Chamber and committees

I appreciate that you, as chief constable, are not responsible for decisions that are for the Scottish Prison Service to make. The SPS has a process that it says is used to assess whether a biological male self-identifying as a female is housed in a male or a female prison, and in what circumstances, such as confinement, segregation from others and so on. I appreciate that you are not responsible for that. However, I want to put to you a point that the petitioners have made. They are looking to the Scottish Government, and to your good self, for leadership on this.

What I am driving at is that, if you record the biological sex of a potential offender but treat that person as the gender that they wish to be recognised as—we will just stick with the example of a biological male self-identifying as female—does that not open a gateway whereby it facilitates the Scottish Prison Service to conclude that it is safe for a biological male to be placed in female prisons? Are you not inadvertently and unwittingly facilitating that outcome by not only recording a person’s biological sex but treating them according to their self-identified gender?

I am talking about males, principally, but you see my point. Although it is not your decision in which prison—male or female—people are put, if you treat a man as a woman, it is no real surprise if that man ends up in a female prison. I am not at all alluding to any on-going court action; I am purely talking about the principle so that we do not get into any sub judice or prejudice territory. As chief constable, do you need to go further in providing leadership to set out that biological males should not, in fact, be housed in women’s prisons?

I support Mr Torrance’s recommendation and add that, as the petitioner points out, the number of people—they include my partner—who happen to have a latex allergy is not inconsiderable. It is between 1 and 6 per cent of the population. Like many allergies, it can have very serious consequences.

I am surprised, in a sense, that the issue has not been dealt with in the packaging world, which is normally fairly good at dealing with this kind of thing. Perhaps it is something that really needs to be dealt with, and I thought that we could stress as much in our letter.

Good morning. My understanding now, from listening to the deputy chief constable, is that the position of the police fundamentally changed as of October this year. Unlike the position beforehand, which was based on the 2019 policy, the biological sex of every potential offender will be recorded. Is that right?

I started off somewhat sceptical. However, having listened to what Mr Marra said and having refreshed my memory of what has been said, I believe that it is apparent from the evidence that—as the petitioner has made clear from the outset—there have been between 200 and 400 investigations in England each year into deaths abroad, whereas, in Scotland, there have been zero investigations. I looked again at the cabinet secretary’s submission of 26 May, to see whether there was any explanation for that, and the only explanation was that, in essence, it is difficult to hold an inquiry when you do not have jurisdiction. However, that is the case for England and Wales as well, so it is not an explanation.

The petitioner wants there to be a statutory definition of residency, which may be one solution. The Law Society of Scotland says that that is not necessary. However, I wonder whether the wider problem is that the authorities in Scotland are simply averse to having such investigations altogether for practical reasons—and there are practical reasons; we recognise that.

For the people for whom this matters, it matters greatly. When someone loses a loved one abroad in circumstances that are unexplained, that will linger forever. It is a serious matter, and the cabinet secretary has not really answered the points that have been raised, so we should go back to the cabinet secretary. It is a bit like being asked to do an exam paper and saying, “Well, I don’t agree with any of the questions, but will you give me a pass mark?” It is not on.

We are here again and again, in the same situation with cabinet secretaries, Mr Marra. It is unlike Ms Minto this morning, who I thought was excellent in her responses. I am not making a blanket criticism, although it is not rare for me to criticise the current Government. However, on this occasion, the lack of a basic answer is an insult to the petitioners and to the committee. I certainly do not think that the petition should be closed—I am sorry if that is not the view of other members—but I am not sure whether we should go so far as to take evidence, because we just need some clarity.

If we are going to approach the chief constable, we should also approach the Lord Advocate, because, if I am correct, she has the final say in such matters—I could be wrong about that. I had a meeting with the Lord Advocate about the inadequacies of the FAI system in Scotland, and she was very aware, attuned and involved in trying to improve the process. I would certainly want to involve the Lord Advocate as well as the chief constable if the committee were to agree to that approach.

As well as the biological sex of the potential offender, will there be recording of any self-declared gender if it is different from the biological sex? In other words, if a biological man says, “I identify as a female”, would that also be recorded?

Which other bodies, chief constable?

Is that the only body that you are waiting for?

No, I am grateful for your intervention, convener, because you reminded me about the submission that we received from the consulate general of Italy on 13 March 2025. Perhaps I could ask the minister to have another look at that.

Should the UK NSC, which we have not heard from since April 2024, also not have a good look at the evidence from Italy? It is pretty overwhelming. Its screening programme has been tremendously effective, particularly for young and active athletes. Surely it would not be difficult to implement a pilot screening programme for young athletes, perhaps via the various sporting associations.

Minister, I entirely accept your commitment, I am impressed by your general approach and I do not mean to give you a hard time today, but we all feel that we have not quite bottomed out this topic yet. To do justice to the petitioners, we are willing to work with you to try to get something done, unlike the UK NSC doing the square root of diddly-squat until the end of the decade.

Thanks for that, convener.

To be serious, Denmark was cited as an example of good practice for training, because it embedded mandatory CPR training in schools. By law, kids must receive the training at an early age. There is some contra-evidence in research that has been brought to our attention but, nonetheless, as raised by Kym Kestell in the British Heart Foundation’s submission, Scotland is the only UK nation where CPR is neither mandated in the school curriculum nor tracked through reporting. I know that each local authority says that it is committed to doing that, but would it not be simpler if we mandated it, so that everyone has to do it? We would know exactly where we are and we would be able to judge the outcomes by virtue of a clear law, rather than by an aspiration that we hope that local authorities will do nice things at some point in the future.

Again, the minister must be capable of reading my mind, which is an alarming prospect for her. I was going to ask about Cameron McGerr because it was brought to the committee’s attention that the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills wrote to him after he delivered his time for reflection contribution and offered to meet him. You have already alluded to the fact that the meeting is being pursued, for which I am grateful. Once it has been pursued, I wonder whether you could alert the committee to what is happening.

I appreciate that you do not have portfolio responsibility, because the matter falls under education, but to get back to the real topic, would it not be simpler if every child had to learn CPR at school? I think that I learned it when I was 45, as it just happens that I was in a mountain rescue team. It was a strange way to learn it, although I suppose it was better than nothing. It shows the random way in which people are learning about CPR. Would it not be best that, like Denmark, every child learns about CPR in primary school?