Chamber and committees

The bill seems to be quite narrow in scope, specifically focusing on the good food nation plans. What was the thinking behind that? What are the practical implications of having such a focused purpose for the bill?

I think that a lot of people expected that a right to food would be included in the bill. Can we expect to see that? If not, why was that decision taken?

I also thank Elena Whitham for bringing forward the motion for debate. The motion rightly highlights the essential injustice that sex workers face under the current legal framework. They face criminal sanctions for soliciting, under section 46 of the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982. The threat of criminal sanctions deters many sex workers from seeking support, including support to leave sex work altogether. That is an untenable position, which is why we must remove the burden of criminality from sex workers.

To explain why that is the case, I will highlight some of the consequences of criminalisation. It prevents sex workers from accessing essential healthcare services, impacting on their health. Concerns about the link between criminalisation and poor health among sex workers are shared by international bodies including the World Health Organization and UNAIDS—the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. The World Health Organization found that female sex workers were up to 30 times more likely to be living with HIV than other women of reproductive age.

Human Rights Watch has found that criminalisation makes sex workers more prone to violence, including assault and rape. That is because criminalisation stigmatises sex workers, reducing their likelihood of seeking police help and increasing their use of unsafe locations for work. Human Rights Watch surveyed South African sex workers who said that they were less likely to report crimes to the police because of the illegality of sex work. That, in turn, left them at risk of suffering violence that they then did not report to the police.

We can break that vicious cycle by taking a decriminalisation approach. That does not mean abolishing laws that protect sex workers from exploitation, human trafficking and violence; it means removing the laws and policies that criminalise the selling and buying of sexual services. Decriminalisation is supported by a broad range of organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women and is increasingly backed by evidence from international bodies including the World Health Organization and UN agencies. The World Health Organization estimates that decriminalisation could lead to an almost 50 per cent reduction in new HIV infections in sex workers over 10 years.

Decriminalisation alone is not enough. We must also tackle the underlying material issues that often drive people into sex work in the first place. For some, it is a lack of employment or educational opportunities; for others, it is rising living costs including those of rent, food and heating. Some sex workers have chronic conditions or disabilities and turn to sex work because of inadequate social security provision. Until there is a concerted effort to improve material conditions, we will see people turning to sex work.

Continuing the criminalisation of sex workers will not help individuals to leave sex work. The evidence shows that it will not reduce violence against sex workers. Criminalisation serves as a barrier to sex workers accessing essential services such as healthcare. We need a new approach, which is why I believe that we should pursue decriminalisation.

I will conclude by sharing a worker’s testimony that I received. Kim, who is an Edinburgh-based migrant worker, said this in response to the proposal to criminalise buyers:

“We are just out of a whole year of Covid, which showed that taking our clients away does not magically deliver us into a new life free from exploitation, but rather makes us poor and hungry and heavily dependent on the few clients that are left.”

I thank all the members who supported the motion, which allowed it to be brought forward for debate at today’s members’ business.

I think that we all agree that our economy must shift from reliance on carbon-intensive sectors to greener alternatives and that failure to bring about such economic change will weaken our efforts to tackle the climate emergency. However, we cannot pursue that at the expense of workers such as those in the offshore oil and gas sector.

I represent offshore oil and gas workers in the north-east, so I know the importance of delivering a worker-led transition. That means a transition that will not only deliver well-paid and secure green jobs but empower workers. We are far from achieving such a transition in the offshore energy sector. In fact, offshore oil and gas workers are left in a position where their transferable skills go unrecognised. They are often asked, and at great personal expense, to duplicate skills and qualifications that they already have. Workers continue to find themselves in that position because of on-going market failure coupled with Government inaction.

Left to their own devices, the sector’s major training bodies have failed to agree common standards. They have instead developed rival standards, training modules and qualifications. Although the Scottish Government provides warm words about a skills guarantee and a just transition, there is no hint that it is willing to meaningfully intervene. That is why I have been engaging with climate campaigners from Friends of the Earth and with trade unions such as the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers.

