Chamber and committees

I resist the move to close the petition. The issue seems prima facie to be reserved, but significant provisions are in devolved legislation, and particularly the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019. That act provides for establishing bus services improvement partnerships, which probably represent the weakest form of regulation after a purely laissez-faire system. The act also contains provisions on franchising and direct public ownership. The Scottish Government has significant regulatory capacity when defining a bus franchise—for example, it can insist on the achievement of certain service standards. That depends not necessarily on legislation but on how well designed a franchise agreement is.

There are significant financial incentives. About 45 per cent of all bus company turnover in Scotland is from public subsidy, and provisions or conditionality could be attached to that public subsidy, which is from the Scottish Government. New vehicles that were procured could be required to meet a certain quality of specification, which would provide such capability in a service.

Given those factors alone, there are significant provisions for the Scottish Parliament as a legislature to design a better service standard that would meet the petitioner’s concerns. The issue is not solely about reserved powers. The committee also has capacity to engage with the Scotland Office and ask what efforts it might make to amend legislation at Westminster to back up any action. There is a breadth of opportunity for us to pursue the petition.

I am generally supportive of the idea of dualling the national trunk road network for safety reasons. That is sometimes conflated with environmental concerns, but the safety implications of dualling on trunk roads are critical.

Elena Whitham raised a wider point about rail substitution. A wider assessment of the ability to move freight from the ports at Cairnryan and Stranraer on to rail is worthy of consideration.

What is lacking, certainly on the west coast, is a port strategy generally. There needs to be consideration of the utilisation of some of the Firth of Clyde ports further north, such as the port at Greenock, for moving freight on to the motorway network. That would help to relieve pressure on the Ayrshire trunk road network.

I think that all these things are considered in isolation, so perhaps it might be worth writing to the relevant ministers to ask for this to be considered in the strategic transport projects review. We need to look at things in a wider sense, because there is no consideration of ports infrastructure in the west of Scotland and how that is managed. It is, in effect, a free market, but that has significant public costs that are not properly accounted for.

I echo that challenge to the DWP on the issue of a “like for like basis”. It is also important that we test the provisions of the Scotland Act 2016 on where the competence for devolved benefits and the topping-up or enhancing of existing benefits lies. It is an important issue that we need to interrogate; it merits thorough exploration by the Parliament.

There has been a risk-averse approach in the civil service in designing the benefit, which could cause significant harm to the people in Scotland who we are trying to assist. Fundamentally, the entire system of arbitrary tick-box exercises for assessing eligibility is absurd and has no basis in clinical evidence. It is a policy that is bigoted against disabled people. Redesigning the policy to move away from that would be advantageous from my perspective.

The idea that the Scottish Parliament should default to the same policy is not reasonable. We need to test that issue as such a presumption might be having a chilling effect. The petition is a valid way to interrogate the provisions. There is also the wider constitutional element in testing where the threshold of the 2016 act sits and what discretion the Parliament has. It is important that we do not make people who are suffering significant hardship wait until 2023 for some sort of risk-averse approach to be introduced on a like-for-like basis, and then test it after that. We need to move more urgently.

Constituents who have contacted me have raised a wider issue that merits investigation. The use of such products and the potential defects that result in significant chronic pain and other medical complications are not well understood, but the significant level of anecdotal evidence merits formal investigation. Insufficient effort has been put in to achieve that, so the petition is worth while. It would be reasonable to initiate inquiries with the cabinet secretary in the first instance by inviting him to say how the Government will proceed with a formal investigation.

I have an additional point, convener. My experience of dealing with planning applications locally is that online consultations have become more of a feature. In many cases, the online facility has increased participation in planning consultations, just because the physical logistics of attending are much more straightforward. This might be an opportunity to ask whether a study has been done of the effectiveness of that procedure. It might be good to consider having online facilities as well as physical facilities. We could ask the Government whether it has reviewed the effectiveness of the way in which consultations have been undertaken.

I think that you are right, convener. This might be an instance of the law of unintended consequences. Clearly, the legislation was written with the intention of regulating mass culling of hare populations and shooting of hares. Falconry is such an incidental and marginal activity that it has a negligible effect at any discernible level. I think that there has been an unintentional chilling effect, which we need to address with the Government. It is clear that the submission of the Scottish Government was inadequate with regard to the specifics of falconry.

In the same way as a listed building is protected, there are sufficient provisions in a discretionary planning system for local authorities to say that development on designated battlefields would be suitable grounds for rejection of a planning application.

I have nothing to add at this stage, convener.

First, I declare an interest as a member of Unite; also, my dad is a taxi driver. I certainly know from personal experience how significantly detrimental the pandemic and the lockdowns have been to the taxi trade. Anyone who has tried to get a taxi in Glasgow in recent weeks will know how limited the current capacity is. That is because so many people have exited the trade altogether.

Assistance during the pandemic has been a severe problem for people. In effect, many taxi drivers were recommended to go on universal credit throughout the pandemic. There has been a severe detriment to taxi drivers’ livelihoods, compared to those of bus drivers, who were furloughed during the pandemic. Bus companies were given significantly higher levels of financial support.

I therefore have sympathy with the petition, and I think that the demands are reasonable. I am inclined to request a further response from the Scottish Government and to ask what it will do about inadequate levels of funding. I think that the response from the Scottish Government is not sufficient. Although the financial support for improvements to vehicles is significant and is to be commended, the on-going issue of lost income during the pandemic is still very much an open wound that has not been sufficiently addressed.

In its submission, the Scottish Government is basically saying that it would need a submission from the petitioner on why the grounds would justify the use of RPM, which is seen as quite an unusual and anachronistic process in current times. Generally, the matter would be referred to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. However, given the historical nature of this absolutely horrific activity, the RPM would seem to be the more appropriate process, given that it involves the First Minister alone making a discretionary decision to refer the matter to the Queen for a pardon. That means that it does not need to go through a particularly onerous legalistic exercise to determine harms, the merits and demerits of cases, and so on. The historical facts of the horrific nature of this past superstitious activity would simply be accepted, and a political decision would be made at the First Minister’s discretion once the Government was equipped with a briefing of the historical incidents and their nature. I think that such an exercise would be more straightforward in realising the aims of the petitioner’s request.