guards and the stair gates up, we have been made aware through the speech that we heard earlier about the danger of loop-blind cords, which is something that people are increasingly aware of. Also, the danger through modern heating systems, if they become faulty, producing carbon dioxide, means that there is another danger in the home that we need to be aware of. I am fully supportive of the principle that lies behind this, that informing people of the dangers and making sure that safety equipment is available to them is a vital step in improving safety in the home, both for adults and for children. Yet, that personal responsibility must remain at the forefront of our mind. Therefore, by informing people of the dangers, by making the equipment available, we also need to make sure that they are aware of these dangers and do not allow themselves to fall into the trap of believing that somebody else has absorbed them of that responsibility. Ultimately, I will close by making that typical noise-lickatory and saying that we cannot wrap our children in cotton wool. We can make the environment as safe as we can possibly make it, but we must make children understand the danger that they are in and take responsibility even at a very early age for ensuring that they do not subject themselves to danger. We all grew up far too early in this modern world, but we can never be too young to understand the limits of our own mortality. For that reason, I would like to see us back in that period in the 1960s, when there were perhaps more opportunities on television for the occasional public information film that actually frightened young children, like I was then, into realising that there are dangers out there and that we should behave a bit more responsively. I invite Eileen Campbell to respond to the debate. I am pleased to respond on behalf of the Scottish Government. I want to put on record my thanks to Clare Adamson for sponsoring the debate and for all the MSPs who supported the motion to enable us to have what is a very important debate, but also to recognise Clare's wider work in convening the cross-party parliamentary group on accident prevention and safety awareness. It is not the most succinct of titles, nevertheless an important group to have in the Parliament, and I was pleased to attend one of the meetings in the recent past. I also want to put on record my thanks to Rossba, and I think that Alex Johnson noted his thanks to Rossba for the work that he has tirelessly carried out over many years in terms of promoting safety in our homes. When Rossba approached the Scottish Government with the proposals for the Scottish Home Safety Equipment Scheme, we were pleased to be in a position to provide funding for it, and others have outlined the costings associated with it. The aims of the scheme and the approach that was taken chined incredibly well with our approach in government, which is about prevention and early intervention, are also our aims to make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up. The child-centred GERFEC approach is set out in our Children and Young Peoples Act, and I just want to pause on that because of the points that Richard Simpson raised. I will have to be careful, because of the legal situation and challenge that is on-going around a particular part of the act. I recognise the potential for the name person to help signposts, signposting families to get that extra support, in particular about safety. As someone who is about to re-engage with the Midwife Service and the Health Visitor Service as well, and from my own experience with my own wee boy, I just know how important the advice and support that health visitors and midwives can give to families at times of a particular vulnerability. That is a point that is well made by Richard Simpson. We need to make sure that we are using all our activities to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our children and young people across Scotland. Of course, that particularly chimes well with the aims of our early years collaborative. The Government is firmly focused on reducing inequalities and making sure that every child has the best start in life. That is what the GERFEC stands for, for every child, and making sure that every child is also ready to succeed. That is why I have developed the policies and taken forward the legislation that I have just mentioned. I recognise what Richard Simpson has said. That is not just the Government that thought about GERFEC. That is a approach that has been supported across the chamber. The sad fact is that an intentional injury disproportionately affects the most vulnerable groups in society, notably children, older people and those living in areas of deprivation. As the report points out, there are substantial financial costs to the NHS and to wider society. It is an estimated £2 billion to Scottish society annually when all age groups are taken into account. The most recent data available on the cost of a non-fatal hospital treated home accident for children up to £4 is £10,600. That was a figure that Clare Adamson mentioned in her opening remarks. However, it would be wrong to focus on the finances alone. Unintentional injury is the major cause of death, especially in childhood. Each of those incidents represents a young life and its potential loss, not to mention the traumatic impact and effect on parents, siblings and wider family members. Sadly, death rates from injury are consistently around a third higher in Scotland than in England and Wales. There is also good evidence to show that the rate of reduction of child injury rates in the UK lags far behind other European countries. In human terms, Clare Adamson stated in her remarks, in comparison to the Netherlands, that represents a potential 47 young people whose lives