Chamber and committees

Do members agree to keep the petition open and to pursue the issues that Mr Ewing identified?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you very much, Mr Marra. Are we content in the first instance to embrace the suggestions that Mr Marra has made?

Following the conversation and the meeting that Mr Marra attended with the Lord Advocate, I wonder whether we might consider also asking the Scottish Government what progress has been made in relation to working with the UK Government to ensure that the differences between the system in England and Wales and the system in Scotland are being properly communicated to the next of kin. We could follow up on that specific point.

Are there any other suggestions that colleagues want to make? There were a few suggestions there. We will have to think from whom we would obtain information about the incidence in England and Wales, but we can certainly seek to do that, because that would evidence and underpin the contrast in how these matters are being taken forward.

Yes, that responds directly to what I thought are two perfectly legitimate questions that the petitioner has raised: why is there not one already and what exactly are the criteria to determine why there cannot be any more? Is the committee agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

The next of our new petitions is PE2084, which has been lodged by Randall Graeme Kilgour Foggie. It calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to amend the Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act 2016 to allow alkaline hydrolysis, accelerated composting and other more eco-friendly methods of disposal of human cadavers. Alkaline hydrolysis, also known as water cremation, is a method of disposal of human remains using hot water with the addition of chemicals. The current legislative framework for burial and cremation allows for the regulation of any new methods of body disposal in the same way that burial and cremation is regulated—how we move from one subject to another in the petitions committee!

The Scottish Government recently consulted on burial inspection, funeral director licensing and alkaline hydrolysis. The consultation sought views on proposals and regulations on all four topics under the Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act 2016.

The report on the alkaline hydrolysis consultation states that 84 per cent of respondents support the introduction of regulations to allow alkaline hydrolysis, which I understand is practised elsewhere. It concludes that the Scottish Government will now consider the proposals for regulating alkaline hydrolysis in light of the consultation findings and that it will continue to engage with the funeral sector and other interested parties to further inform the development of policy proposals. Do members have any comments or suggestions for action?

Thank you, Mr Torrance. Would anybody else like to come forward with proposals?

My final question relates to the second part of Laura Hansler’s petition, to which you alluded, which is on a national memorial to the many people whose lives have been lost. We had a rather bizarre intervention in our conversation with Transport Scotland, which seemed to think that we were suggesting having a memorial in the middle of the carriageway, with people driving past it, which it said would be a distraction. However, having it there was never the intention. It is to recognise the extensive loss of life and for people to have somewhere to commemorate—as is the case with some other tragedies, albeit that they have been more concentrated. Do you have sympathy with that idea, or can you foresee issues arising from it? If you have sympathy with it, where should the momentum come from?

That is a perfectly reasonable point, and I slightly share your analysis of the way in which these things can drift.

I will now bring in our reporter, Edward Mountain.

Just out of interest, what do you think of the trams now that we have them?

As I said at the start, I will now give you an opportunity to add any final reflections before we draw the meeting to a close.

We will come back to two things that you touched on. One is the proposal in relation to a national memorial, because I realise that, in your lifetime of politics, we have seen memorials to the Piper Alpha disaster and the Lockerbie tragedy. It would be interesting to touch on what might be appropriate—or otherwise—in relation to the loss of life. That is one of the imperatives that drives forward the interest of the committee, and, in fact, it was the original raison d’être for the commitment.

The manifesto commitment from the Scottish National Party at the time did not make particular reference to economic wellbeing or the benefit of potential expansion in the north-east of Scotland. It made particular reference to the fact that dualling could lead to a significant reduction in the loss of life on the route. Was that not a prime motivator in the underpinning of the commitment?