Chamber and committees

Is the consensus diagnosis approach ever used for adults?

Thank you.

I thank all the witnesses for their evidence. I am keen to understand a little more about the balance between the benefits for people who might have an adverse reaction or an emergency in a safer environment and the benefit of having reduced drug paraphernalia in the local community, for which there is clear evidence, and the concerns that have been expressed about there being more unknown faces around, whether those are service users or dealers. I could not see anything in the written submissions that tells me whether you collect information about where your service users are travelling from. It might not be easy to get objective data, but do you have a sense of whether people are travelling across the city or even from further afield or whether it is overwhelmingly people who would otherwise be using in another environment in the Calton area?

Good morning. I want to press you a little further on the issues that Paul Sweeney raised about the Thistle and, more generally, about how you see the future of safer drug consumption facilities.

We acknowledge that it is early days for the Thistle, and that a full evaluation is to come, but let us assume that it evaluates well. You pushed back a little on the issues around reserved legislation. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we did not devolve that legislation in 2016, when we addressed other irrational reservations in the Scotland Act 1998 on a consensual, cross-party basis. I wish that we had been able to do that. Let us assume that the Government will be successful in making the case either to change or to devolve the legislation, and that the legal barriers can be removed.

You presumably have some idea in your head already about what level of provision of that type of facility there ought to be in order to address the needs not just of one community but of multiple communities around Scotland. Do you have a sense of how extensive a network of that type of facility a city such as Glasgow ought to have, or that the country ought to have, if those legal barriers were removed and if the evaluation of the early phase proves to be positive?

I absolutely take the point about the connection to drug deaths and to places where there is a particular cluster, albeit that those patterns may change over time. Some of the evidence that we heard earlier and that we have read in the written submissions shows that that is not the only benefit of such a facility. It is clear that the reductions in drug paraphernalia in communities and in people being exposed to drug taking in communities and other settings are significant benefits.

There could be the opportunity to achieve those benefits in other parts of communities that may not have the same cluster of deaths at a particular time to justify a fixed facility. I am curious to know whether there is a sense in the Government or in the public health community in Scotland more generally of where this could go if the barriers were removed.

Have the new UK ministers that you mentioned shown an interest in visiting the facility and seeing for themselves what is happening?

The debate has been interesting. A number of members have used the word “distraction”, but it is coincidental that this has been a slightly distracted debate. I think that Neil Bibby was the first one to suggest that the Government is being distracted, when he said that it is being “distracted by the constitution”. I think that he is the only member who mentioned the constitution in the debate, proving that it is not only independence supporters who are distracted by the constitution.

There have, however, been aspects of the debate in which we have been distracted from the real issue—it is not only in classrooms where that happens. Should this serious debate really come down to the difference between a cabinet secretary issuing an edict and respecting the autonomy and the judgment of schools and headteachers? That, in itself, is a distraction from the wider issue that all members across the chamber are genuinely concerned about.

Members have spoken about the impact on learning and of conflict. Those are social and cultural phenomena that are part of our behaviour. They come from us and do not inevitably come from the technology itself.

I have been left thinking that, had someone described mobiles to me when I was a young person growing up in the west of Scotland in the 1980s, they would have sounded like something from science fiction—a great, enlightening and liberating technology, giving us all access to the sum total of human knowledge and the ability to communicate with anybody else in the world. They would have sounded so utopian. In reality, they have become something deeply dystopian.

When I consider the social and cultural environment in which I grew up as a queer, out young person in the 1980s, I just imagine how much worse that experience would have been had every homophobic bully on the planet—whether it was the person sitting at the next desk in my classroom or someone in Government or in a position of power in the country—been able to access me directly and to beam that prejudice right into my eyeballs. I also imagine how much worse it is for, for example, young trans people who are coping with the level of prejudice that is being beamed through those devices right into their eyeballs every day, let alone for young people who are being affected by racism or anti-migrant prejudice, those who are vulnerable to the pressure to present Instagram lifestyles and Instagram bodies, and those who are desperate for information about their health or their wellbeing and finding only lies and conspiracies.

I am afraid that I do not have time.

Ending the use of phones as a distraction in class is fine, but we must also enable our schools to give young people the skills to navigate their lives in this age of information and disinformation. If we want schools to teach those skills, sometimes the question to ask is what the right role is for phones in classrooms, in the right context; it is not just about having a blanket ban.

I will finish by saying, once again, that the problem does not stop when the school day ends, when young people leave the class or leave the school—far from it. The harms that all members are concerned about in the debate are not inevitable. They are really the result not of the technology itself, but of the deliberate choices of the wealthy, powerful people whom we have permitted to control the technology and how we all use it.

I would prefer not to vote against the business motion, but I need to ask for some assurance and a commitment from the minister in relation to an issue that he will be aware that the Greens have repeatedly raised with the Parliamentary Bureau: the long-overdue carbon budgets, which are due to be presented to Parliament and have already been scrutinised by the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee.

We have been asking for clarity about when the carbon budgets will be put to the vote and an assurance that time will be allocated to debate that hugely important issue. This week, we received a letter from Mr Dey, in his role as the Minister for Parliamentary Business and Veterans, telling us that he hopes that the vote will take place prior to the October recess. Obviously, if that is to happen, it will have to be by next Thursday at the very latest, yet the business motion that is before us does not allocate any time to debate the carbon budgets. Therefore, I am asking for an assurance from the minister.

As I acknowledged, the committee has undertaken that scrutiny, and the member is quite right that this relates to the timing of the climate change plan, which itself will have to be scrutinised during what is left of the parliamentary session. The point is that the Scottish statutory instrument on the carbon budgets ought to be given some time for debate in the chamber as well. I ask for an assurance from the minister that an amendment to the business motion will be lodged at the start of next week’s business to ensure that time is allocated for us to debate the carbon budgets in the chamber before we are asked to vote on them.