Chamber and committees

I thank Paul McLennan for bringing the debate to the chamber and for his excellent speech, and I support the call—as I am sure that we will hear from every member—to congratulate Walking Scotland on its 30th anniversary.

We all know the benefits of walking and wheeling, which are wide ranging, from the environment to the health and wellbeing of the population. We should place significant focus on encouraging and facilitating that. It is fantastic to read about the work of Walking Scotland’s delivery programme alongside communities in schools and workplaces; the improved paths—many of us will have been along to see some of those improvements—which improve the community’s ability to use local paths; strengthening networks through members’ walking clubs; and promoting the benefits of walking by doing policy work.

Scotland has to be one of the best places in which to walk, with its beautiful scenery and its amazing and interesting cities, and of course its weather, or at least its access to technology and waterproof clothing, which will help with walking in Scotland; I know that many members in the chamber enjoy walking.

I do not often talk about my family in the chamber, but I will share a short story about us. In 2018, my husband, Hammy, and I, and my two children, Amber and Gordon, who were both still at primary school, walked the Bibbulmun track in Australia, which is a walk of more than 600 miles. It took us 51 days, and it was an adventure that I never imagined having. I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that everyone needs to do that in order to take up, and start taking pleasure in, walking. Of course, walking can be 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days, and that is perhaps why it can be seen as such an important tool in tackling many issues such as inequalities, social isolation and mental wellbeing.

Walking can be undertaken in rural or urban settings, alone or with friends. We must ensure that walking continues to be enjoyed by many people, and I will mention one or two things that might help with that.

In Scotland, we have the right to roam, which is an enormous privilege, but we must access the land responsibly, under the Scottish outdoor access code. Walking can be enjoyed in the majority of Scotland—in fact, the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, which we passed last year, allows for much better use of the land, as it provides that land managers must ensure that they have access programmes.

In Scotland, we can enjoy the hills and mountains, the moorland, the woods and forests and the fields. As I said, the 2025 act ensures that landowners must provide for reasonable access to their land. It is important that that access is retained to ensure that walking in nature is welcoming, and the 2025 act allows us to scrutinise that, which is an important point.

My second point, which is linked to that, is about the underrepresentation of groups in walking, in particular in nature. We know that ethnic minority communities and inner-city families are underrepresented in accessing Scotland’s land. It would be great if, over the next 30 years, the Government and the Parliament—including all of us, as parliamentarians—and Walking Scotland could put special emphasis on increasing confidence among those underrepresented groups to allow them to access and enjoy the land. I hope that, as a result of that, we will, in future debates, be able to talk about all the people who continue to walk and wheel and enjoy the land.

I thank Paul McLennan once again, and I look forward to the contributions this evening.

18:02

Recent research carried out by the University of Edinburgh has found that doctors using artificial intelligence to generate medical notes are missing vital patient information. What is the Government doing to address those findings? Does the First Minister recognise that much more research needs to be carried out to understand where and how AI is working in healthcare settings?

I thank my colleague, Katy Clark, for securing the debate, and I welcome all the contributions from other members. I was unable to get into the debate last week on wildfires, but I want members to know that I found many of the points that were raised in that debate extremely important. We must continue to take climate change seriously and understand not only the role of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service in managing the dangers to our communities, but its valuable role in understanding climate change.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is a cornerstone of every community across the country. The public respect its efforts and wants to see its role supported and sustained, yet it seems that, every year, the service is met with more cuts coming down the pipeline. Since the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was formed in 2013, as we heard from other members, we have seen £900 million of cuts and the loss of more than 1,200 firefighters. The public are probably not fully aware of that—in fact, I think that they would be appalled to know the true scale of the damage that has been done to our firefighting capabilities in their communities.

The service delivery review clearly shows that many stations and facilities require serious upgrading and that more money is needed, as we know, for assets to fight fires and for equipment for firefighters. As the motion sets out clearly, we need sustained investment to ensure that the service can operate fully and—importantly, as other members have said—keep the public safe.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is a unionised workforce of members who stand up for themselves, and that is incredibly important. The Fire Brigades Union is relentless in its support not only for firefighters, but for communities and businesses across Scotland. The Government would do well to include the FBU in decision making and planning, because that would ensure that the service meets the modern-day demands of our communities.

Like the Fire Brigades Union, I welcome the Government’s manifesto commitment to progress role expansion for Scotland’s firefighters, with additional funding, but that must be delivered swiftly and with the full participation of the FBU.

We must also, however, demand increased funding to the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service to reverse more than a decade of real-terms cuts in order to ensure that the service is fully resourced and equipped and that firefighters are trained. Other members have mentioned the Government’s poor response on the upgrading of equipment and the poor infrastructure and facilities that firefighters have. We know that firefighters are, at times, put in danger as a result of their work, and they do not always have the facilities to make sure that they retain their health. That cannot go on.

