A Day of Two Policies

Today's been almost entirely taken up by two bits of Scottish Government policy. The first was the White Paper on Independence. Most of this morning was spent trying to get hold of a download of the White Paper so that I could policy-check it against what we have in our FMQ briefing on Free Personal and Nursing Care. Eventually got the Health and Social Care chapter at 11.45, before I had to dash off to a briefing session about - you guessed it - the White Paper.

This afternoon I headed down to Parliament for the second SG policy of the day - the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Bill. I caught about half of the White Paper debate which immediately preceded the integration debate too. The debate was as frustrating as ever - too few MSPs attending and taking part until they all come back in the last few minutes for Decision Time and then proceed to have conversations with each other while the MSPs taking part in the debate are virtually drowned out... On the plus side for our policy area, the Stage 1 vote was carried unanimously, so back to the grindstone tomorrow for my colleagues for the work to start on Stage 2.