Chamber and committees

To ask the Scottish Government whether it has carried out an equality impact assessment following reports that it plans to cease funding for the schools programme as part of the Scottish attainment challenge. (S6O-00475)

I am pleased to contribute to the debate as convener of the cross-party group on learning disability. I thank my colleague and friend Pam Duncan-Glancy for securing the debate as we mark the international day of persons with disabilities. I also pay a wider tribute to Ms Duncan-Glancy for all the work that she has done over many years and for what she has already done in the short time that we have both served in this Parliament.

On 2021’s international day of persons with disabilities, it is important to acknowledge that the chamber looks different to how it looked when the previous international day was marked in 2020. Parliament has changed to become more diverse, with an increased number of MSPs identifying as having a disability.

I praise Daniel Johnson, my colleague and friend, for his powerful and personal speech. As someone who knows something of speaking your own truth every day, whether that is in Parliament or anywhere else, I say that it is a brave and important thing to do, not only for oneself but for other people. Jeremy Balfour’s advice on that to him was very solid: speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.

Jeremy Balfour also made a characteristically powerful speech. He was a great help to me in a former role in the secretariat of the cross-party group on learning disability in the previous session of Parliament.

This session, Parliament includes our first permanent wheelchair user in Pam Duncan-Glancy. I will quote from her maiden speech. She said:

“for too long this Parliament—and others like it—has not looked like the people that it is here to represent, but this year is different. The people of Scotland broke glass ceilings and glass staircases, and this room got a bit closer to looking a bit more like the people of Scotland. It is now our chance to turn a little hope into lasting change. This is the room where it happens.”—[Official Report, 27 May 2021; c 50-51.]

Those are powerful words that are worth recalling, because we know that we have much more to do to make our Parliament look like our country and to ensure that the voices of disabled people are heard and listened to.

I certainly agree with Jeremy Balfour on that. All of us in political life have a duty to find ways, within our political parties, to encourage more people from diverse backgrounds to join our political life. Politics is often off-putting for people because there are barriers in respect of how we deal with and respond to one another. Political parties have a bigger role to play. I hope that we all take cognisance of that.

Decisions that we make in Parliament impact on the lives of disabled people every day and on their families and communities. I will focus my remaining time on this year’s theme, which is disabled people’s leadership and participation in fighting for rights in the post-Covid era. For too many disabled people, the past 20 months have been a battle to have their rights upheld, protected and advanced. Too many people have seen care and support being removed with little or no consultation. Too many have been cut off from family, friends and their social lives. Many have been pushed further into poverty. Tragically, six in 10 deaths from Covid-19 have been of people who were disabled.

We know that people have not felt consulted, engaged or involved when Covid-19 regulations have changed. I reflect on my experience of working to support people with learning disabilities and their families in the first lockdown. Regulations did not always fit the many complex and different challenges that those people experience every day. For example, autistic children could not visit the beach that they went to every week, which for them was a haven because it was in a different local authority area, just down the road.

Many people did not feel able to engage with and understand what was being asked of us all because of the lack of accessible formats such as easy read. Far too many people’s lives were viewed as being worth less than those of others, through blanket approaches being taken to “do not resuscitate” orders. I commend my colleague Jackie Baillie, who is a former convener of the cross-party group, and the former vice-convener, Joan McAlpine, for bringing that matter to the fore in the previous session of Parliament. Serious questions remain unanswered.

I conclude by looking forward. A single day of awareness raising and celebration will not solve the problems that are faced by disabled people. We must learn the lessons of the past 20 months and we must do more. We must always ensure that the voices of disabled people ring loud and clear in all our considerations, in Parliament and beyond.

The impact on the 73 schools is significant. Of those affected, 34 are set to lose around or more than £100,000 in direct funding, and 13 schools will lose more than £150,000. Yesterday, the Education, Children and Young People Committee heard what the Scottish attainment challenge funds in schools. It pays for staffing, support for pupils with additional support needs and a vast range of important interventions such as speech and language therapy. What would the cabinet secretary advise headteachers in those schools to cut?

