The Scottish Government strongly opposes amendment 2. What is proposed in the amendment is completely unworkable and could end up defeating the bill. It is clear to me that we should not do anything that might delay the bill’s coming into force: as Rona Mackay just said, survivors have waited long enough for a change in the law.
Witnesses to the Justice Committee have accepted that it is not possible to estimate with any certainty the bill’s impact; and we will not know the impact of the bill until after it has come into force. Therefore, it would be premature to draw conclusions about resources. Indeed, amendment 2 would put us in a catch-22 position: the impact will not be known until after commencement, but the amendment would not allow us to commence the act until the impact was known, or perhaps until a blank cheque had been written. The conclusion must be drawn that the act might then never be commenced.
It should be remembered that the bill’s proposals would not change the law of delict and the duty of care. On top of that, as the committee will appreciate, the current law allows new claims to proceed where the court considers that to be equitable. That must be viewed, at least, as a potential liability for local authorities that already exists, even aside from the bill.
The bill is about access to justice for survivors. Although we recognise that there will be financial implications for public bodies, which is the nature of civil litigation, we should not lose sight of the importance of the basic principle of removing an unfair barrier for survivors. Parliament has unanimously supported the general principles of the bill; amendment 2 runs the risk of derailing the whole aim of the bill. We need to respect the outcome of the interaction process and, most important, to respect survivors who have campaigned for decades for the proposed change.
Our public bodies, including local authorities, provide valued public services; I share Douglas Ross’s view about the importance of maintaining those at the highest standard. Of course, we are in regular dialogue with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and local government on a range of issues, so it will be open to local authorities to raise, in the normal way of things, concerns about any new and unplanned financial pressures that they face that might impact on service delivery, so that we can consider together how those might be addressed.
However, the impact will not be the same in all local authorities in terms of, for example, the number of cases and the availability of insurance cover in a case. We therefore do not yet know what the impact will be—we cannot know that in advance of implementation of the bill.
I recently met the former children and young people’s spokesperson for COSLA, Stephanie Primrose; it is clear that COSLA is not looking for a blank cheque. Rather, we agreed to continue the dialogue and to keep the situation under review. After a new COSLA spokesperson is elected on 30 June, I will seek a further meeting with them to discuss the issue.
Amendment 2 will not provide a constructive solution, but would end up holding the bill hostage and could potentially derail the aim of the bill, which is to remove the insurmountable barrier to access to justice for survivors of childhood abuse that the three-year limitation period embodies. I urge members to reject amendment 2.