would have been saved, able to flourish and go on to contribute to Scotland's society. That is something that you will need to reflect on the human terms of those tragedies. I mention that to remind us that we cannot be complacent and that there is still much for us to do in this area. As Clare Adamson said, Scotland could do better and there is a balance in reflection of what Ilych Johnson said about making sure that we do not wrap our children up in cotton wool. There is a slight difference, but I appreciate the work that we are doing around the play agenda and getting children outdoors. We need to make sure that we allow children to experience risk and manage that so that they can go on and manage that better as adults in later life. However, today, I think that it is about making sure that we create the safety parameters for children in their homes and recognise the work of ROSPA and the instructive evaluated support that they have produced today. All of us in the chamber, as well as those working with support in enriching children and young people in Scotland, want to make Scotland the best place to grow up. Part of that must be to make sure that our children are safe. The Scottish home safety equipment scheme therefore has taken us a bit of a way along that path. I think that we can agree that the evaluation report published today demonstrates the success of the scheme, and we count that success on a number of different levels. Firstly, the number of home safety kits fitted 841 families and 1,616 children under the age of five are safer. Importantly, kits include bling cord cleats, and I commend the work of Gordon Banks and my colleague Keith Brown for raising awareness about the dangers of bling cords. I know from my own perspective that we have taken action to make sure that our view does not fall at the risk of the dangers of bling cord cleats. We must make sure that the legacy of that absolute tragedy is to make sure that more awareness is raised and that more lives are saved as a result of the actions that we can take as a Government. The reason that people are safe is not only because of the kit, but because of the holistic approach that was taken by Rosspa and the local teams in providing a home safety risk assessment and home safety awareness for parents and carers. That, in itself, is a remarkable achievement. I am aware that we cannot measure what has happened and in some ways we will never know what the full impact of the kits have been, but common sense tells us that lives will have been saved and injuries prevented. As someone has said, there are no randomised control trials to tell you that wearing a parachute when you jump out of an aeroplane is a good thing to do. The quotes from the parents that have been included in the evaluation report illustrate how much parents have welcomed the scheme. I want to return to the same quote that Clare Adamson used when she described one parent saying, I had been stressing about getting safety gates and other equipment but could not afford it. I was overjoyed when I heard about the scheme, and I want to link in to David Torrance's points about needing eyes at the back of your head when you are bringing up a wee one. We should not have a situation where that social inequality and the lack of income prevents you from making your home as safe as it can be. We need to sharpen our focus across Government and make sure that our anti-poverty measures recognise the recommendations that have been outlined in the report today from Rosspa. Although we can count the number of kits that are fitted and the number of families that are visited, there are other successes from the scheme that cannot be counted or measured in the traditional way. There are now relationships that have been built between professionals and families that will provide a springboard for further interactions. There are the links made between different professional groups who did not know each other before but who all have a shared interest in making sure that families are safe and healthy. Maybe that is a signal that we need to involve staff groups beyond the obvious ones of health, social work and education in our GERFEC training and approach to ensure that we truly get it right for every child. There is also the increased knowledge and the confidence in the part of the parents and carers which in itself will contribute to children's safety. There is the increase in staff capacity also to deliver the scheme in terms of knowledge, understanding and skills, and in some cases gaining a recognised qualification. We are delighted with the success of the scheme and we would like to commend Rospa for that initiative. I know that it has not all been plain sailing and that there have been a few challenges along the way, however we can learn from those challenges. I know that the evaluation report makes some suggestions about how we can build on the legacy of the project. I urge community planning partnerships to study and consider those suggestions. Even in times of financial challenge, there is a need to move towards a prevention and early intervention agenda, so in conclusion I would again like to thank Claire Adamson for her sponsorship of this debate and to commend Rospa for the work on the scheme and also to thank all the other members who have contributed so fully in the time that they have during a member's debate to make sure that we have this shared agenda towards making Scotland not only the best place to grow up but probably I think reverse the unfortunate trends that we have seen in Scotland but actually make move us towards being one of the safest places in which children can grow up as well, so thank you. Thank you very much. That ends Claire Adamson's debate on home safety kits and I now suspend this meeting until 2.30pm.