Public Petitions Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Official Report 466KB pdf

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New Petitions

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Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 (PE1310)

I am conscious of the time. The first new petition is PE1310, by Jean Gerrard. It calls on the Parliament to urge the Government to amend the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 to abolish the overuse of compulsory treatment orders for non-violent mentally ill patients, and to provide a process that allows patients and their representatives to challenge any perceived errors in CTO reports that can lead to misdiagnoses, faulty speculation and the administration of unwarranted forms of treatment. Is this the petition that Bob Doris is here to discuss?

I got confused. I thought that I might need a CTO. I invite comments from committee members on the petition.

We should write to a range of agencies to try to get some clarity. Anne McLaughlin asked whether you can legislate on overuse. We need to pursue other issues with the agencies. We will get the statistics that Rhona Brankin mentioned.

We will look into that. If possible, we will do that. We wish to keep the petition open and explore the options that members have identified. Is that okay?

Members indicated agreement.

No.

It is a serious subject, convener, and I believe that we need to continue the petition. For a start, we should ask the Scottish Government whether it will amend the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 to abolish the overuse of CTOs for non-violent, mentally ill patients and provide a process that allows patients and their representatives to challenge any perceived errors in CTO reports, which can lead to misdiagnoses and faulty speculation. We should continue the petition.

I want to clarify something. The petition calls on the Government to abolish the overuse of compulsory treatment orders. Can you abolish overuse? I am being a bit pedantic, but the wording is a bit unusual.

I broadly support the petition, because I know people whose mental health problems are exacerbated by the frustration that they feel about not being able to challenge any perceived errors in the compulsory treatment orders or to speak out about that. There is a feeling that often the people who make the orders or the diagnoses look at the illness, not the person. I would certainly support anything that gives a voice to people who suffer from mental health problems.

I suggest that we write to the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, the Scottish Association for Mental Health and an organisation called Voices of Experience, which is made up of people with mental health problems who advocate on behalf of others. We should ask what they think of the petition and how they would advise us to take it forward.

I agree with Anne McLaughlin. We should write to those three organisations.

I understand that local health boards are responsible for delivering CTOs, so I suggest that we write to a number of them to ask about their views on and experience of compulsory treatment orders. I suggest that we write to NHS Lanarkshire. The petitioner mentioned NHS Dumfries and Galloway. We should ask a couple of health boards how they operate and monitor the process.

Absolutely.

Do we have information about the number of orders that have been issued per health board? If not, we should get it.

I see that the report of the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 review group has not yet been published. Is the review group still active? If so, would it be possible to send the information that we have gleaned from the petition to the review group as part of its considerations?

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Amateur Coaches (PE1311)

I am relieved that I am speaking on this petition and not the previous one. Serious as it was, I could not have provided much input on it.

Stephen Koepplinger’s organisation, After School Activities Programme, is a charity that is based in Glasgow and works in Glasgow, Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire, as far as I am aware. I will give a bit of context and set out the reasons behind the petition, which might help you decide the best way forward.



After School Activities Programme runs a variety of activities including tennis, dodgeball, football and athletics for young people in communities across the three areas that I mentioned. It often works with young people who would not otherwise be involved in physical or sporting activity and have not opted in to or shown an interest in the formal coaching routes through local primary and secondary schools.

Mr Koepplinger wants to ensure that those who have appropriate police and Disclosure Scotland checks, have a keen interest in working with young people, and have a charity such as his would not find any artificial barriers—created unintentionally by local authorities or other stakeholders—to engaging with young people. I refer particularly to Glasgow City Council, which has tried to work constructively with Mr Koepplinger, but rightly wants to ensure that those who coach youngsters have the relevant coaching qualifications. Mr Koepplinger has pointed out to me that a responsible adult supervising at a tennis court does not have to have the relevant national body qualification. Someone supervising football, dodgeball or athletics through his organisation and others like it would be only too keen to signpost young people who show flair, promise and interest to the relevant coaching experts in schools and the wider sporting community.

There might be unintentional barriers within local authorities and other organisations, and the petition asks the Scottish Government, or whoever, to investigate how charities such as Mr Koepplinger’s can participate constructively with young people and get them to be physically active and productive. The young people that ASAP is working with can be more challenging people who might not be able to sustain a formal coaching relationship. I have also given note to a number of local authorities that the organisation often works with a model in which, for lack of a better expression, middle class children from one local authority are involved in a dodgeball tournament with working class children from another. That is an example of Mr Koepplinger’s charity being involved in social inclusion.

I will finish by saying that the petition is not just about ASAP; that is only one example. I do not know whether Mr Koepplinger’s is an isolated experience in my constituency or the tip of an iceberg. The committee could consider ways of using the petitioner’s experience to find out whether it is a wider experience, and it could consider how to ensure that organisations such as ASAP can provide additionality to the good coaching that takes place in Scotland.