I rise in support of the motion in Michael Marra’s name.

As Scottish Labour’s spokesperson for public health, it is clear to me that more active ventilation in our schools is crucial to our continued efforts to reduce transmission of Covid-19, and that thus far action by the Scottish Government on that has been lacking.

Society expects public health measures to be front and centre in ensuring that buildings such as schools are safe for pupils and staff, and in ensuring that we have confidence in environments that are used day in and day out not only for learning by our young people, but for wider community use and our civic life. Rigorous systems are in place around water, sanitation and hygiene—now we must invest in systems that provide long-term and robust active ventilation across all our school estates. Indeed, as we have heard many times in the debate, we cannot be in the situation next year or the year after of having to open windows.

It is clear that we cannot tackle Covid-19 with a one-track strategy. We need a basket of measures, in line with an overarching public health approach. Vaccinations are incredibly vital in protecting people’s health, but vaccines alone are not enough. Science has shown repeatedly that proper ventilation is one of the most effective ways of preventing infection, due to the aerosol nature of Covid-19. We must have safe environments for our young people to learn in. That is why the motion advocates that there be at least two high-efficiency particulate absorbing filters in each classroom. As we have heard, they have been employed elsewhere in the world, and the Government has advocated their being placed in other settings.

It is clear that the work that has been undertaken to date by the Government has not been sufficient. The CO₂ monitoring that the Government has persevered with has no standardised approach. It has a methodology that the Government has refused to share, and its implementation was delayed, anyway. The Government has done nothing apart from cling to the incompetent approach of relying on CO₂ monitors alone, which I believe has wasted money and time and has brought us no closer to a long-lasting solution. It has also done little to inspire confidence in young people, parents and staff. Confidence in our public buildings and in the places where we live, work, learn and play is crucial, as I said earlier.

This morning, I received a copy of the results of survey work that was done on a wellbeing group of almost 400 teachers from across Scotland. Thirty-one per cent of them reported that they still have no CO₂ monitor, and 30 per cent have one that is shared throughout the school building. Of the teachers who said that they have access to a CO₂ monitor, 10 per cent have had it for only one day. Many teachers reported that opening the windows is their only means of ventilation—although teachers often teach in rooms that do not have windows. Of 102 teachers who had a CO₂ monitor, 11.8 per cent reported that it is frequently red and 43 per cent said that it is sometimes red. Those teachers have also reported classrooms being “uncomfortably cold”, as we enter some of the worst of the winter weather.

Although on paper opening windows is an attractive way to achieve ventilation, it is not working in practice. Not only are classrooms and learning spaces freezing, Covid cases are still rising, so clearly there has not been enough action.

Pupils, parents and staff deserve better, and so do local authorities, which are struggling to get things right in a variety of buildings and spaces. I declare an interest, as a serving councillor in East Renfrewshire Council.

The money that has so far gone to local authorities for monitoring has not been needs based. Instead of funding what is really needed, the money has been mainstreamed, with no clear methodology for allocating it. It is clear that we require a strong public health approach, with consistent funding and implementation. It is time for urgency from the Government; 20 months into the pandemic, it is clear that young people, parents, staff—

—and local authorities deserve better.

I thank Jamie Greene for bringing the debate to the chamber as we mark world AIDS day 2021, and I praise him for his very powerful speech.

I also thank all organisations that work to support people living with HIV, to improve sexual health, and to advocate for more services and action to eradicate HIV and AIDS, most notably the Terrence Higgins Trust, Waverley Care, the National AIDS Trust and HIV Scotland. I thank them all for the briefing material that they have provided ahead of our debate today and for the work that they do throughout the year.

As each world AIDS day is marked, I reflect on how far we have come and what we still have to do in Scotland and the UK, and around the world, to meet our ambitious target of ending new HIV infections by 2030.

