Chamber and committees

I associate myself with those remarks from the First Minister. I pay tribute to Hazel Nairn, who tragically went missing during Friday’s adverse weather. As the search continues, my thoughts are with her family and the responders on the ground.

In Brechin, two of the pumps belonging to the town’s £16 million flood defences failed, flooding homes and causing extensive damage. Villagers raised concerns with me about the safety of an electrical substation in Inchbair, which was half-submerged in water for days. Communities rallied together over the weekend, but improvements need to be made to the organisation of the emergency response to such weather events.

How will the Scottish Government work with local resilience partnerships to expedite that process and reassure people in my region that every possible step has been taken to protect them?

To ask the First Minister what assessment the Scottish Government has made of the emergency response to flooding in the north-east of Scotland in recent days. (S6F-01565)

We need to stop the haemorrhaging of existing GPs in search of better conditions abroad or early retirement, and to stop those who are considering cutting the sessions that they currently work.

Mr Doris talks about blame, and he is blaming Brexit for these dire situations. We cannot plug the gaps when the system is a sieve. More than a third of practices report having at least one vacancy, which is a higher figure than at this time last year. It takes years to train a doctor. The SNP Government must focus on retaining the talent that we have.

Humza Yousaf says, “Judge me by my record”. On resources, the cuts of £65 million from the primary care budget and £5 million in support payments mean that GP practices will have to try to meet patient demand with even fewer resources than before, and the kicker? The slashing of £65 million from primary care was announced on the same day that the Crown Office confirmed that almost £51 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on a range of malicious prosecutions.

If the health secretary left his bunker and his spin doctors and listened to our doctors and nurses on the NHS front line, he would understand that establishing multidisciplinary teams in primary care is vital if we are to scale up our patient care. We know that there are problems with putting in place multidisciplinary teams that can help to spread the GP workload.

We have an NHS recovery plan that has seen things getting worse, not better. We have a winter resilience plan that tells the public to access urgent care only if the situation is life threatening, which piles even more pressure on primary care. Things are so dire that NHS leaders have considered introducing a two-tier system for treatment, which would charge the wealthy.

How many warnings from the front line of our NHS will it take for this health secretary not just to listen but to act? Primary care is at breaking point. Members have laid bare the fact that there simply is not the capacity to meet demand.

Sadly, Graham Simpson highlighted the fact that, under the SNP, we now have a national have-not service. Jeremy Balfour outlined the alarming stats and bleak picture. Dr Sandesh Gulhane highlighted the lack of trust in Humza Yousaf and shed light on conversations that are taking place behind closed Government doors. Jackie Baillie stated that GPs are on their knees while Humza Yousaf says, “Go to the GP rather than A and E”. What does Humza Yousaf do? He deflects and he blames Labour. He makes personal attacks on Jackie Baillie. He sneers at Dr Sandesh Gulhane. Alex Cole-Hamilton talked about a “slap in the face” to GP practices and the heroic healthcare staff. Paul O’Kane talked about GPs being at their wits’ end.

Research by the British Medical Association clearly shows that it is not just some practices that are struggling but the vast majority and that, if primary care buckles, it will be catastrophic not just for general practice and patients, but for the whole healthcare system.

There are two overriding issues affecting primary care: a lack of GPs and a lack of resources. Bob Doris referred to Humza Yousaf’s plan to recruit 800 additional GPs by 2027. However, the BMA says that we do not need 800 additional GPs—we need 1,000 and we do not need them by 2027; we need them now.

We also need to stop the haemorrhaging of existing GPs—

Humza Yousaf must step aside and let someone else step up who has the confidence of the medical profession.

I am sorry that I was late this morning—I was at another committee meeting.

I have a question for Rosemary Agnew and Kevin Mitchell. Many are concerned that the bill gives too much centralised power to ministers, and we have heard today that it will make the ombudsman function toothless and powerless and that, as Rosemary said, it will make the SPSO unable to do its job. What other conflicts of interest do you foresee?