I urge the cabinet secretary to support the Fire Brigades Union’s calls for a national conversation on Scotland’s wildfire preparedness. If I had been able to speak in the wildfire debate last week, I would have asked the cabinet secretary what attempts he had made to work across portfolios. This issue is about community preparation, water availability and land management. With an unsettled future for our climate and the related emergencies that could come from that, as we know, we must work across portfolios. That is the only way to increase our understanding and delivery. The Fire Brigades Union has been clear that it is happy to work with the Government on that. It is important that the cabinet secretary takes these issues seriously, and I hope that he will work with the men and women of the service to make sure that they can continue to save lives, as they have done for so long.

18:27

Kyle Scott, can you talk about how young people interact with Citizens Advice Scotland?

No, I do not think so. On the points that people have been making about the rule of law and the independence of the judicial system, what I have noted down is the ability for everybody to have access. What we need to work on are the issues that have been raised about making these things accessible to everybody.

I would also share the view that there are places where AI might be useful, but when it comes to people’s individual right to the law, we, as legislators, need to be very clear about what we mean by that in order to help the judicial process.

What Colin has just said is quite helpful in relation to what I was going to ask. I was also really interested in some of the stuff that Jamie was saying, because people speak to me about advocacy services, in particular, and I want to understand the issues.

Colin Lancaster said that working on that is not within his remit at the moment. What are the barriers in that regard? Is it that we do not have enough people trained, or is it difficult to get people to the right place to deal with young children? Alternatively, is it just that there is not enough funding in the system? It would be useful to know that information, because it would help us to raise that in a cross-party way.

: Iam an MSP for the South Scotland region. My region has many rural areas, and I am interested in hearing about that aspect of legal services.

I appreciate this worthwhile debate, and members have made valid points. It is important to work across parties. If there is anything that the minister or members think that we can do to raise the issue across parties, I would certainly be happy to do that on behalf of the Labour group.

I am interested in the point about upstream measures, and I am particularly interested in women, because we know that they should not always enter the criminal justice system and prisons in particular. Perhaps there is more that the cabinet secretary could do in that area, because there is a lot of research on it.

I thank Marie McNair for bringing this important debate to the chamber and I welcome action mesothelioma day 2026, which will be marked on 3 July.

I am pleased, in the years that I have been in Parliament, to have played my part in joining Marie McNair and other members to raise awareness of this cruel condition and to call for further research and for the condition to be properly understood as an industrial injury.

As the motion highlights, it is important to recognise the role of grass-roots activism in seeking justice for victims. It is often grass-roots campaigns that really turn the dial on these issues, and it is great to welcome those people to the public gallery again this year.

I support the Cape must pay campaign, which calls on the former asbestos manufacturer Cape plc, now Altrad, to donate £10 million to mesothelioma research. As my colleague Jackie Baillie said, that is a small amount to expect. Such companies and the state owe a great deal to individuals, families and communities. We need that research to be done and compensation to be delivered for what is fundamentally a class-based issue.

At this point, it seems totally appropriate to pay tribute to my former colleague and comrade Richard Leonard. Richard, as members might know, spoke in the annual debate on this topic. He was—and, I am sure, will continue to be—an avid campaigner for the right to justice for those affected by mesothelioma and the right to health and safety for the next generation of the workforce. Those who were members during the previous session of Parliament will know not only that Richard Leonard was a passionate and committed campaigner but that his speeches were also very passionate—as passionate as his beliefs. I thank him for his time in the Parliament, for his guidance and for his commitment to economic justice. I will miss Richard in the chamber, particularly during debates on this subject—we always sat up here, at the back, together. He often mentioned socialists and campaigners who influenced his beliefs and work, and I now do the same by thanking him for his guidance and influence on the work that I have undertaken as an activist and now as an MSP.

As Richard Leonard and others have said, mesothelioma is not a historical disease. In fact, we know that the number of sufferers is increasing. The reality for the people in my area is that the industrial work of the early part of the last century, right up until the mid-1980s and into the 1990s—mainly mining, in my area—exposed men, in particular, to asbestos. However, as others have mentioned, secondary exposure through washing clothes and so on, which was often undertaken by women, also presented a massive risk, which those companies really wanted us to ignore.

The time delay in the progression of the disease means that many of my constituents continue to be affected by what happened during that period, and they are also affected by the ongoing issues around asbestos and how we should deal with it, which members have brought to our attention today.

Industrial conditions such as those that my constituents were exposed to show what the approach of big business and the insurance giants has been. We, in this place, must be clear that people are worth more than this and that working-class people—those men and women who built and maintained our country—must be compensated for the impact on their lives and for loss of life due to the nature of thei work. I agree that the Scottish Law Commission’s report on damages for personal injury, which was published in December 2024, must be actioned. I call on all lawmakers to support that call and, of course, on the Government to make it a priority in this parliamentary session.

I fear that we have a lot more work to do as we keep fighting for proper compensation and, importantly, for proper health and safety in workplaces. We must ensure that the rights of workers are at the centre of all that we do and that the generations who come after us have much better work-related health.

17:53