I wish to begin by remembering all those lost in the 40 years since the first diagnosed cases of HIV. We think of all those who have died from HIV, AIDS and related illness, the pain and suffering caused to those who loved them, and the long-lasting impact of stigma and shame, which has dominated in our society for too long.

I remember only too well when I was growing up the sense of fear that existed: the sense of othering people, particularly those in the LGBT+ community; and the view of many in the mainstream media and more broadly in society that AIDS was somehow about lifestyle choices or some kind of punishment for being gay. The lack of compassion, the refusal to seek to understand and the lack of support led to unimaginable circumstances for people and long-lasting poor mental health.

When I look at my own adult life, I realise that I have been extremely fortunate in the support that is available now for LGBT+ people in particular to talk about the issues, seek advice on safe sex, know their status and now have access to PrEP and PEP. People living with HIV have better support to live a full life and, through advancements in medicine, to reach undetectable viral status, which means that it is untransmittable and they cannot pass the virus on. I think that we would all want to praise the U=U campaign—and, indeed, the work done by charities in that area—and I very much echo Jamie Greene’s comment that, if people do not know about that, they should take some time and look at it.

It is important that we look back and acknowledge the pain and suffering of a whole generation. As we have heard, recent TV dramas have helped to do that very well. “It’s a Sin” on Channel 4 very powerfully portrayed the darkest moments of the 1980s and the culture of fear and hate that was created. “Pose” on BBC iPlayer told a similar story, focusing in particular on the discrimination that was faced by transgender people decades ago. As Jamie Greene said, “It’s a Sin” was a difficult watch, but at the time I tweeted that it made me laugh, it made me cry and it made me feel angry for a whole generation of people. These stories must be heard and lives remembered, and we must educate people about how far we have come and what we still have to do.

As for what we still have to do, the fact is that although, decades on, our world is different, and the advances have been remarkable, stigma persists. A poll in 2019 by the Terrence Higgins Trust found that public attitudes to HIV remain stubbornly out of step with scientific progress, with 41 per cent of British adults believing that everyone living with HIV can pass on the virus and 64 per cent feeling uncomfortable having sex with someone living with HIV who is on effective treatment. Almost half would feel uncomfortable kissing someone living with HIV, despite there being no risk of transmission, and 38 per cent of people would feel uncomfortable going on a date with someone who is HIV positive.

We also have more to do to achieve our target of no new infections by 2030. Indeed, organisations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust have said that we need a step change to make that a reality. I know that, in closing, the minister will want to provide an update on developments in the Scottish Government’s work to end new HIV transmissions within the decade and on any considerations with regard to expanding the access of PrEP into other healthcare settings, in particular, and other actions to reach the target.

I am proud to have been able to contribute to today’s debate, to remember the dead, to fight for the living and to strive for a world without new transmissions.

The gravity of this debate cannot be ignored. It is shocking that we have reached this point and that Scottish Labour has had to bring the motion to Parliament today. Surely all of us across the chamber must agree that no family should have to experience a battle to know what happened to their loved one when they died in one of our hospitals. No family should have to fight for the answers and no family should have to relive their loss every day because of a lack of closure and a lack of accountability. We must also agree that nobody who works in our NHS should ever feel that they cannot speak out and be heard on such serious issues.

However, after years of secrecy, denial and cover-up, not a single person has been held accountable for the catastrophic errors and infection scandal at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital. Since 2015, the issues have been raised time and again. There have been reports on contaminated water, deadly flaws in the building’s fabric, serious patient infections and death, the bullying of staff and the silencing of whistleblowers, but no one in the senior management or board leadership has been held to account.

Let us be absolutely clear once again that this is not about the doctors, nurses and care assistants who work day in and day out in the hospital treating sick patients—they have worked tirelessly, especially throughout the pandemic, and they rightly deserve our deep gratitude. This is about those in positions of leadership. We stand with the courageous staff and whistleblowers who have revealed the scale of infections at the hospital, in the face of denial and intimidation from the leadership. We stand with the families who have described their ordeal and their feeling that nobody in power is listening to them.

