Chamber and committees

What did you mean when you said that you favour an independent body? Did you mean for whistleblowing?

Good afternoon. I find the responses from David Kennedy and, in fact, David Malcolm about not being told what you have been accused of very interesting, given the previous panel’s remarks about the importance of human rights. It is a fundamental right, even under Scots law, to know what you are being accused of and who your accusers are, but that does not seem to apply here either to staff or to police officers.

It would be helpful to have that information.

David Malcolm, what range of staff do you represent? Do you represent public-facing staff, too?

Just to mention another example, I note that Wayne Couzens had a prior record. Chief Superintendent Hay, you said that Police Scotland already vetted officers. Would that approach root out something like that?

That is very helpful. Thank you very much.

We should be indebted to Dr Hilary Cass for the sensitive way that she has approached the issue. The fact that she has taken the time to come to Scotland to answer detailed questions is to her credit. It is a watershed moment.

However, Dr Cass has highlighted the Government’s lack of urgency in acting on the report. The methodical and thorough way in which she has examined the issues around gender identity services will serve not only to protect more young people from harm but to demonstrate that there are many different pathways for young people who are distressed about different aspects of their lives that are related to gender identity.

I agree that waiting times for gender healthcare are unacceptably long. However, I do not believe that there is any excuse not to implement the report’s recommendations in full. As Jackie Baillie said in her opening speech, Government ministers have behaved as though the findings have just arrived, but anyone who has been following the review in the press over the past two or three years will have been fully aware of the whistleblowing around the Tavistock clinic and the follow-on report by Dr Cass, so it should have come as no surprise to the Government.

The review report highlights the lack of evidence and raises concerns about the potential harm of treatments—particularly puberty blockers and hormone therapies. Others have pointed out that those are major and life-altering interventions. The report states:

“we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”

It is deeply worrying that this was allowed to happen in our NHS, which offered experimental treatment to vulnerable children without having proper evidence for its safety. When giving evidence to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee yesterday, Dr Cass said that the issue of puberty blockers has become “almost totemic” and that it has prevented us from looking at other ways of managing young people’s distress, which is important.

Other leading figures share Dr Cass’s view. The editor-in-chief of The BMJ, Kamran Abbasi, noted:

“A spiralling interventionist approach, in the context of an evidence void, amounted to overmedicalising care for vulnerable young people.”

I am pleased that Dr Cass has flagged up the issue of children being socially transitioned in schools without parental involvement. As she has said, it is not helpful to young people to create an adversarial system.

We need to look at the bigger picture. Almost two thirds of referrals to the gender identity development service in London in recent years have been for teenage girls, so more questions need to be asked about why a higher portion of girls is presenting with gender dysphoria. Based on Dr Cass’s recommendations, we should not make any assumptions about the complex picture until we know the facts.

The Cass review is robust, independent research, which, importantly, is informed by the views of people with lived experience. Gender medicine is built on “shaky foundations”, and it is deeply worrying for child welfare. I urge the Government to get on with implementing the Cass recommendations now.

I will.

Scottish Labour will support the amendment to the business motion, because we believe that there should be a statement from the Lord Advocate, and I want to say why. There is emerging evidence that the Crown Office knew or ought to have known that the Horizon system was questionable, and we still do not have answers on that.

We obviously need to see the details of the bill, but we will support any attempts to overturn convictions. However, it will not be enough for victims simply to have their convictions overturned. In fact, in the Sheriff Appeal Court this week, there were six cases in which it was deemed that the Horizon evidence was not corroboration, so those cases were overturned. Victims will want accountability for the full timeline in relation to who took decisions and why better decisions were not made, because what happened resulted in the prosecutions in the first place. I think that victims would want a statement followed by detailed questions and answers.

Apologies, Presiding Officer—I do not want to speak at the moment.