Chamber and committees

Thank you for that. If you are seeking to encourage me to attend events where exercise is involved, you will have the whole-hearted support of Mrs Carlaw, even if I am slightly more reluctant.

Do you have anything else to add, minister?

Welcome back. The next petition on our agenda, under continued petitions, is PE1876, which was lodged by Lucy Hunter Blackburn, Lisa Mackenzie and Kath Murray. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to require Police Scotland, the Crown Office and the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service to accurately record the sex of people charged with or convicted of rape or attempted rape.

The Citizens Participation and Public Petitions Committee has considered the above petition throughout the current parliamentary session. It is one of our longest-running petitions this session—it was lodged back in 2021—and the committee has been pursuing extensive work on it since then. We have a large volume of petitions, and our practice is to do a considerable amount of work on every admissible petition by securing a research briefing, a Government response and committee consideration for each one.

We also try to progress the ask in petitions on behalf of petitioners as far as we are able to do so. We are not the Government; we are a committee of the Parliament. To ensure fairness for all our petitions and petitioners, we consider them in turn, which sometimes means that there can be a wait after a petition is considered before it can be rescheduled.

At its meeting on 30 October 2024, the committee agreed that it would be appropriate to invite the chief constable to give evidence at a future meeting. The committee does not hear evidence on every petition. In fact, it takes evidence on relatively few of the petitions that come before it. As a result, we want to make sure that we get the most out of any sessions at which we hear from witnesses.

After issuing our invitation to Police Scotland, we were advised that there was a full review of the policy on recording sex and gender that was due to conclude this autumn. To make sure that we could use this valuable opportunity to hear from the chief constable as effectively as possible, the committee agreed to wait until autumn 2025 to take evidence.

I am pleased to say that we are joined today by Chief Constable Jo Farrell, and by Deputy Chief Constable Alan Speirs, who has responsibility for professionalism and enabling services. I warmly welcome you both. I understand that the chief constable would like to make a brief opening statement before we move to questions from the committee.

Did Police Scotland act without giving due thought at the time to disquiet that might be a consequence of the statement that came out in 2019? What was the motivation at that point?

In so far as officers are confident in how they proceed, is it now the case that the same criteria are applied in relation to the policy for all sexual offences and that there is no distinction in that regard?

Exercising my discretion as convener, I now invite our three parliamentary colleagues to join the questioning. Tess White is first.

Notwithstanding that, we have been engaging on the petition for some time, and we have raised it with the First Minister. Are colleagues content that we ask the Minister for Agriculture and Connectivity for a progress update on the pilot scheme that was due to commence this autumn and see what efforts we can make to direct the thing and move it forward? I would just note that we hope that it will materialise in the lifetime of the current session of Parliament, given the duration of the petition and the acceptance from Government at various stages of the aims that it seeks to secure.

Are colleagues content with that?

Members indicated agreement.

PE2074, lodged by Iona Stoddart, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to increase the funding that it provides to local councils, enabling them to deliver the best possible health and social care and help to protect the vulnerable, frail and elderly population from the closure of residential and nursing care homes.

We last considered the petition in March, when we agreed to write to COSLA and to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government. The response from COSLA highlights increasing pressures on the sector and significant funding constraints on local government, which have made negotiations with the sector regarding the average cost of care particularly challenging. COSLA reiterates that

“it is the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them, including on health and social care services, on the basis of local needs and priorities.”

COSLA intends to continue to press the Scottish Government on

“the importance of urgent additional funding”

so that local authorities can

“invest in social care and social work services.”

In his response, the Minister for Social Care and Mental Wellbeing states that the 2025-26 budget allocation to local government in Scotland saw

“one of the largest increases in funding in recent times and a real terms increase of 5.5 per cent.”

In relation to the impact of fiscal pressures, the minister indicates that the Government has been engaging with local leaders, the integration joint board chief financial officers and COSLA to gain a better understanding of the range of issues and consider how the pressures on social care can be managed. In addition, the minister points to the financial viability response group, which has developed a detailed risk register and has identified potential mitigating actions for the sector.

Do members have any comments as to how we might proceed?

PE2181, lodged by Paul Blaker on behalf of Accountability Scotland, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to introduce measures to stop teachers backdating or altering school records in SEEMiS and other education management information systems. SEEMiS, which is the management information system provider that is used by local authority schools in Scotland, holds the core student records.

The petitioner believes that the practice of altering school records after they were created is open to abuse and could cause significant harm to children. The SPICe briefing cites the particular case mentioned by the petitioner in which a local council in Scotland was censured by the Information Commissioner’s Office for backdating education records, and it adds that, in a separate case, a different council was found by the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman not to have consistently recorded incidents reported in pastoral and other recording systems.

In its response to the petition, the Scottish Government makes clear its expectation that local authorities and schools should keep accurate and timely records in compliance with relevant legislation and Government guidance. The Scottish Government also expects local authorities to ensure that staff and teachers understand how information should be recorded and to have clear audit processes and procedures in place to track who has accessed such systems and what changes have been made to pre-existing information, together with the reason for those changes.

SEEMiS explained to our SPICe researchers that the ability to backdate or update records in pastoral notes is intended to align with the day-to-day practice in schools. Teachers or staff might not be able to update records immediately and, therefore, may create or update records when they have non-contact time. SEEMiS also clarifies that, following the issues highlighted in the first case that I mentioned, changes were made to the system to allow local authorities to access the content history of an entry, rather than just the dates and the authors of any changes.

Colleagues, do we have any suggestions as to how we might proceed?

Are colleagues content, on that basis, to draw the petition to a close?