PE1311, by Stephen Koepplinger, calls on the Parliament to urge the Government to review arrangements so that individuals who have undergone satisfactory police checks but do not have a national governing body level 2 coaching certificate are allowed to access community resources, funding, sports facilities and equipment in the same way as those who have such a qualification, in order to increase the breadth and number of coaches available to work with young people across the range of sports activities. Bob Doris has expressed an interest in and support for the petition. I invite him to comment, then we will try to work our way through the petition.

I am interested in the thinking that there could be an issue around social inclusion or areas of deprivation not having access to qualified coaches. If that is the case, it would be of concern. How do we find out whether that is happening in practice? I wonder whether we could ask the various sporting governing bodies about where their coaches work. I am not sure how we could find out where accredited coaches are operating, but it might be interesting to do that.

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We could write to ask several local authorities about the use of facilities and the criteria that they apply in letting facilities to people who wish to coach, whether or not they are accredited. The petitioner’s organisation feels excluded from running sessions because the local authority does not recognise the services that it delivers or makes the cost of using facilities prohibitive. In Glasgow and other areas, preferential rates are often given to people who organise coaching classes for youngsters. It might be useful to write to several local authorities to ask what criteria they use and whether they insist that anybody who provides coaching sessions must have level 2 accreditation before they will consider offering them premises or funding to assist in the delivery of such sessions.

We want to keep the petition open and to continue consideration of it. We will explore the points that it raises and obtain views from sportscotland, other agencies and local authorities about operations, access and participation. Thank you for your time in considering the petition.

The petition is worth while, and we should continue it and explore some of the issues raised by the petitioner. Perhaps we could ask the Scottish Government whether it would review the arrangements that allow individuals who have undergone satisfactory police checks but do not have the necessary level 2 coaching certificate to play their part and to access community resources in the same way as those who have such qualifications. We could also ask sportscotland how its proposed scoping work to analyse accreditation schemes as well as best practice from abroad could assist in achieving the petitioner’s aims.

We should also ask the Scottish Government, sportscotland and local authorities whether there is any evidence that using amateur coaches who do not have level 2 certification increases risks to an unacceptable level. If it does not, that might be a way of moving the petition forward. Those are just some suggestions, convener.

We could ask the governing bodies whether it is generally accepted that sport has different purposes. Qualified coaches are needed for competitive sport, but I understand that ASAP’s work is not necessarily about competitive sport. As Bob Doris said, ASAP would show people where they should go if they want to become great tennis players, for example, but the programme is about more than that—it is about social inclusion, general fitness, keeping young people off the streets and giving them something productive to do with their time, which does not necessarily mean that they must become great sportspeople. Given that, qualified coaches are not necessarily required. Do the governing bodies accept that sport can be used for different purposes?

Members are broadly agreed about the petition. Bob Doris wants to speak; I ask him to be brief, because I want to pull together the discussion.

I know that the committee has had a long meeting. I stress again that Mr Koepplinger wants not to compete with but to complement professional coaches. He does not feel that local authorities are intentionally excluding him from or charging higher rates for facilities. However, as Mr Wilson said—I have heard the point made before—just because councils do not intend to do that, that does not mean that that does not happen in practice. Anything that the committee can do to make progress would be most worth while.

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Medal Awards (PE1312)

I have a connection with the issue. When Concord and Amethyst tied up at the end of their trip, they did so next door to the training ship HMS Tamar, on which my father did his training as a midshipman before the war—he served on the China station before and after the war.

I am familiar with the story of the Amethyst. It is clear from the details with the petition that the story that we were fed in the film after the war was far from being the whole story. There is no doubt that all the ships, including Concord, were engaged in an extremely dangerous operation and that everybody behaved extremely creditably and bravely. However, one ship and her complement were left entirely out of the honours. The petition is not asking for the clasp to be given now, because it is so long after the war and successive ministers have made it clear that they will not do that, but it is time that the truth came out.



I would like us to make representations to the UK Government asking it to investigate the circumstances of the process of awarding medals to those who were involved in the 1949 Yangtze campaign and, in particular, whether the process was corrupted as a result of the exclusion of relevant and important documents relating to the role of HMS Concord in the campaign on 30 and 31 July 1949. We could ask the UK Government whether it knows of any documents that we have not as yet seen, but which could now be released under the 30-year rule. Although the log of HMS Concord disappeared, a fairly accurate description of her journey has been reconstructed, possibly through evidence that was given by Sir David Scott well after the incident, in documents that he left.

The story is extraordinary. I knew about it before we received the petition, but I now realise that I knew only part of the story. I commend the petitioner for bringing his petition to the Parliament. He is asking us to ensure that history is rewritten. We should rewrite history if it is written wrongly the first time round. The petition is commendable in its own right, but it also reminds us that a lot of the history that we have is corrupted. It will do us no harm at all to correct history for the sake of those who were there. I, too, tend to doubt whether there is any prospect of anybody sorting out the medals issue and maybe that is not really the point. However, I rather like the idea of getting our history books correct and reinforcing the idea that we should not automatically assume that everything that we are told is correct.