Workers’ futures can no longer be left to the whims of the market or remain unsupported by Government. Workers need Government intervention. That is why I am calling on the Scottish Government to commit to creating an offshore training passport. When I raised the issue with the First Minister last month, she described an offshore training passport as a “constructive proposal”. However, when the Minister for Just Transition, Employment and Fair Work later wrote to me, he failed to offer any firm commitment that the Scottish Government would support the creation of an offshore training passport. I therefore have three key asks that I hope a minister will respond to when they come to close the debate. I cannot see a minister here.

Thank you.

I referred earlier to the significant personal expense that offshore oil and gas workers face in covering training costs. Research by Friends of the Earth Scotland, Platform and Greenpeace UK suggests that an offshore oil and gas worker will pay up to £1,800 a year in training costs. Most of those workers receive no financial contribution from their employer towards training costs. As the sector offers largely insecure work, workers are often forced by new employers to duplicate training that they have previously completed.

The impact of those training costs on the lives of workers should not be underestimated. Take James, for example, who worked in the offshore oil and gas sector for almost 25 years but took the decision to transition to working primarily in offshore wind. James said:

“I bear all training costs myself, from my own pocket, and to become competitive with other divers, the more qualifications you have, the better chance you have of working”.

To increase his competitiveness and meet the standards required by offshore wind employers, he has spent £6,000 of his own money on training and certification costs in the past two years.

Like James, Jack has spent a significant period working in the offshore oil and gas sector. He has borne training costs of £3,000 in the past two years due to receiving no financial support from his employers. Jack said:

“The companies used to pay for your training costs. Once you were established with a company, they would pay for your training because they wanted you to work for them. Now it’s very different. You’ve got to cover all these costs yourself, and the training needs redoing every couple of years, so you’re in this constant cycle.”

Those workers have taken a financial hit in the name of transition, but achieving the scale of change that we need will take co-ordinated Government intervention. My first ask to the minister is this: will the Scottish Government commit, in principle, to supporting the creation of an offshore training passport?

Along with the burden of costs, I spoke earlier of the market failure in the offshore energy sector that is exemplified by the two industry training bodies. The Offshore Petroleum Industry Training Organisation focuses on offshore oil and gas training while the Global Wind Organisation covers training for offshore wind. Despite a significant overlap in many of the training modules that they provide, particularly in relation to safety, they have been unable to agree common standards. That means that workers who are looking to make the transition are in the ludicrous position of regularly having to duplicate training and qualifications.

One worker, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me of the duplication of safety training that he would have to undertake if he wanted to transition from offshore oil and gas into offshore wind. He summed it up perfectly:

“Can anyone tell me what the difference is between the GWO and OPITO courses? All it leads to is confusion and very rich training providers”.

My second ask for the minister is whether he will call a summit for OPITO, the GWO and the trade unions to deliver an agreement on common training standards and to resolve other issues such as the lack of sectoral collective bargaining in the offshore wind supply chain.

The Scottish Government regularly talks of its commitment to a just transition for those working in carbon-intensive sectors, but its actions to date have failed to live up to that commitment. It has provided no detail on how its planned skills guarantee will work in practice, and its much-trumpeted green jobs workforce academy has also turned out to be little more than a referral website to job adverts and training courses. In fact, when I used that website yesterday to search for offshore jobs, at least half seemed to be for advisory roles and research posts at universities.

Given that the energy skills alliance has been tasked with creating an all-energy apprenticeship for new entrants into the sector, my final ask of the minister is whether he will look at tasking the ESA with creating an offshore training passport to benefit the existing workforce as well.

As delegates begin to arrive in Glasgow ahead of the 26th United Nations climate change conference of the parties—COP26—we have an opportunity today to demonstrate Scotland’s commitment to climate justice, underpinned by social and economic justice. I hope that the Scottish Government will grasp that opportunity and deliver the worker-led transition that our offshore oil and gas workers deserve.

The pandemic has caused a sharp rise in rent arrears, which now stand at more than £3 million in Dundee and nearly £8 million in Aberdeen, yet support for landlords has been prioritised—landlords have received around 14 times more in financial support than tenants have received. When will the Scottish Government start to support tenants who are facing rent arrears, given that no money has yet been paid out from its £10 million tenant hardship grant fund?