Two weeks ago, at First Minister’s question time, I raised the case of the Smith family from Greenock. Theresa and Matthew Smith’s baby daughter Sophia died at just 12 days old of an infection that was contracted at the Queen Elizabeth, despite initially responding well to treatment for breathing problems. I spoke to Theresa today. Her child is not just a statistic. She spoke to me about the unimaginable pain of being unable to find any closure or to properly grieve the loss of her child, because she does not know why she died. She said to me:

“How can you accept what you do not know?”

Theresa asked me to speak of Sophia today, to say her name in this place and to say that her life was worth the world to those who loved her for those short 12 days and who still love her today. The family want all of us in positions of power in this place to listen. They want us to listen when they tell us about the tortuous journey to try to get answers. They want us to listen to the fact that, for four years, they have felt locked in a battle, with phone calls, emails and letters stonewalled, when all they want to do is find some peace. They want us to listen to the fact that they feel constrained and silenced in the public inquiry.

The Government regularly cites that inquiry in response to calls for action on the issue. Last week, Theresa’s evidence to it was ruled too contentious to be made public, after legal applications by the Government and the health board. The legal experts have said that such orders should be used only as a very last resort, or there is a risk to public confidence in the inquiry. The First Minister told us in the chamber that she

“will not tolerate cover-ups or secrecy on the part of any health board.”—[Official Report, 18 November 2021; c 15.]

However, in this case, her officials acted to ensure that evidence was heard in secret. That cannot be how the inquiry is conducted, given how families have been treated.

It is clear that, for families such as the Smiths, trust is completely broken. They have little faith in the process, so we must act. This is about leadership and confidence in leadership. Crucially, it is about the trust of grieving families and the basic decency of ensuring that they can grieve in some peace. To begin to even think about a process of restoring trust, we must support the motion in Anas Sarwar’s name.

I thank everyone for their contributions this morning. What is coming across is a sense that the approach needs to be evidence led and that we need to take our time with it. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but we want to take time to learn from the experience of the past 18 months.

I will touch on two points. On digital exclusion, I agree with what has been said about ensuring that people have the right support. My concern is that we often end up with a two-tier system, even within a digital offering. People who do not have access to the internet sometimes cannot do audiovisual participation and end up participating via a phone, which is not always the best option, particularly—Karen Wylie alluded to this—in relation to children’s hearings and family courts, in which the issues that are discussed are very emotive and can be very stressful and challenging for people. Participation on a phone can often mean that it is difficult to read people’s tones or get a sense of what support someone might need. In addition, if someone is being supported by an advocate or legal counsel, it can often be hard in a digital setting for that relationship to be well established and for the person to get the right support. There are certainly things that need to be looked at to ensure that there is parity of access, even within digital offerings.

Ruth Crawford touched on the public’s access to the courts and how, where appropriate, members of the public can ensure that they can be present, if they choose to be. Obviously, our public galleries at Holyrood have been empty for the duration of the pandemic, but we broadcast all the public meetings of the Parliament via the website through Scottish Parliament TV. The difference is that we have not quite reached all court proceedings being digitally available or available in live time. I am keen to understand how we can protect the right of the public to be present in court if there is a move to a digital setting.

I am currently a serving councillor. We have a strange process if a member of the public wants to join the meeting. They have to request to do so prior to the meeting and be let into the system that we use, otherwise they have to watch it after the live event on YouTube. We need to look at such issues so that we protect people’s fundamental right to be present.

More must be done to support post office provision not only in rural communities but in town centres. The town of Port Glasgow, in my region, has no post office, which is remarkable in a town of almost 15,000 people.

When post offices close, community groups and local development trusts often wish to take the services on but cannot get off the ground due to funding or resourcing issues. Will the First Minister look at how we might better fund community capacity to offer such services and retain them in communities?