Chamber and committees

Thank you.

Over the festive period, NHS Grampian made an extraordinary plea on social media for exhausted NHS staff to come in on their days off. Dr Iain Kennedy—who is chairman of the British Medical Association Scotland, as members will know—said that that intervention should

“close any debate that the NHS is broken”.

The issue of how strapped for staff NHS Grampian is has been well publicised. Does the cabinet secretary think that that will happen more often? Is it acceptable for that to become the norm?

Since June last year, I have repeatedly tried to ask the Scottish Government when a women’s health champion will be appointed. The Minister for Public Health, Women’s Health and Sport and even the First Minister have deployed every delaying tactic in the book, and the can is just being kicked down the road. The petition on the services in Caithness and Sutherland underscores why a women’s health champion is so important to Scotland. Why is a women’s health champion not a priority for the Scottish Government? Can you say today when an appointment will be made?

Hello, and thank you, cabinet secretary. I acknowledge that you do not want to provide the budget allocation for NHS 24 until this afternoon’s statement, although I am disappointed to hear that. I raised NHS 24 capacity with you in October, and, at the time, you emphasised the additional recruitment that will take place to support that crucial service. Can you at least indicate this morning, cabinet secretary, how many new NHS 24 staff have been put in place since you made that pledge in October and how many you intend to recruit over the coming weeks?

Thank you.

Cabinet secretary, the total maintenance backlog bill across Scotland’s 14 health boards has, shockingly, reached more than £1.5 billion. What budgetary provision is in place to cover that bill? Why is the 2021 commitment to invest £10 billion over the next decade to replace and refurbish health infrastructure not mentioned in the 2022 programme for government or in the 2023-24 budget?

Thank you for allowing an additional speaker today, Presiding Officer.

I spent many years helping organisations to improve inclusion in the workplace. It is part of my DNA. I have made sure in my job that everyone, whether they are female, male, gay, transitioning or with a disability, is physically and psychologically safe at work. As a human resources director and now as a legislator, the safety of others is my priority.

However, in recent months, I have been inundated with emails from people who are not just sceptical about the plans but deeply, deeply worried. They know that the bill is not just simplifying the process to get a piece of paper. They know that it makes it easier for people to legally change their sex and that it opens the door to single-sex spaces to an undefined group of people.

Women and girls are not victims, but they are victimised. This is not about a competition of rights. It is about creating the right conditions for the co-existence of those rights. This bill simply does not do that.

We have been told by the SNP that there is no need to press pause on the bill and examine the implications of a major intervention by the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls or last week’s court ruling on the definition of a woman. Scrutiny and debate matter to the SNP only when that suits it. That is shameful. The sad truth is that the passage of the bill has shattered my confidence in our democratic institutions.

Women’s organisations were an afterthought prior to the introduction of the bill. Every party save the Scottish Conservatives is whipping the vote. At stage 1 and this week, a handful of SNP MSPs broke ranks, and they should be applauded for doing so. That was a much-needed departure from the authoritarian ideologues who preside over the SNP-Green Government. I say to those MSPs on the Labour and SNP benches who fear the reproaches from their party whips or the effect on their careers more than the repercussions of the bill for women and girls that there is still time to choose courage over cowardice. Collectivism should not trump their conscience.

My amendments yesterday would at least have placed a duty on ministers to report on the bill’s impact on women and girls, who risk being collateral damage in the SNP-Green Government’s single-minded pursuit of self-ID.

However, something else is happening—an insidious creep that started with women being branded as bigots and transphobes for raising concerns over their rights and safety. A few weeks ago, women wearing suffragette scarves were told to remove them or leave the meeting of a parliamentary committee that was scrutinising the bill in Scotland’s own seat of democracy. Last week, women were prevented from assembling in an academic institution to discuss the issues arising in the documentary “Adult Human Female”, their right to freedom of speech being not just curtailed, but cut off completely.

On Tuesday night, law-abiding women were threatened with arrest as they observed the proceedings from the Scottish Parliament’s public gallery. It will not end there.

As the parliamentary passage of the bill reaches its conclusion, I still believe that the intent behind it was good, but it remains the case for me that the unintended consequences for women, girls and young people will be far greater. From the age of application to access to single-sex spaces and safeguards against sex offenders exploiting the system, there are still massive question marks over the safety of the operation of the bill. For those reasons, I will be unable to support it when we vote on it.

Does the member think that a public board that is 50 per cent men and 50 per cent transgender women is gender balanced?

What safeguards will be put in place to prevent those who fraudulently obtain a GRC from accessing women-only spaces?