Chamber and committees

It is clear that further restrictions are necessary, but does the First Minister agree that people are willing to comply with restrictions when they think that they are consistent and fair, and that it will be difficult to explain why people are allowed to mix at large events when restrictions are being put on small family gatherings?

I have no doubt that the minister agrees that it is important to have the community on side, with maximum consultation on all aspects of drugs policy. I know that that was raised with her previously, when North Ayrshire Council, community councils and the local community found out from the media about the national drugs facility that is intended for Saltcoats. Will she outline what she can do to ensure maximum consultation, and will she provide an update on what is happening about the Saltcoats facility, so that that can be shared with the community?

Over the past 10 years, the Scottish Government’s budgets have increased, but local government’s budgets have been repeatedly cut. North Ayrshire Council, for example, has had to make more than £100 million in cuts. Given the £137 million real-terms cut to councils’ revenue grants in this year’s budget, what does the cabinet secretary expect councils to do to continue to provide services and to deliver on her stated aim of reducing inequalities?

I welcome the statement and in particular the apologies that have been made by the Scottish Government to survivors. Does the Deputy First Minister agree that, for many survivors, the additional practical and emotional support will be even more important that any financial compensation, and could he outline what work is being done to establish the redress support service, how much it is likely to cost and how we can ensure that it is properly resourced?

Seafarers returning to Scotland from work overseas are still required to quarantine in hotels at a cost of £2,285, but some employers are refusing to meet those costs. That is not consistent with other sectors such as offshore or the rules in the rest of the UK. Has the First Minister had the opportunity to look at the issue and is she willing to meet the relevant trade unions to discuss how those rules could be made consistent?

I will use the short time available to me to outline some concerns about the failure, to date, to take the necessary steps to ensure that we create the green jobs that we need. Despite ambitious targets, jobs have not been created in the numbers and with the terms and conditions required to make a just transition possible. Unless we see seismic change, there will be no just transition.

There is no doubt that we need a jobs and workers-led transition, with the trade unions at the heart of the debate in all sectors. The Scottish Government promised 130,000 green jobs by 2020. However, as has been said previously, the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that an estimated 21,400 direct full-time equivalent jobs were created in the low carbon and renewables economy in 2019—the most recent year for which we have figures. That was a fall from 23,100 the previous year and the lowest direct employment since 2014. My concern is that a strategy has not been presented to us today to describe how we will create those new, high-quality jobs.

The Conservative Party amendment welcomes the UK Government’s North Sea transition deal, which includes a commitment to work with employers to secure joint investment of £16 billion to retrain their workforces, but that deal fails to recognise that many of the workforce are contractors, who will therefore not benefit from it.

The recent debate on offshore training passports outlined the transferable skills that many oil and gas workers have. A Robert Gordon University review found that

“over 90% of the UK’s oil and gas workforce have medium to high skills transferability and are well positioned to work in adjacent energy sectors.”

The review projected that 100,000 of the jobs in adjacent energy sectors are likely

“to be filled by people transferring from existing oil and gas jobs to offshore renewable roles”.

However, we are talking about only approximately half of the workforce. The announcement on Cambo makes it clear that change is coming, but well-paid green jobs are not currently being created in the numbers required, and much more needs to be done by both Governments to make them a reality.

Scotland has, of course, huge potential to lead the way in renewable energy. However, our history is one of innovation and invention, but then failure to turn that into mass production. That is, of course, what has happened in the renewables sector in recent decades.

We need an industrial strategy that lays out how domestic industrial capacity will ensure growth in renewable energy production and new jobs in Scotland. As a first step, we need to create a publicly owned energy company, but we also need to look at municipal energy production, such as the solar energy farms that are being created by North Ayrshire Council. The model of public energy provision is mainstream in many other parts of the world, including Germany and the USA.

I welcome the debate on all sides. However, to deliver a just transition, we need to be more radical.

I was asking for information for MSPs about how the Scottish Government evaluates how the trials worked and, in particular, how victims and survivors felt that the trials worked for them. I would like information on whether the specialist courts dealt with cases better in certain ways; on the impact on sentencing, including whether the sentencing outcomes were the same in the specialist domestic abuse courts as in the more traditional way of dealing with such cases; and on whether cases were dealt with more speedily.

Violence against girls and women needs to be looked at in the context of wider gender inequality. In the previous session, Parliament passed hate crime legislation in relation to other groups. We need to consider how our legal system works and what more can be done to create criminal offences that tackle misogynistic behaviour.

I hope that the misogyny working group makes recommendations on how the law can be changed. Although, in recent years, there have been many changes in how the courts work, in many ways, they still operate similarly to how they operated a century ago. Therefore, we need to look at making radical changes to our legal system.

Women who are victims of such offences still feel and know that the justice system fails them. It is our responsibility to create a justice system that recognises the power relationship between men and women in society, as well as the widespread sexist and misogynistic attitudes that exist, and to provide a way of delivering justice for women and girls.

Like others, I have been contacted over the past few weeks by a number of constituents who are eligible for the booster but have had difficulty accessing it, despite the helpline. Can the First Minister provide a detailed breakdown by age group of those who have been offered and have received the booster? If she feels that mass vaccination centres and drop-in centres are not the best way forward at the moment, will she outline what can be done to put resources in to make it easier for people to get their booster?

The cabinet secretary said that he agrees “in principle” with the key recommendation of the report that a separate independent investigation should be undertaken into each death in custody. Does he agree that, as part of that, it is vital that an independent investigator has early access to all witnesses, while events are still fresh in their minds?

The statistics on violence against women and girls make sombre reading. The number of sexual crimes reported to Police Scotland, including rape and attempted rape, has gone up by 114 per cent over the past 10 years. Since 2010-11, the number of other sexual crimes, including internet-based crimes such as communicating indecently and taking, possessing and distributing indecent photographs of children, has increased by 238 per cent.

According to Rape Crisis Scotland, on a typical day in Scotland in 2019, the number of survivors of sexual violence who were waiting for access to what it calls life-saving rape crisis support had almost doubled since the year before. Only 43 per cent of rape and attempted rape cases lead to a conviction compared with 88 per cent for other crimes. Disturbingly, at least 40 per cent of all sexual crimes recorded in 2019-20 related to a victim who was under the age of 18.

Many women will never report their abusers. Those who do report these crimes experience a legal system that fails them, and many speak of the further trauma that is caused to them due to their treatment by the police, the courts, the legal profession and the wider judicial system.

Domestic violence against women and girls is endemic. The figures that were released today show that, for the fifth year in a row, there has been an increase in the number of domestic abuse incidents that are reported to the police.

Specialist domestic violence courts have been trialled, and we ask the Scottish Government to provide an evaluation so that we know how the courts worked. We need to know whether those who had suffered domestic abuse felt that the specialist courts dealt with cases better.