Chamber and committees

I am happy to do that. Laura Hansler might well be back before us in the next parliamentary session.

I suggest that we close the petition under rule 15.7 of standing orders, on the basis that legal access rights and the outdoor access code were designed to apply only to non-motorised access to land. The Scottish Government believes that infringements of the code are best tackled in that way.

Before making that proposal, I read the Scottish Government’s response. I must say that it seems to be sitting on the fence. For some strange reason, the Scottish Government shows a strange propensity for being reluctant to say anything at all about camper vans. I cannot imagine why that could possibly be the case.

Those remarks aside, lay-bys are not meant for overnight camping for recreational purposes, but they can be necessary to allow drivers of heavy goods vehicles to take a break. Those drivers may have to do so because of tachograph rules that are designed for vehicle safety. It is not entirely straightforward, but I think that a distinction could be drawn for commercial business employment use for protected lay-bys, which are the only ones that should be used for overnight parking. We should distinguish between that on the one hand and camper vans on the other.

The petitioner has a serious point to make and I thoroughly back up what the convener has said, but we have no alternative but to close the petition.

Yes. Mr Torrance is absolutely right. The Scottish Government has set out its stall, but it does not really have an answer, nor can it ever have an answer, to the point that has been raised by the petitioner. The cut-off time is arbitrary, and one can well understand how much that must rankle and worry people who have been through abuse before 2004.

I guess that we will come back to the issue again, because if a decision is not based on principle and confounds any sense of decency, I am quite sure that this committee will be hearing about it again—and rightly so.

I suppose that the number of signatories would, in itself, justify taking that somewhat unusual step.

We would need to also stress to the signatories of the petition that its not being closed does not mean—

—it is defeat; it is simply a deferral of probable consideration.

The members of the next Parliament, including those of us who are not ourselves culled, can give it consideration.

The Government has provided quite a long response, but it does not seem to be much more than a patchwork of random actions and fairly modest grants for small pieces of work here and there. It does not really address the point that the petitioner stressed in her written submission of 5 January, which is that,

“Despite affecting at least 1 in 10 women and people assigned female at birth”—

females—

“Scotland does not collect national outcomes data for endometriosis. As a result, clinicians lack reliable evidence on:

• treatment effectiveness,

• treatment-related harm,

• complications and disease progression,

• and which patient groups are at highest risk of treatment failure.”

I noticed recent press coverage of the issue, in which it was pointed out that females who suffer from endometriosis suffer horrendously—they suffer years and years of unremitting pain.

Given the numbers involved, the Government’s apparent unwillingness to establish a database of outcomes is hard to understand. So determined is it to avoid doing so that it has pointed to all sorts of other things that seem to me to be inadequate substitutes.

There is just no time left. I hope that the ladies in the room and those outwith the Parliament who are interested in and affected by the matter will understand that, if the petition had been presented to us 12 months ago, we would certainly have taken evidence from the Minister for Public Health and Women’s Health. She would have been here answering questions within a couple of weeks.

That is what should happen, and the petitioner can secure that by lodging a similar petition in the next parliamentary session. I am perfectly sure that the issue must be considered for the sake of women who suffer, as I understand it, unbelievable and unbearable pain.

Given the effluxion of time, we are unable to pursue the matter further, but the petitioner has raised an interesting point. I will say more about that in a minute. The Scottish Government has said that it has no plans to make any changes in the current parliamentary session, so nothing will happen in this session.

I want to make a very simple point. In England, the limit is £10,000, whereas it is £5,000 in Scotland. I looked in vain for an explanation, but the Scottish Government has not remarked on that point at all. I do not know the reason for that, but it is completely and utterly unacceptable.

I am no longer a practising solicitor, but, having observed the courts scene at the moment, I know that it is very difficult to get a criminal lawyer and that there are massive delays in the civil courts. Quite frankly, no individual can afford to go to court unless they are very well off or get legal aid, which people often do not get. Therefore, there is, of course, a case for raising the limit to £10,000 to allow people to avail themselves of the simple procedure, instead of having to deal with the extraordinary byzantine complexity of the ordinary cause or summary cause procedures, which are not much simpler. The current situation means that, in effect, there is no justice for individuals in that narrow band.

