Chamber and committees

Yes, I agree with that. It was very helpful to have Monica Lennon’s exposition at the beginning, so I thank her for that. I will refer to a couple of bits of the evidence and then make a couple of recommendations.

The Lord Advocate was very clear that it is not her role to deal with matters relating to pathology. She started off by saying:

“We do not have a role in the recruitment or training of pathologists”.

She went on to say:

“It is really for the professional body to consider the quality, efficacy and benefits of the imaging and to determine whether imaging should be utilised in the process being undertaken. If the Royal College of Pathologists has identified a means by which post mortems can be less invasive when undertaken using imaging, then I as the Lord Advocate ... would reasonably expect that the pathologist advising the Crown on that issue would explain that the process was available and should be used.”—[Official Report, Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, 14 June 2023; c 10, 14.]

In a sense, the Lord Advocate is saying that it is not her job but, if she is advised by the experts in the pathology world that that is something that should happen, as it does apparently in England—and, we hear today, in Japan and elsewhere—she would pay heed to that in her role. That seems to be no more than common sense, and entirely logical and correct.

Therefore, with one caveat, we should take up the suggestion of writing to the Royal College of Pathologists to highlight the evidence session, point out the evidence from the practitioners in England, stress that scanning and other processes appear to be available in England but not here, ask for an explanation of why that is and get its views on these matters—perhaps orally, if necessary, but in the first instance in writing. As the petitioner very clearly argues, there is a gap in the Scottish system, which results in the petitioner’s conclusion that nobody appears to care, which struck me in her remarks.

The one caveat is that, as the petitioner pointed out, the fiscal service’s contract that the Lord Advocate referred to a couple of times expires in seven months. If that is the case, the committee may feel that the new service-level contract should refer to specific duties to enable the provision of scanning and so on to be available where appropriate. Working backwards from that, for that to happen, we might want to flag up to the minister that that approach is in our minds, subject to getting professional expert advice from the pathologists.

Finally, the clerks have flagged up that the pathologists say that some of the medical and clinical decisions may involve radiologists as well as, or instead of, pathologists. Perhaps the clerks could consider from whom we require to obtain the most relevant evidence, and whether it is one or the other, or both—I suspect that it is both.

I am sorry that I spoke for so long, convener.

I absolutely understand the points that my colleagues who have proposed a different approach make. At the end of the day, Mr Torrance’s argument that the Scottish Government is not going to change its position seems to me to be pretty much correct and not really open to doubt. The views that colleagues have expressed are perfectly legitimate, but they perhaps need to be pursued in the political arena, because I am not sure that, as a committee, we will get any further with that.

I absolutely agree that we could write to the relevant minister setting out the reservations that we perhaps all have about the approach, but I do not think that the approach will change; indeed, I am certain that it will not change. Therefore, we should probably close the petition, subject to the helpful suggestion of writing to the minister. I share the concerns, as I think we all do. There is a particular problem in the Highlands because of the distances between available opportunities, shall we say.

I endorse that. I was struck by the detailed response that the petitioner gave to the Scottish Government’s main response. As well as saying that the Scottish Government does not seem to be covering the issues that he believes are relevant, he says that the multi-agency working group to which the Scottish Government refers might not include the right people, and he goes through who they might be.

I do not know much about the area, but the petitioner is basically saying that there are young people between 16 and 25 who go to gyms and have access to steroids with no guidance or information about how to use them and what the risks are. I think that he is saying that people in that world, who are in charge of running gyms and have a medical background, for instance, should be involved in the multi-agency working group.

When we write to the Scottish Government, could we specifically ask about the range of suggestions that the petitioner made so that we can get answers on them now? I suspect that, if we did not, we would get the same points from the petitioner again, who might feel that we have not pursued the substantive and concrete points that he made in his response.

I endorse David Torrance’s suggestion and support Paul O’Kane’s comments.

I have heard from constituents who are parents of a child with profound disabilities, who feel that they cannot travel south of Inverness because there are no facilities on the A9 that are suitable for their child. I thought that I would mention that, because, although the petition relates to the situation in Tyndrum, which is over on the A82 in the west, the issue is one that substantially affects rural Scotland, as the petitioner herself says.

Perhaps it is not a triumph, but it is certainly unusual. However, it is, of course, just a referral.

I agree with Mr Torrance for the reason that my understanding is that the lead committee is still considering the issue as live and is unlikely to cease doing so. It has the bit between its teeth, it has been considering the matter in detail, and it would be wrong for us to start to take on any serious consideration of a matter to which a lead committee has devoted a huge amount of time and effort. I do not know whether the issue is still live, but there is certainly still public debate about it.