I agree with Robin Harper and Nigel Don. We should continue the petition. We should also ask the Royal British Legion for its view on the petition. Similarly, we should ask the Ministry of Defence for its view.

We should write to the Ministry of Defence to ask whether any of the documentation from the conflict has been withheld by successive UK Governments under official secrets legislation, whether the rule is 30 years, 50 years or whatever. Clearly, there were political implications at the time of the incident. We could try to find out whether the correct and accurate history of the incident has been withheld from the general public.

We will follow up those comments from members and continue the petition. I hope that we get responses in due course. I thank the petitioner for his patience. We will continue to explore the issue on his behalf.

PE1312, by William Leitch, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to make representations to the United Kingdom Government to ask it to investigate the circumstances of the process for awarding medals to those who were involved in the 1949 Yangtze campaign and, in particular, whether that process was corrupted by the exclusion of relevant and important documents that relate to the role of HMS Concord in the Yangtze campaign on 30 and 31 July 1949. The petitioner is in the public gallery and I thank him for his patience during a long committee meeting.

I invite members’ comments on how to deal with the petition.

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Knife Crime (Mandatory Custodial Sentences) (PE1313)

I will say a few words. Paul McGee was a constituent of mine who had just returned from Afghanistan—he had been there and in Iraq—when he was killed outside his house as a result of knife crime. His sister Kelly is trying to link in with the other petitions that the committee has received on the subject. That shows the Public Petitions Committee working properly and the public continuing to keep the matter on the agenda because it is a very important issue. I am here as a constituency MSP and I am sure that every one of the committee members could be here in the same position. I want to get support for the petition, which links in with other petitions, such as that from John Muir. The public are making a clear statement to the committee that something must be done.

One cannot come to such petitions without recognising the human tragedy behind the bit of paper. Every one is one too many. We will keep saying that, because the problem will never go away completely but we are entirely clear that we must tackle it.

Perhaps we can short circuit consideration of this petition and that from John Muir. This morning, the Justice Committee decided that the amendments on knife crime to the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill will be subject to a call for further evidence. The Justice Committee will issue that call—probably as we speak—and have an evidence-taking session in perhaps a couple of weeks’ time, although that must be subject to a committee decision.

We have active amendments to the bill before us in the Justice Committee; we have a call for evidence and the intention of taking that evidence within weeks. Therefore, I suggest that this committee suspends consideration of the petition and of PE1171 to allow us to get through the process in the Justice Committee, which will inform further discussion of the matter.

PE1313, by Kelly Anne McGee, calls on the Parliament to urge the Government to introduce mandatory minimum custodial sentencing for those caught carrying knives or other dangerous weapons in public, except where there are exceptional circumstances relating to the carrying of a knife or other sharp implement. The petition has already received support on our e-petitions system and has received a substantial number of signatures in hard copy. The petition relates to a difficult set of circumstances, as is the case with a similar petition that we have been dealing with for a longer period.

Trish Godman is here in her capacity as a constituency member, rather than as a Deputy Presiding Officer, to express support for the petition. I invite her to comment.

That information should be conveyed to the petitioner. It is important that, as well as lodging the petition, she is able to feed into any consultation on the possible practical outcomes of changes in legislation.

The suggestion is that, because of the framework of the debate in the Justice Committee, it would be sensible to take the course of action that Nigel Don and Rhona Brankin propose, and that we will come back to the petition in due course. We will wish to convey that to the petitioner. Do we accept those suggestions?

Members indicated agreement.

I thank Trish Godman for her time on the petition.

I request that we combine the petition with PE1171, which was submitted by John Muir. I am conscious that we are at quite an advanced stage with that petition and that the debate about how we legislate to tackle knife crime is advancing in the Parliament.

I invite members’ comments on PE1313 and how it links in with our earlier discussions.

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Hot Branding (Equines) (PE1314)

We should get an update on the Government’s thinking and information from the organisations that are suggested in the paper—the British Veterinary Association and the British Horse Society among others.

We should contact the Exmoor Pony Society in particular because that breed is clearly still affected by hot branding.

Okay, we will contact a range of organisations related to animal welfare and ask for the Scottish Government’s observations or position on the proposal.

Perhaps we should ask for opinions not only from the Exmoor Pony Society but from other pony societies and breeders.

This is our final new petition today. PE1314, by Rebecca Stafford, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to amend immediately the Prohibited Procedures on Protected Animals (Exemptions) (Scotland) Regulations 2007 and ban the hot branding of all equine animals. Members’ views on the petition would be useful.

We will explore that option and continue the petition until we have the information back.