It is important that island impact assessments do not become just a box-ticking exercise and that, if concerns or issues crop up through the assessments, they are acted on. Are witnesses able to share any examples that they have come across where a concern or issue that was raised in an impact assessment has had a substantive impact on a public body’s course of action, so that something has been implemented off the back of the assessment?

We have significant public ownership of island transport infrastructure, including ferries and HIAL, which has experienced industrial disputes recently because of the centralisation of its air traffic controller jobs to the mainland. My question is for Jenny Milne and Alex Reid. Do you have any views on the responsibility of the Scottish ministers to island communities in relation to public ownership of transport infrastructure as it relates to connectivity and jobs for the islands?

In its motion, the Scottish Government emphasises its commitment to Scotland being a good global citizen, but that commitment lacks substance. It is easy to say that Scotland in the world should be a champion of progressive values. Everyone in the Parliament would probably identify themselves as an internationalist. We would all say that we support Scotland being a champion for fairness, democracy and human rights, but achieving those goals requires fundamental change to our failed economic system, because the global challenges that we face, from the climate emergency to vaccine apartheid, are a direct result of wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of a few. That will not change while the Scottish Government pats itself on the back with motions rather than bringing forward a real plan to tackle those international issues. [Interruption.] No.

The scale of the challenge could not be greater. The world’s richest 10 per cent now own more than 80 per cent of global wealth. There is a growing divide between the north and the global south when it comes to access to healthcare, education, housing and wealth, and the pandemic has exposed that divide, with the global south set to suffer from greater debt and lack of access to vaccines. It is also set to bear the brunt of the climate emergency.

So, the Scottish Government’s commitment to increasing its international development fund by 50 per cent is a welcome step forward, but it does not go nearly far enough, especially in meeting its own self-image as an international progressive force.

The Labour amendment calls for specific commitments from the Scottish Government on access to vaccines and highlights the importance of matching rhetoric with reality when it comes to promoting human rights.

The Scottish Government’s current action on human rights is totally inadequate. We can see that in its refusal to address the activities of Police Scotland’s international development and innovation unit. That unit is proactively offering training and technical advice to some of the world’s worst offenders when it comes to human rights abuses. Several organisations, from Pax Christi Scotland to Freedom from Torture, have highlighted that the Sri Lankan regime is engaging in the use of torture and state surveillance of human rights defenders. Police Scotland has claimed that its training activities with the Sri Lankan police are helping to promote gender equality and tackle gender-based violence, but, as recently as August, the Sri Lankan police confirmed that cases of intimate partner violence would not be taken to court. Therefore, how can anyone say that that training is working?

The activities of the unit extend far beyond Sri Lanka. Police Scotland is also offering technical advice to the police force in Colombia, a country that has faced long-standing allegations of human rights abuses and which launched a major crackdown on recent protests. What is the Scottish Government’s response to that alarming activity? To repeatedly pass the buck to Police Scotland. There is no point in having a justice secretary who is not prepared to stand up for human rights and hold the police to account when things go wrong, yet we have exactly that in Keith Brown. He avoids answering questions about human rights abuses, and he has nothing to say about Police Scotland providing political cover and legitimacy to those human rights abusers.

My question to the member is this: will he urge the justice secretary to seek an immediate suspension of Police Scotland’s activities with any country that engages in human rights abuses? Will the Scottish Government also launch a full-scale review of the international development and innovation unit’s activities?

This debate has asked us all, as MSPs, to consider Scotland’s role in the world. Although the Scottish Government’s motion seeks to paint a picture of Scotland as a progressive beacon, the reality, at home and abroad, could not be more different. It is yet another example of Scottish Government ministers talking progressive while failing to deliver real change.

Vaccination and testing are both crucial tools for ensuring that our schools remain safe for staff and pupils. Teachers are eligible for the flu jab this year, but they are not being prioritised for the Covid booster jab. Will the cabinet secretary look again at that decision, and will he commit to not introducing charges for lateral flow tests?