Chamber and committees

We all agree that giving birth in a lay-by is unsafe. I would be grateful if the cabinet secretary would commit to doing a risk assessment of journey times in emergency situations and, indeed, routine ones.

I, too, congratulate Bill Kidd on securing this debate, and I join him in paying tribute to UN House Scotland for its work as secretariat to the cross-party group on human trafficking.

There is a media focus on the war in Ukraine, but it is clear that the standards and support that we would wish to be made available for Ukrainian refugees should be extended to all refugees. They should be treated equally and should be given a safe haven and the support that they need to deal with the trauma that they have faced.

The focus on the war in Ukraine has highlighted a number of issues relating to the support of refugees. I have heard of cases in which refugees who have accessed the homes for Ukraine scheme have found themselves to be at the mercy of those who would exploit them. I am pleased that protections have now been strengthened to weed out those people, but we also need to prosecute those who do that. We know that people who are escaping from war are easily exploited by people traffickers. They often do not have identification or paperwork, they are vulnerable, and they are a ready source of profit for traffickers. That profit can come from the refugees themselves using the little money that they have with them to pay traffickers to get into a country. It is also clear that refugees are vulnerable to traffickers who are looking for modern day slaves to feed our need for cheap labour and to feed the demand of the sex industry.

The Co-operative Party, which I am a member of, has promoted a modern day slavery charter, which encourages local authorities and organisations to look at their procurement processes to ensure that they are not inadvertently supporting those slavers’ activities. We all have a role in that, especially those of us who use cash-based industries. We must remember that trafficking and exploitation go on in plain sight. If you suspect it, report it.

That exploitation is particularly prevalent in the sex industry. That is because there is a demand for purchasing sex, which is legal in the UK—hence the attraction of sex trafficking to feed and profit from that demand.

Bill Kidd has highlighted the OSCE and Thomson Reuters research that showed that there was a 200 per cent rise in UK internet searches for “Ukrainian escorts” in the early days of the war. That shows the role of those pimping websites in the exploitation of trafficked people. It also totally undermines the myth that sex buyers are unaware that trafficked women are being used to fulfil their demand for sex, and it clearly shows that, worse than their being uncaring about that, many of them actively seek to exploit trafficked women and to assault them.

That should not be a surprise, because we all know that prostitution is violence against women. It is gendered and misogynistic. It comes from age-old violence and men wanting to possess and control women.

It is high time that we became a less welcoming country for traffickers and a country in which those who buy sex are held to account and are criminalised and punished for their abuse. Every day in which they continue unchallenged is a day in which we turn a blind eye to the misery of trafficking.

I know that the minister is committed to changing that. I ask her to do so as a matter of urgency because, while we wait, more people are being traded into misery.

17:35  

I thank the members who signed my motion, allowing this debate to take place. I also thank all the individuals and organisations that have provided briefings—far too many to name, which shows the level of interest.

Staffing issues are common throughout the NHS—indeed, last weekend, in a Royal College of Nursing survey, 90 per cent of nurses said that their latest shift had been understaffed. Currently, across Scotland, 6,209 nursing and midwifery posts are vacant. In NHS Highland, that figure is 296, which is 8 per cent of all nursing and midwifery posts in the board area.

When there are staff shortages across Scotland, we in the Highlands bear the brunt of them, because it is easier for people to change their careers without that impacting on their families when they live in the central belt. In the north, we need to make it attractive not just for the person to move but for their whole family to be uprooted. Therefore, it is a lot harder for us to recruit.

Added to that is a shortage of affordable housing, local services and public transport. Therefore, it is no surprise that waiting times in NHS Highland are among the longest in Scotland.

NHS Highland is attempting to recruit from all over the world. It is not for the want of trying that it finds itself desperately short staffed. Portree hospital’s urgent care unit is closed more often than it is open. Home care services and care homes are also desperately short staffed. The new Broadford hospital, which was opened by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care only weeks ago, cannot be fully utilised because of a lack of staff. Dentistry in Moray is so dire that NHS Grampian is requiring dentists in Aberdeen to step in and help. Dunbar hospital’s minor injuries unit only recently reopened as there were staffing challenges due to staff being moved to support the Covid response.

Staff are totally burnt out by the pandemic. Some are off sick with stress or other mental health issues, and some are leaving the profession altogether or taking early retirement.

I turn to maternity care specifically. Since Caithness general hospital’s maternity service was downgraded, women whose births are likely to involve complications have been sent, usually by road, to Inverness—more than 100 miles away. This week, a petitioner made the point that that is like a mother in Edinburgh travelling to Newcastle for maternity care.

