Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener. I would like to take the opportunity to commend the petitioners, Pinar Aksu of Maryhill Integration Network and Doaa Abuamer of the VOICES Network, who, for several years, have worked tirelessly, alongside people with lived experience of the asylum system, on the campaign to extend access to free bus travel, which has been running for at least two years.

I welcomed the Scottish Government’s announcement in October that £2 million would be allocated in the budget for the financial year 2024-25 to enable the roll-out of free bus travel for people who are seeking asylum in Scotland. However, I speak to the committee today in order to urge caution and to encourage members to keep the petition open for the time being. Although the funding that has been announced is welcome and, indeed, overdue, the detail of how it will be utilised and what it will actually mean for people who are seeking asylum remains to be seen.

The original ask of the petition was that the concessionary bus travel scheme be extended, but, in its announcement, the Scottish Government gave no indication that that is what the funds will be used for. There has been no sign of a draft statutory instrument, no indication of the logistics and no details on the design of the scheme.

There is a risk that the funds will simply be used for more information gathering and research or for a temporary scheme, rather than to make free bus travel a permanent reality for people who are seeking asylum in Scotland. Frankly, we do not need more data. We have had a pilot in Glasgow and another one in Aberdeen. We know that there is a need, and we know how to meet it at a relatively marginal extra cost to the public purse.

I urge the committee to write to the Scottish Government to seek written confirmation of the detail of the plans for the roll-out of the £2 million scheme. I also ask the committee to assess whether that funding will be used to deliver on the petition’s ask, which is that the national concessionary travel scheme be extended to people who are seeking asylum, before it considers closing the petition.

We have seen the development of food pantries, particularly in urban areas, which have been a really positive thing in recent years. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Courtyard Pantry Enterprise in Glasgow.

I am interested to know more about efforts to co-operate with local authorities on turning more parkland over to cultivation. One of the big challenges that has arisen from local government budget cuts in recent years is the collapse in finance for urban parks. In Glasgow, the budget for parks has gone down by, I think, 80 per cent over the past decade. Is there an opportunity to promote greater agricultural use of urban parkland, which could allow councils to reduce budget pressure from maintaining what have traditionally been manicured landscapes?

I will touch on public procurement. It has been mentioned in relation to school meals and so on, but how engaged are you in decision making around public procurement of food, its quality and supply-chain design? Is that something that you take an active role in, or is it more the case that you provide guidance? I am curious about how you operate in that space.

In relation to supermarkets, we can see the range of products and where supply chain densities are in terms of geography. Forgive me if it is already visible, but is that visible the public sector? Can we see supply chain density for the NHS, for example, including on whether products are procured from certain farms or locations in Scotland? There are large industrial catering companies, such as Bidfood Ltd and Brake Bros Ltd, that supply NHS organisations. Is there visibility in those processes? If there is not, should we design it in so that we have greater capacity to make rational adjustments?

The supermarket distribution and wholesale system is a huge influence on food consumption behaviours. A large part of that is not necessarily to do with poverty in the financial sense but is about time poverty. People are increasingly thinking at the margins, and single-occupancy households pick things that are convenient to make late in the evening or whatever.

Would you be able to provide retailers with guidance on product bundling, which could help them to package or offer more healthy options for people. There has been significant progress in improving the density of Scottish supply-chain products in supermarkets. Aldi is currently the leader, with 25 per cent Scotland-sourced products. It would be interesting to know more about that.

Companies such as HelloFresh are providing people with immediately ready kit for making nutritional meals, but are quite expensive: it is a high-end offer. How can we make that a more normal choice and use it as a way to seed supply-chain density in Scotland?

I have a question on calorie publication. Have you noticed a change in the behaviour of food providers in reducing calorie density in things that are excessively calorie dense? If there are 1,500 calories in a meal, for example, they might consider that that is quite alarming to the consumer and try to reduce it to 800 calories or whatever.

Thank you, Dr Cass, for your contribution so far. I want to look at the wider balance of harms. We have noted that the average wait from referral to being seen at a gender dysphoria clinic can often be more than four years. During that time, people may experience significant distress—physical, psychological and social—and they may self-medicate with hormone replacement drugs, although I am not sure how accessible puberty blockers are. Obviously, that can introduce unregulated harms beyond, say, the practice of bridging prescriptions. What observations do you have and what evidence have you seen about that broader behaviour of self-medication?

Do you have any thoughts about how best to remedy that?

Does the model that has been adopted in Glasgow for the overdose prevention centre, or safer drug consumption facility, match what you would like to have seen in an ideal world, based on international benchmarks? Could it benefit from further development?

Dr Fletcher, I noticed that you were nodding there. Are you looking closely at emulating what is currently happening and, I hope, benefiting from the learning curve that Glasgow is leading on?