It is impossible to get a lawyer for that sum of money, because the legal fees involved would probably exceed the sum sued for in most cases. Lawyers will not take the case on and people go without remedies. We are in a country where there is a theoretical right of access to the courts but where, in practice, it does not exist. One simple way to address that, to a modest extent, is to do what the petitioner asks.

This is another petition where, if it were not for the fact that it is now 2026 and we are a few weeks away from dissolution, we would have had the justice minister here to answer some of the questions that, quite frankly, they have manifestly failed to answer in any way at all, which is quite abysmal, in my opinion.

I think that we should close the petition. However, in saying that, I am mindful that Laura Hansler, as the petitioner, has achieved an extraordinary number of things, and that shows the committee’s value in our Parliament as a voice for ordinary people to come here with something that they wish to see achieved.

In paying tribute to Laura Hansler, I want to run through some of the things that are unlikely to have happened were it not for the work that she—and she alone—instituted. First, she paved the way for evidence to be heard from Mr Grahame Barn of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association Scotland, which is the representative body of most of the civil engineering companies—or the large ones, at least. He said that Transport Scotland was

“the worst client to work for in the UK.”

Mr Barn also pointed out, in a forensic display of knowledge of procurement policy, that the particular mode of procurement employed by Transport Scotland had the effect of deterring bidders, which meant that the Tomatin to Moy tender was abortive because there was only one bidder, which was rejected because its bid was too high, at £170 million. Then, later, Transport Scotland retendered that, and I believe that the total cost is £308 million. It may be that the Auditor General for Scotland will wish to examine that, and it may be that I will be inviting him to do so.

It is clear that Transport Scotland then changed its contract to the new engineering contract, which Mr Barn referred to in his evidence—I think that that was in January, early in the inquiry. The evidence that the committee took and Laura Hansler’s efforts led to a major change in Transport Scotland’s procurement policy. Transport Scotland might say that it would have done that anyway, but if it did, I am not sure that I would be too quick to believe it and swallow that.

Secondly, when the committee began the investigation, which became a formal inquiry, there was no revised timetable. However, due to the pressure that was in part exerted by the committee, time after time, meeting after meeting, a revised timetable was produced in December 2023.

The Beatles wrote the song “The Long and Winding Road”, and the A9 is the long and winding road of the Highlands. It has been a long and winding tale, which was supposed to have been concluded by 2025 but will now not be concluded until 2035—and many of us doubt whether it will be concluded by then. Be that as it may, the revised timetable was extracted only because of the work that this committee has done.

The petitioner has pressed for a memorial garden, and she informed me informally that she had had discussions with one of the contractors, which was willing to carry out that work. It is abundantly clear that Transport Scotland has blocked that. I have no doubt that it will redact and conceal the advice that it has given to ministers, as it has frequently done, but the truth will out eventually, and I think that that will have been the case. It is ludicrous for the minister to say that it is up to the community, because the community has not got assets to carry out a contract of hundreds of thousands of pounds—that is for the birds. That issue will have to be revisited.

Lastly, the committee suggested in its report, and I think that this was substantially your idea, convener, that one of the problems since 2011, when Alex Neil first made the promise—he gave a very effective statement of his evidence, as the late Alex Salmond did in his last public appearance in the Parliament before he died—has been slippage. The scrutiny by the Parliament has been sporadic, intermittent and insufficient. That is why I hope that the committee—if it agrees with the convener’s suggestion and with the one that I am repeating now—will write to the incoming Presiding Officer of the next parliamentary session to suggest that there should be a bespoke committee, given the scale and importance of the contract. Its scale is bigger than that of any previous construction contract ever in Scotland. Such a committee would mean that the scrutiny was not sporadic and intermittent; it would be consistent, thorough and forensic, and there would be no hiding place.

I have a personal interest, because I hope to be around for some more terms yet as the representative of the good people of Inverness and Nairn, if they feel that that is a good idea. I am determined to be there at the cutting of the red tape ribbon when the dualled A9 opens. I would prefer that to be in the next session than in the one thereafter.