Chamber and committees

Good morning, minister. I want to move us on to section 75 of the bill and discuss definitions of “incapable” and “mental disorder”. The committee has heard a number of views on future proofing the bill and its interaction with capacity law, in the context of possible reforms stemming from the Scottish mental health review, and it has been suggested to us that the bill cross-refer with the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 with regard to the definition of “incapable” instead of its having its own, very similar definition. Do you agree with that? Would that provide an effective mechanism for allowing incapable adults to offer a view on situations that affect them, or would changes to trust law ultimately still be required after any reforms to capacity law?

I associate Labour with members’ comments following the resignation of Kevin Stewart. We wish him well in his recovery.

Somewhat belatedly, I welcome the Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, Active Travel and Tenants’ Rights to his role. In his own words, it is “no secret” that he enjoys cycling, and his personal engagement on active travel stretches back to well before he took on his portfolio. I hope that, from his appointment, we will see enthusiastic prioritisation of active travel infrastructure and progress through cross-party work on that shared goal.

We in Labour believe that active travel can bring significant benefits for our health, our economy and our environment. However, none of those benefits will be achieved without significant investment, planning and promotion. We welcome the Scottish Government’s funding commitments and progress on the new cycling framework, but we must also be honest about where the Government is letting us down.

Council budgets have been slashed, road repairs are waiting, planning has been delayed, pavement parking is widespread, speeding is rampant, congestion is building, and air pollution is choking us.

Why does active travel matter? Active travel is not just about leisure; it is also about making it easier to get from A to B off our own steam, not just because that will improve our health but because it will improve our environment and save us money. If we can find a way to make that one switch, the benefits will be transformational. Therefore, the importance of active travel cannot be overstated.

Will the minister clarify whether he is saying that he is unable to support the amendment, which notes the findings in a report, because he does not like the findings?

The minister will be aware that Sight Scotland has concerns about how blind and partially sighted people will be able to access and take part in the deposit return scheme. Just last week, Sight Scotland received a letter from the minister’s officials, but it failed to address the issues that the organisation has raised. Will the minister take the concerns of Sight Scotland and others seriously and use the delay to the deposit return scheme to ensure that blind and partially sighted people can take part in the scheme?

I would like to make some progress.

We know from research that active travel is associated with a lower likelihood of having diabetes or hypertension. Research also demonstrates positive mental health benefits from active travel. A study based in London found that, compared with commuting by car, walking to work is significantly associated with higher life satisfaction. In fact, commuters who maintained cycling to work for a year reported lower sickness absences and improved mental health compared with commuters who travelled by non-active means.

It is not only our health that improves through active travel; the health of our environment does so, too. Changes in active travel have significant life-cycle carbon emissions benefits. Research has found that an average person who exchanges one car journey per day for cycling for four days a week would decrease mobility-related lifecycle CO₂ emissions by about 0.5 tonnes per year. That is roughly as much CO₂ as would be captured by 25 trees in a year. Imagine if we all made that switch—we would be a forest of millions.

With fewer cars on the roads, we will rid our environment of the relentless drone of traffic and quicken our nature recovery. We saw that during the pandemic. At first, we noticed the quiet, but we then heard the birds and other wildlife as they reclaimed the outdoors.

As much as we know that we ought to take better care of our health and our environment, it is hard to begin to think about that when the immediate reality is financial hardship, low pay, high prices and increasing demands on our time. The issue is not just that public transport is too expensive; it is too often impractical. When you are on a zero-hours contract, who has time to plan a journey with multiple changes? When you are working in healthcare or hospitality, who can be sure that they will finish work before the last bus to get home? When you are in insecure housing and are forced to move every six months, who has time to book three months in advance for the cheapest deal? When you are juggling childcare and caring responsibilities, whose plans will not change at short notice? It is no wonder that so many of us still opt for the reliability and convenience of a private vehicle. Once we are reliant on private vehicles, where would a walk or a cycle fit in, other than on a rare day off?

Let us remember that access to, and experience of, active travel are impacted by our gender, our ethnicity and whether we have a disability. We know that a lack of lighting in public parks and some streets means that women are less likely to walk or cycle after dark. We know that uneven paths and pavement parking can make it harder for people with disabilities to get around, and we know that people who are from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds are disproportionately impacted by air pollution, as they are more likely to live in areas of environmental deprivation. Therefore, our encouragement of active travel must be inclusive while we seek to redress social as well as economic inequalities.

The truth is that the current choice between private vehicle or active travel combined with public transport is not a fair one. What we are experiencing is a problem with our whole transport network, the planning system and our political culture because when Government retreats, private commerce fills the void and, rather than build what many need, it builds what a few can profit from.

So, who profits from us being in this impossible situation? The oil companies, the multinationals, the private developers—the list goes on. Who pays? Our pockets, our families’ health, our neighbours’ business and our polluted environment.

The Scottish Government’s commitment to increasing active travel spending to 10 per cent of the overall transport budget is welcome—we made the same call in the Labour manifesto—but we cannot stop there. We must account for the reality that economic and social inequality has created by implementing a gendered approach and a diversity approach to transport infrastructure that ensures that safety, convenience and affordability are properly addressed, particularly for people with protected characteristics including women, black and minority ethnic people and those with disabilities. We must end the cuts to local authorities and invest in insourcing so that we treat active travel as the vital public service that it is, with well paid, unionised public sector workers at its heart.

A recent study showed that mothers participating in active travel led to more active children and young people, which contributes to long-term habits that are good for the young people and for our planet. Those are benefits that will build up over time; if we take the opportunity to invest now, we will reduce strain on our health, our health service and our roads.

