Chamber and committees

We may need to ask your successors what they did—

I note the cabinet secretary’s response, which is brief. What it does not say is that, although the statement was made to the Scottish Parliament on 29 June that the proposals would not be going ahead, one of the Green MSPs said shortly afterwards that the Scottish Government was

“committed to bringing forward these proposals”,

so what was in the statement was immediately contradicted in the press. Since then, the cabinet secretary has said that she will bring forward other measures.

The industry itself is highly sceptical. The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation has talked about the measures being brought back in by the back door, and when I speak to fishing representatives in Clyde, Shetland, the Western Isles and elsewhere, as well as the SFF, I hear grave concern. Instead of closing the petition now—the issues have not really gone away, which is the point that I am making—could we write to the Scottish Government to seek an update on its alternative plans to enhance the protection of the marine environment and whether they will include HPMAs? That appears to be the case, even though such a move appears to have been ruled out.

In addition, could we specifically request the Scottish Government to tell us what engagement it is having with Duncan Macinnes and the Western Isles Fishermen’s Association, with Elaine Whyte and her colleagues in Clyde and with all the bodies that represent inshore fisheries? They have tremendous knowledge and are doing tremendous things, but they have just been completely skated over.

Finally, 37 per cent of our seas are already designated as marine protected areas, but there has been no mention by the Scottish Government whether there should be a review of the existing designations of MPAs. It has always seemed to me—as a logician, I would hope—that before you embark on a series of brand-new measures, you should work out how effective or otherwise the existing measures have been as well as the economic impacts. As a former fisheries minister, I know that the impacts issue is highly controversial, because the fishermen feel that they have never been properly assessed and are repeatedly underestimated. We need look only at the number of vessels closing—we are losing vessels all over Scotland. It is a dire situation.

I am sorry—perhaps I have gone on too long, but I feel that we should keep the petition open and ask in writing for a lot of detail. Indeed, I am pretty sure that that is what the petitioner and many others would want us to do.

I want to raise a wider issue about citizen participation. As we know, the purpose of this committee—good morning, minister—is to act on the side, as it were, of David versus Goliath, which is the Government.

It is a shame that the fleet was so prematurely deprived of Alex Neil, its admiral, but—[Laughter.]

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.

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.