At the time of the downgrade of the Caithness maternity unit, clinicians in Inverness expressed concern about staffing in Inverness and whether they would cope with the additional numbers. Members of the local community in Caithness were obviously concerned about the long distance that women needed to travel to access those services. Risk assessments of the service in Caithness were carried out due to the lack of paediatric support, but nobody has risk assessed the journey from Caithness to Raigmore hospital in Inverness.

Food prices are rising, but the costs that farmers pay for feedstuffs and fertiliser are rising more quickly. What help can both of our Governments give farmers to ensure food security? Will the Scottish Government now implement a human right to food in order to ensure that people do not go hungry?

I echo some of the things that the petitioner said about the Sumburgh radar project in his written response. I share his concerns, and I believe that he has highlighted areas that we need to look at.

When the ATMS project came to light, everyone agreed that something had to change and that safety improvements had to be made, but it was felt that HIAL was going in the wrong direction.

Radar is really important, but my understanding is that there are concerns about the training that is being delivered to the new operators of radar who will be transferred across. In his submission, the petitioner says that training has ceased, so all the work that has gone on has now stopped. The training manual is being rewritten and will need to be approved by the Civil Aviation Authority, which will build in quite a time lag.

It would be good to find out how many people need to receive the training and how many people who were in training will go into the new programme once it is signed off. I also understand that the whole thing might not have been signed off by Transport Scotland. We need to ask Transport Scotland whether that is the case. It might be worth asking NATS, which runs the Sumburgh radar at the moment, what it thinks is happening—it must have a date in mind, because it has a contract and will know when it is supposed to be handing over the radar to HIAL.

Quite a few concerns have been raised with me about the situation, and I wonder whether the committee has given any thought to the suggestion that Audit Scotland should consider the issue. If it does so, perhaps it should also consider the issue of the transfer of radar.

I wonder whether the committee has had any discussions with the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee about whether it will look at the subject. I know that the Health and Sport Committee in the previous session of Parliament looked at some issues to do with rural healthcare. In a way, the problem extends from the very start of the process, with the training of clinicians, right through to how we support them in different areas. They are now all trained to work in huge teams, but when people work in rural general hospitals, they are not in a big team.

In addition, the standards of care, which are written for urban areas, are not transferable to rural areas. One of the lessons that I have learned from my time in Parliament is that policies that are written for rural areas work in urban areas, but that is not the case the other way round. We should be turning this on its head so that we make sure that people have access to the services that they need.

I wonder whether the committee has discussed the matter with the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, because a light needs to be shone on it and some detailed work is required to make sure that we get the changes that we need. We certainly need to have people advocating for our rural areas, because that is just not happening.

My final point is that, in the Highlands and Islands, we get assistance with travel and accommodation, but it is absolutely inadequate when people get £40 a night to stay in Inverness and they cannot find a room for less than £400 a night. That is impossible, and it is creating a barrier to healthcare.

The petitioners have made it very clear what the issues are. There is a huge distance to travel to access healthcare, and they are not being heard.

Let me give the example of maternity services in Caithness. I have been asking the health board for a risk assessment of the journey between Caithness and Inverness for someone who goes into labour early, for example. I know that there are people who are more likely to be induced or to have an elective caesarean, but there are people who go into labour and need to drive down that road. The road is horrendous in winter and can often be blocked.

As we were discussing before the meeting, expecting someone to drive down there with a partner who is in labour is unacceptable. It is an offence for someone to use a phone while driving a car. Imagine what it is like for a driver to have someone in active labour beside them while they are trying to concentrate on a really difficult, dangerous road. No one will risk assess that journey. I have asked the same question in relation to routes in Moray. I hope that the committee would at least request that a risk assessment is done on transporting people in emergency situations where there is no local healthcare.

When this situation started in Caithness, there was not enough ambulance cover. Quite often, if one person was being transported by that means, the area was left without an ambulance. That problem has been resolved to an extent, but the situation is still not ideal.

I support the petitioners’ argument that the healthcare service that they have received is not equitable.

I thank the committee for the huge amount of work that it has done on the issue and for all the evidence that it has taken. In some ways, you are responsible for our being in a much better position than we were when the petition was first lodged.

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to ensure that the marine environment is protected. (S6O-01193)

Next week, all marine protection vessels will be tied up because mariners are on strike because of an imposed pay deal. Marine Scotland has refused to negotiate and has thrown striking workers off the vessels, leaving them homeless. That is the Scottish Government using P&O tactics against its own workers. In the meantime, our waters are not being policed and our protected areas are unprotected. What steps is the minister taking to protect our valuable fishing grounds and protected areas during the strike action? What steps is she taking to resolve the situation and negotiate with the rightly aggrieved workers?