Chamber and committees

We thank Jordan Anderson for the petition. I would very much urge that the issues raised within it be pursued through the Scottish Youth Parliament. Of course, the Parliament and the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body would consider requests actively made through that body.

PE2041, which was lodged by John Ronald, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to encourage local authorities to exempt staff working at community healthcare facilities who do not have access to free on-site staff parking from on-street parking charges, to allow them to care for vulnerable and sick people in our country without it costing them thousands of pounds per year.

We previously considered the petition on 6 December 2023, when we agreed to write to the health secretary, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the Royal College of Nursing, the trade unions Unison and Unite the union, and the Allied Health Professions Federation.

Responses in support of the petition’s ask have been received from the Royal College of Nursing, Unite and the Allied Health Professions Federation. Although being mindful of the need for sustainable travel, the RCN highlighted that parking arrangements

“form part of working conditions for RCN members and impact recruitment and retention rates.”

In its response, the Allied Health Professions Federation noted that, if allied health professionals

“are required to pay for parking, they would effectively be penalised for accessing their workplace.”

The then Cabinet Secretary for NHS Recovery, Health and Social Care’s response notes the expectation that all NHS boards in Scotland should have a policy in place that enables staff to be reimbursed for valid expenses, including car parking charges, but the response is clear that such policies should not be extended to

“cover staff who drive to their work and park their car all day at their base of work”.

We have also received a response from the petitioner, who remains concerned that community health staff who use their own cars for work are being discriminated against.

Do members have any comments or suggestions? There is a route for the reimbursement of such charges when community care workers are out in the community and have to use off-street parking, but it is clear that a different view is taken to permanent daily parking at a fixed place of work. Are there any suggestions for actions?

I am content to do that. Are we all content?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you, Mr Kerr. The issues that are raised in the petition are of considerable interest to colleagues on the committee, and there are a number of things that we might now reasonably consider doing to take it forward. Colleagues, do you have any suggestions?

I thank Mr Stewart and Mr Kerr. Again, I note the presence of the Bundy family. I hope that they will be content that we will progress those issues. The evidence session, together with the further written evidence that we will seek, will give us an opportunity to pursue the issues that are raised in the petition.

We will keep the petition open. We thank Mr Muir for raising the issue with us. We will write to the Scottish Government and see what response we get in the first instance.

That bring us to the end of our public session. Our next meeting will take place on Wednesday 30 October. We will move into private session to consider agenda items 4 and 5. I again thank Marie McNair for joining us as a substitute for David Torrance this morning.

Thank you for that unsurprisingly compelling advocacy in support of the aims of the petition. I am old enough to remember the era before multiplex cinemas when the ABC cinema—the Regal—in Sauchiehall Street was a regular place to go. I can recall Charlton Heston going there for the premiere of “Earthquake”, with surround sound, when we were shaken in our seats during the earthquake. It seems that the cinema survived that, but is not surviving the calumnies that have been visited on it by Glasgow City Council’s planning process.

The argument that you make is an interesting one. Most of us are aware of buildings that are being lost without necessarily having fully understood what processes have led to their demolition. Sometimes that will, of course, have been completely necessary and unavoidable, but there is sometimes a suggestion that there is a shiny new model that might better suit the owners and they are keen to pursue it. I am minded, in relation to Glasgow, of the Odeon cinema on Renfield Street, where the magnificent façade was preserved and has been incorporated into the much newer building structure that was allowed to be developed on what had been the site of the auditoria of that cinema complex. There are solutions that can be found if people want to find the imagination to take them forward.

I am quite interested in the petition, and I think that the public is generally interested in it. I do not know whether we have a room in Parliament big enough for all the people whom Mr Sweeney was suggesting, but I am minded to conduct an informed round-table discussion on what is happening with the process and whether legislation might not be more appropriately drafted to give a little bit of weight to the idea of conservation-accredited engineers having a say on this. I think that those arguments were quite interesting.

I wonder whether there is anything that we might do to inform that panel. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what we might do in the first instance?

I should have noted that we received a late submission, which colleagues will have seen, from our colleague Beatrice Wishart on the petition.

Mr Golden has suggested that we keep the petition open and write to the cabinet secretary. Are we content to do so?

Members indicated agreement.

PE2108, which was lodged by Andrew Muir, calls on the Scottish Government to require medical professionals to obtain a second medical opinion before a person is detained under the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003.

The SPICe briefing explains that a short-term detention certificate authorises a patient’s detention in hospital for 28 days in order to determine what medical treatment the patient needs and to provide that treatment. The 2003 act specifies the criteria that an approved medical practitioner must confirm have been met in order for a detention certificate to be used, and the act requires that a mental health officer must give consent before it is used. If the patient has a named person, that person must also be consulted and have their views taken into account.

In England, the decision on whether to detain a patient is made by an approved mental health professional following an assessment by two doctors. When the Mental Health Act 1983 was being debated, it was stressed that the independence of the two doctors making medical recommendations was important in order to avoid collusion, influence or interference with clinical judgment.

In her response to the petition, the Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport outlined the use of short-term detention certificates and highlighted the right of appeal. The submission also highlights that reducing coercion is one of the priorities that emerged from the Scottish mental health law review.