Most recently, the UK Government suggested 2026 and not 2025. I believe that the minister has resisted that.

All those matters will almost certainly be raised by members of the lead committee, so it would be otiose for us to stick our neb in. The petitioner is quite entitled to go to the lead committee and make representations to his MSP to that effect. They would be the more appropriate vehicle to raise these issues with.

I worked with Mr Golden and other members on the matter, and I would be interested to hear what he thinks. However, that is my honest view, despite the fact that I would very much like to question the minister. Perhaps that is for another time and another day.

I back up what Mr Torrance has said. I perhaps owe the petitioner an apology because, in my remarks when we last considered the petition, I specifically suggested that we look at the rural tourism infrastructure fund. The reason why I suggested that was that I knew, from experience as a minister, that that was a practical way of providing funding for something. However, in the petitioner’s response, he made the fair point that that was a red herring or a cul-de-sac—whatever you want to call it—and that he was concerned about the basic human right of having a public convenience. I wish to state on the record that I did not mean, in any way, to show disrespect to the petitioner.

However, for the reasons that Mr Torrance has described, it is plain that, although we admire and respect the principle that the petitioner is pursuing, we cannot take the petition any further. I want to make that clear to the petitioner, because I fear that he did not understand what I was trying to do, which was to be helpful in a pragmatic way.

What we might want to do, because seven months is not a long time and it might well be that the meat of the negotiation is being conducted right now—my point is that we might miss a chance—

I very much support what Mr Torrance has recommended, but perhaps I can supplement it by asking that, when we do write that letter, we draw specific attention to the useful material that the clerks have provided in paragraph 9 of their paper. The paper mentions the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales, which published its final report in October 2022. The paper then refers to recommendations 2, 9, 13 and 19 of that inquiry report, all of which appear to have relevance. In his reply, Mr Swinney says that the on-going inquiry might well consider the issues that are of relevance here, but he does not really go into any specifics; however, at least four of those specifics have been drawn out by the clerks, and there might be others, too.

The point that I am making is that it would be useful to give the Deputy First Minister a steer on this and suggest that, as well as the general points that Mr Torrance has made, it would be useful to hear whether the existing inquiry will specifically consider all the pertinent and relevant recommendations made by the English inquiry. If we are to accept the Government approach, we can do so only on the basis that it will cover all the relevant issues, albeit in a different way—and even, perhaps, unsatisfactorily, given that we have not heard evidence et cetera.

I just wanted to make that specific point, convener.

I have just been looking through the previous evidence and the points that Dr Allan has made about the desirability of having island residents on public bodies. I also looked at the specific recommendations of the three petitioners, who use HIAL as an example of a body where a place on the panel for selecting the chair could be reserved in this respect. The same could be done for every chair of every board such as CMAL and CalMac.

They also talk about assigning three seats on the HIAL board to people who live in island communities, one of which would be retained for a co-opted member, with at least one council—the Western Isles Council, Orkney Islands Council or Shetland Islands Council—allocated a place on the board.

The point that I am making is that the petitioners have made concrete and specific suggestions and they have not been responded to. I hope that I am not being unfair to the former minister, but my reading is that he replied with a lot of good will without responding to the petitioners’ specific suggestions.

In as much as we are the voice of the petitioner, irrespective of party issues, it seems to me that we have not got an answer from the former minister and we need to get an answer from the current minister as to whether those specific suggestions can be pursued. There are arguments for and against each suggestion but not to have had an answer of any sort means that your premature summation was absolutely correct, convener.

I thank the petitioner for setting out so comprehensively the sad series of unacceptable facts on this issue. I will not repeat what the petitioner has said but she has done a service for the people of the Highlands.

I want to focus on how we move forward and get dualling done as swiftly as possible. I have two areas of questioning for Mr Barn. The first is about the retendering of the Tomatin to Moy section and the second is about what he, as a representative of 80 per cent of the civil engineering sector in Scotland, which is the vast majority of the businesses that are involved in doing that work, thinks is the solution. What needs to change?

I will take Tomatin to Moy first. There was only one bidder and the bid was rejected because it was said not to offer value for money, which appears to mean that it was too high. Is that your understanding? That contract is being retendered, and in a late submission to the committee—it was submitted this morning or perhaps late yesterday—Transport Scotland said that it has engaged with you, Mr Barn, and others in the industry about changing the risk profile of Tomatin to Moy. Has it done that, and is there a risk that, when the Tomatin to Moy contract is retendered, which is supposed to be done by the end of this year, we might end up with an even higher price than the one that was rejected because it was deemed to be too high?