That is why it is disappointing that in February we heard that only 3,650 bikes had been given out to school children so far. That figure is significantly below the 145,000 families who should be eligible. In order to ensure that infrastructure investment has the greatest impact, we must follow it up with support and promotion to encourage behaviour change.

Active travel policy must be about more than just encouraging people to walk, wheel and cycle at the weekend; it must fit within an integrated publicly owned transport system, so that it becomes the best choice for commuters. It must be rolled out alongside reductions in speed limits around our education centres, so that every child and young person has a safe and healthy journey to school, college or university. It must also enhance our natural environment so that every active journey comes with the benefit of wildlife and natural beauty.

Greater participation in active travel is the culture change that we need, not just to protect what we have and to combat climate change, but to make all of our lives a little more joyful as we travel and work alongside each other.

I move amendment S6M-09328.1, to insert at end:

“; recognises the importance of local authority transport and planning funding in allowing all new and existing developments to include active travel infrastructure, tackling potholes, cycle parking, and ensuring safe pavements and travel for all; believes that active travel policies should be more conscious of protected characteristics, including women, disabled people and BME people, and notes the recent report highlighting the decrease in children travelling to school in an active way.”

I thank the minister for the advance sight of her statement.

The minister will be aware that, on 20 January this year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced that Wales’s deposit return scheme would include glass bottles and make use of existing kerbside collection. Can she confirm when she last met her counterparts in the Labour Government in Wales, what discussions she has had with them on Wales’s plans for glass deposit returns and what our nations’ Governments can learn from each other as we seek to develop deposit return schemes to improve recycling rates across the whole country?

It is clear that we need to make changes to support our agricultural sector. Our current direct payments system is deeply unequal. The top 20 per cent of claimants receive 62 per cent of the direct payments budget, while the bottom 40 per cent receive just 5 per cent.

We have heard today how the current direct payments system rewards intensive farming, often incentivising the least environmentally friendly land management choices. In effect, the current system penalises those who are working hardest to serve the public good. Our new payments system must incentivise high nature value farming and end area-based payments that reward ownership at the expense of the public good.

The system must also provide as much certainty as possible for our food producers, because farming requires plans that are made years ahead, and our nature targets require the same forward thinking, neither of which is possible without clearer, longer-term strategies to meet those goals.

In 2019, more than three quarters of the farming payment budget was paid exclusively on the amount of farmable land owned. That is a regressive system, which rewards land hoarding and often acts as a payment for the farmers who need it least. However, instead of ensuring that those large landholdings are being held and managed for the public good, with responsible whole-farm plans that demonstrate sustainable practices, we have payments that reward practices that are detrimental in the long term.

We need our agricultural strategies to encompass the principles of land justice, in order to diversify our land ownership and tenancy and allow more people to live and work on our land, because the barrier for entry into agriculture is currently too high for too many, and land monopolies lead only to agricultural production monopolies, which harm us all.

Just last week, we spoke in this chamber about food insecurity, not just as a nation but as individuals, because more people than ever are forced to rely on food banks. However, we cannot begin to tackle long-term food insecurity without a system that recognises the natural symbiosis between sustainable farming and nature management.

Extreme weather costs farmers—and, by extension, the public—hundreds of millions each year, and farmers are often the first to be affected by the loss of soil quality and water scarcity, which go on to affect us all.

The empty shelves in supermarkets show us not just the food that we cannot buy but the food that our farmers cannot supply under our current system. It should not be the responsibility of farmers to slash prices in order to inflate supermarket profit margins, and nor should the public be expected to pay ever-increasing food prices, while supermarket share prices soar. Both farmers and consumers need a fairer approach to pricing and distribution.

For any Government that is hoping to get by on the status quo, I am afraid that the message is clear: we need Government intervention, we need a national industrial strategy and—yes—we need price controls.

In conclusion, we have heard today about the deep flaws in our current payment system, the lack of a long-term strategy to meet biodiversity and emission goals, and the regressive rewards for concentrated patterns of land ownership. However, despite those challenges, we know that many farmers and crofters are going above and beyond to meet environmental targets and provide our food, and that the public are more interested than ever in eating local to support our producers and protect our planet. Let us use the power of this Parliament to support local and nutritious food production, fair pay for workers, fair prices for consumers and a universal right to food for us all.

The minister will be aware that a key demand from offshore workers in the “Our Power” report is that the Scottish Government create an offshore training passport that aligns standards across the energy industry. That passport has already been delayed by the Government and, just today, the general secretary of the STUC warned the Government to “get to grips” with the transition.

Can the minister reassure offshore workers and their trade unions that the energy skills passport will align offshore basic safety, sea survival and firefighting standards? I am looking for a cast-iron guarantee from the Government on this point. Will those standards be aligned—yes or no?

To ask the Scottish Government what discussions the energy minister has had with ministerial colleagues regarding the recommendations to the Scottish Government contained in the report, “Our Power: Offshore Workers’ Demands for a Just Energy Transition”. (S6O-02263)

I move us on to sections 65 and 66 of the bill, which relate to expenses of litigation.

The committee has heard from the Law Society of Scotland and some other legal stakeholders, who are concerned about the current policy underpinning section 65. This section provides principles to determine how legal bills are paid for in trust cases. Specifically, it provides that trustees will be “personally liable” for those expenses in certain situations, including when the trust fund does not have enough resources to cover them.

The Law Society thinks that section 65 will deter people from becoming trustees and may lead trustees to unfavourably settle or abandon legal proceedings for fear of personal liability.

We are keen to hear whether you share those concerns, or whether you can offer the committee any reassurance. As a follow-up, do you think that the availability of insurance helps to mitigate the risks that the Law Society has identified?