The petitioner has shared his view that the certification process

“does not contain sufficient safeguards”

because the mental health officer who grants consent is not necessarily independent of the approved medical practitioner. His view is that the mental health law review was “not fit for purpose” and that, although the review stated that coercion should be reduced, it is not clear how that will be achieved. The petitioner would like

“supported decision making to be the norm rather than substituted decision making.”

These are important issues. I think that I recognise the name of Andrew Muir—he might have lodged petitions with the committee previously. Do colleagues have any comments or suggestions?

I thank colleagues who chose to support my motion. There are some events that people are party to that they never forget. As somebody who was in Brighton the night that the bomb exploded, I can say that that is one for me. It is not something that I have talked about very much publicly, but, as I get older, I felt that now was perhaps the time to put on record my experience of that night and my reflections on what it meant for politics in this country, all the way through to Jo Cox, David Amess and colleagues in the chamber who, I know, have been subject to—not always publicly but privately—real harassment and concern.

I will start 10 years before the events of 1984, as it is important to put into context the troubles in Northern Ireland, which underpinned all the difficulties in the United Kingdom at that time. In 1974, a bomb blew up in the Horse and Groom pub in Guildford. The 50th anniversary of that event took place last weekend. Among the victims that night were two Scots Guards—two young boys aged 17 and 18 who lived in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire. They lived in the same street, at number 18 and number 11. They had been in the Boys Brigade together. They had been in the same school football team. They had worked in Armitage Shanks together. They had a joint funeral, and they lie together in the cemetery adjacent to each other to this day.

With people serving in the armed forces, the troubles of that era came very close to home in many communities in Scotland. However, for two young boys, hardly out of school, who had joined the army, to be cut down in that way had a great effect on my local community.

Ten years later, I was at my sixth party conference. All of us here will have been at our respective party conferences. They were very open affairs at that time. Yes, there was a certain amount of policing, but that was more to marshal demonstrators. The policing was not in any sense concerned that there was a genuine threat to life.

On that day—12 October 1984, which will be commemorated this Saturday—I was in the bar of the Grand hotel until about 1 o’clock. I then went back to my digs with other people. In a way that I have never been properly able to explain, I woke up suddenly with a deep-seated sense of unease that something was not right. I could not put my finger on what that was; I just felt it. I said to the people with whom we were sharing accommodation, “Look, something’s not right. Let’s get up and go and see.” We did that.

We were 100 yards away from the Grand hotel. We walked round and there was an extraordinary sight before us. The only parallel that I could think of at the time was the disaster at Clarkston that had taken place in the early 1970s, when a landmark that we were familiar with was suddenly ripped apart in front of us. There it was: the Grand hotel, with a gaping slash down it.

We did what we could. We brought deck chairs up from the beach to let people who were staggering out, covered in soot and dust, sit down. However, in due course, we realised that that was really as much as we could do, and the emergency services had to be left to get on with things.

We knew that the Prime Minister had survived but, in an age before digital communications, it was difficult to know anything else whatsoever. However, what we understood was that there had been an attempt to wipe out the democratically elected Government of the United Kingdom. It did not matter which political party people were in or whether they were fans of Margaret Thatcher—let us face it: not many political parties were fans of hers—they all stood together and understood at that moment that this was an act of terror the like of which we had not seen in the country before and that, had it been successful, it would have had profound implications. Indeed, even though it was unsuccessful, it had profound implications.

The bomb was behind the bath panel in room 629, which was occupied by my friend Donald Maclean—the president of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Association—and his wife, Muriel. I had seen Muriel just two nights before, when she hosted the Scottish reception—I remember her still, with the Maclean sash. She was a lovely woman.

They were catapulted six floors down. Muriel died a few weeks later from the injuries that she sustained, along with four other people. Donald was horribly scarred. For the rest of his life, he carried the injuries that he suffered that night with tremendous fortitude and courage.

I remember the sense of leadership, irrespective of politics, that the Prime Minister showed the following day. I remember journalists saying to me, “She put the spine back into us, as well.” Everybody was shaken by the enormity of that event.

The bombing led to a change in our politics. Before then, we could go to party conferences and mix and mingle with politicians without there being any real security. However, from that moment onwards—as I saw in the conferences that I attended afterwards—a curtain came down on the way that politicians at the most senior level could engage with people. Over the years since, that has come to affect all of us, too.

Jo Cox was cut down in 2016 and David Amess was cut down a few years later, and I know that there are colleagues in this chamber whose constituency offices have been attacked as they have gone about their daily business. Last week, a woman attacked my office—she attacked the staff in the shared services area of the building. She was arrested by the police, was on remand for three nights and has been charged. These things visit all of us and have changed the colour and character of politics. They have made us all aware of something that we never thought that we would ever have to be aware of. That is the long shadow that has carried forward from that night in Brighton all those years ago.

There is one positive thing that I remember. On the 25th anniversary of the bomb, the fireman who had dug Donald Maclean out of the rubble contacted me and asked whether I could put him in touch with Donald, whom he had not met since that night. They were able to meet, and I think that it meant a great deal to Donald, who passed away the following year. Humanity finds its way through, even in the most awful of circumstances and tragedies. That is what I choose to think and celebrate.

That night gave me a determination that terrorism must never be allowed to succeed. That does not mean that we cannot confront the giant issues that trouble us. However, when it comes down to it, we have to stand together as politicians and recognise that democracy is a fragile thing and that it will succeed only if we stand together, work together and are resolute.