Chamber and committees

Does the minister agree that we would be far better able to support all of Scotland’s fishing industry had the Westminster Tory Government kept its much-repeated Brexit promise to fully replace all European Union marine funding?

I thank my colleague Emma Harper for bringing this important debate to the chamber. I also thank Beat, which is an amazing organisation that has for many years been amplifying the voices of those who are dealing with eating disorders, and which has provided us with information and has led on eating disorders awareness week 2024.

I want to make special mention of ARFID Awareness UK, which is the UK’s only charity that is dedicated to raising awareness of avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. Hearing comments such as:

“She’ll eat when she’s hungry”,

“If that was my kid, she’d clear that plate”,

“If she doesn’t eat it, heat it up again and give it to her for breakfast”,

“You’re spoiling her and you’re making a rod for your own back”,

“Just get her telt”,

“In my day, a skelp is what you would have used to fix this”

and

“She’s just being picky and you need to put a stop to this fussy nonsense”

made me dread interacting with anyone as a family unit when food was involved, as it became ever more clear that my youngest was developing a serious aversion to the majority of foods that we all enjoy daily.

I can trace it back to the moment when, as a three-year-old, she choked a wee bit on a homemade chicken nugget. Almost overnight, she went from enjoying a variety of foods to tolerating only a handful. There was a distinct link to anxiety and sensory issues, and with what we later understood to be neurodiversity. At times, her food intake was limited to only a couple of items, mostly beige and carbohydrate in nature.

After a year, our general practitioner advised us that our child had selective eating disorder and that there was not a lot that we could do except to offer her a wide variety of things in the hope that one day, magically, she would start to eat again. In retrospect, that approach often caused more harm than good, as new foods were met with such suspicion and terror that anything relating to eating had any scintilla of enjoyment removed, leaving a highly distressed child and two highly distressed parents.

We stopped eating out. I dreaded parties and social events, as I knew that well-meaning folk would try to coax her into trying the lovely food that they had prepared, while casting aspersions on our parenting abilities with passive-aggressive comments. In a sea of judgment, my mum was the only person who kept saying to me, “Elena, if the wean is only going to eat your lentil soup and bread and nothing else, just feed her that with a smile and love and ignore what everybody else thinks. It’s just background noise.”

My child stopped eating at school when she was not allowed to bring in crackers and peanut butter—one of her staple safe foods—given the risk of allergies among other children. After protracted negotiations, she was allowed to have vegetable soup and bread from the canteen, and she would not be forced to eat a main course. Maybe 200 calories at most would see her through the school day. She avoided the canteen totally while she still attended secondary school, as the smells and the noise of people eating overwhelmed her.

At nearly 16, she now has a slightly longer list of safe foods, including her much-loved plain udon noodles and bubble tea, but we often lose some of those when recipes change or when something is no longer made, or when she has eaten a certain food every single day for a whole year and just cannot face it any more. She is slight and often exhausted, and the health service still does not really know how to help her, or the thousands of other young people who are living with ARFID.

I know that the Scottish Government has a special focus on eating disorders, and I hope that the minister will say a wee bit about how it plans to help those like my Sophie. We must ensure that every layer of our health service, from health visitors to GPs and child and adolescent mental health services, understands the needs of those who are living with ARFID. We also need to educate the public and those working in our public services, including our schools, to stop needless pressure and guilt being laid at the feet of parents who are doing their level best just to get enough calories of any kind into their children. The condition really is far more serious than is suggested by the “fussy” label with which children are often saddled.

I will follow on from the question that the deputy convener has just posed. Like many others, I am interested in understanding how the Scottish Government and the marine directorate will resolve the data deficiencies. In her letter to the committee of 8 February, Gillian Martin outlined that the three strands in question were enhanced observer coverage, passive acoustic monitoring and a science presence on compliance vessels. I am interested in understanding how we can move firmly into a co-management principle sphere, where we work collectively with our fishers, who have a vast knowledge of the area that they work in. They also have an interest, as we all do, in ensuring that the bedrock of the marine environment is protected. That is a key plank in our planet’s ecosystem, but it is their livelihood.

You have already alluded to the fact that you have had meetings with the CFA, and I hope that you will meet the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation as well, but, given the financial pressures that the marine directorate is under, how do we ensure that we involve the industry in developing shared scientific data? There will always be vested interests in different aspects of this matter, but, given that we do not have a shared understanding of the scientific data at the moment, how can we involve the industry meaningfully?

You have made a really important point, which alludes to what Emma Harper said earlier. We also have fish that are moving for climate reasons. It will be very difficult to manage fish so that they stay in one area when other pressures are influencing fish behaviour and where they go. It will be important for us to understand what the science tells us is happening beneath the surface of the sea. That shared scientific data, which our fishers and our marine directorate will come to together, will be really important.

Thank you.

I think that I have learned my lesson about not volunteering to go last. I will be as brief as I can be.

Cabinet secretary, you mentioned a just transition for our farmers and crofters, which is really important, especially when we are looking for them to redevelop their skills and practices, as we have just been speaking about. A big part of that will be continuing professional development. The committee has heard in evidence that there needs to be a massive culture shift in how our farmers and crofters take up such opportunities. We have to be cognisant of certain groups, such as female farmers, new entrants or younger farmers.

Although stakeholders and respondents are broadly supportive of CPD, they have raised a number of questions about how it would be implemented and what the Scottish Government’s intentions are for those powers. I am thinking about measures to compel versus measures to incentivise. When can we expect to see any regulations in that area?

Good morning, everybody. I am not sure whether this is something to declare, but I note that I am the nature champion for the hen harrier.

The 2024-25 alcohol and drugs budget has remained the same as that for 2023-24. The minor change seen in the published 2024-25 budget is not a proposed budget spend increase; rather, it shows funding being formally baselined into the alcohol and drugs budget line. The £13.6 million budget increase from 2022-23 to 2023-24 includes an additional £12 million to deliver the cross-Government plan, which was published in January 2023. The remaining £1.6 million increase covers portfolio operating costs for drug and alcohol staff, the funding for which was previously held centrally. Funding for drugs policy has increased by 67 per cent in real terms from 2014-15 to 2023-24, according to Audit Scotland figures published in 2022.

I thank Carol Mochan for that question, which gives me the opportunity to inform the Parliament that, in the coming weeks, we will have a debate in the chamber on alcohol harms and how the Scottish Government is seeking to address the matter. I look forward to having Carol Mochan and others participate in that debate with me.

I have been pondering how we ensure that we collate the information that we get from the RADAR reports and collect from the Queen Elizabeth university hospital’s programme, which monitors people in real time as they come into accident and emergency, and examine that information in totality. I am concerned about what might be coming down the line to us. I visited local organisations this week and heard that four doses of naloxone have had to be deployed in a service to reverse an overdose. That is concerning.

I am also concerned about the fact that nitazenes have been found in substances that are not linked to heroin, which means that somebody will not anticipate that they are taking a nitazene. They might be buying an illicit benzodiazepine or using what is supposed to be a cannabinoid-type vape, and nitazenes are contained therein.

I commit to keeping Parliament abreast of the emerging threats, but I will also try to figure out how we respond in an even shorter timeframe.