I have two amendments in the group. The main one is amendment 135, which seeks to place a duty on the Scottish ministers to encourage public understanding of not just the act’s provisions but its effects more widely. Amendment 142 requires that the Scottish ministers must prepare and publish a report on how that requirement has been fulfilled,

“no later than 6 months after the day after Royal Assent.”

On amendment 142, during stage 1, we heard evidence that raised question marks over what it means to live in an acquired gender; whether name changes will be required; what it means to make a false declaration; whether GRCs will be recognised by other jurisdictions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere; whether there is a pathway to detransition in the bill; what the bill means for the operation of the Equality Act 2010; and what the bill’s implications will be for single-sex spaces and women and girls. That is just the tip of the iceberg. The number of amendments that have been lodged at stage 2 is indicative of just how little clarity the bill provides on key provisions. One stakeholder described the Scottish Government’s own understanding of the bill as “flawed”.

Of course we seek to improve the bill’s clarity at stage 2, but it remains the case that the public need to understand what the bill will do and will not do once it has been passed; how it will affect people, especially women and girls; how people can use the bill; and what the penalties will be for misuse.

I lodged four amendments in the group. Amendment 143 would create a duty on the Scottish ministers to carry out a review of the operation of the act, focusing on three areas in which we know that its provisions will have an impact—educational establishments, the health system and the criminal justice system. There is potential for unintended consequences in the legislation that we might not be able to foresee at this stage, and reports on those areas every two years would help to facilitate post-legislative scrutiny, which the Scottish Parliament needs to do much more of, especially in relation to the operation of the bill.

Amendment 144 would modify section 15 of the bill to include a duty on the registrar general to report the number of applications each year for a GRC

“where the applicant has previously obtained a gender recognition certificate”.

The Scottish Government has emphasised that the process for detransitioning under the new system will be the same as the process of self-identification, meaning that individuals who seek to detransition will be caught in the data on the generic numbers of applications and GRCs. However, without a specific pathway to detransition in the bill, the challenge is that it will be difficult to capture figures on the people who choose to detransition under the new system, which will make post-legislative scrutiny more difficult.

Section 15, as drafted, creates a new duty on the registrar general to include information about gender recognition alongside the number of births, deaths and marriages in Scotland each year. That provision was drafted by the Scottish Government and it is clearly information that the Scottish Government wants to capture. Amendment 144 would simply modify section 15 to include in the report the annual number of applications made to the registrar general

“where the applicant has previously obtained a gender recognition certificate”.

Amendment 148, which goes hand in hand with amendment 155, would create a duty on Scottish ministers to transparently consult women and girls on how and how often the Scottish Government should report on the impact of the act on that demographic. It would require that regulations be made that set out the details of such a report. For the avoidance of doubt, it would also include a requirement that any data collected for the purposes of a report

“should record the sex as recorded at birth.”

Amendment 148 states that that consultation should take place within six months of royal assent, but the Scottish Government should have started consulting long before the bill becomes law. Women and girls have felt marginalised at every turn during the process. They have been treated as an afterthought; told by Scotland’s First Minister that their concerns about the bill’s proposals are not valid; and vilified on social media for asking legitimate questions about the operation of the act in relation to single-sex spaces and the safety of women and girls. Just last week at this committee, we saw women’s freedom of expression shockingly denied, simply for wearing suffrage colours—the symbol of women’s hard-won rights. I make that point because, in 2018, before the introduction of the bill and the start of public discourse surrounding it, female MSPs from all parties stood together on the steps in the garden lobby, proudly draped in the colours of green, white and purple. We already see the unintended impact of the bill on women and girls and it has not even reached stage 3. That is why amendment 148 is so important.

Crucially, amendment 155 would delay the commencement of section 2 until Scottish ministers have made the regulations that are required to set out plans for reporting on the impact of the operation of the act on women and girls.

I regret that the provisions that I have proposed are necessary. The Scottish Government should have managed the process far better. Nevertheless, I urge the committee to support the amendments.

Presiding Officer, I would welcome any guidance that you can offer on how the Scottish Parliament can play a role in tackling misinformation online and defending the journalistic freedoms of our independent media outlets.