Chamber and committees

Before I bring Dr Whelan in, can I nudge you a little bit more on that? If the bill is required, surely many more young people will be captured, including transitioning students who are off the radar just now or do not have the plans that are required. Do you agree that, if the bill works, the figure of 29 per cent will go up quite substantially, so there must be significant resource issues?

There was an interesting exchange near the start of the meeting when I asked Anne-Marie Sturrock whether the bill was required. Anne-Marie and Dr Whelan had mentioned that it will bring clarity and will more consistently identify young people with disabilities or additional support needs, irrespective of the current position with local authorities. What might the resource impact be on colleges and universities? If the expectation is that more young people will be identified more regularly and more consistently, will colleges and universities be able to support the planning process by taking part in meetings and ensuring that the agreed support is in place for students, who will come from multiple local authorities? I know that further education has more of a footprint in schools than higher education perhaps does, but are we anticipating additional workload? Has that been quantified? Is further and higher education in a position to deliver on the significant expectations in the legislation? Annie-Marie Sturrock, have you given any thought to that?

Okay. I have one final question to ask. Mike Corbett, I will come to you first and will give everyone the opportunity to respond if they wish.

We know that most young people will come through a local authority route or an education route, but not necessarily everyone will. Young people going to university may have left school, and there is that flux during the summer, so local authorities might not always be best placed to take the lead. There is an expectation, however, that local authorities would take the lead in transition cases. Should that always be the case, or is more flexibility required?

Thank you for adding that.

That is incredibly helpful; I just want to make sure that Colleges Scotland and the further education sector have thought about quantifying what additional resource might be required from their end. Has consideration been given to quantifying that additional resource?

For once, convener, it is just a supplementary.

I will go to Anne-Marie Sturrock first. The committee is trying to wrestle with what you and Mike Corbett have talked about. Mike said that, although a statutory right to a co-ordinated support plan exists, those plans are not produced consistently or regularly.

Anne-Marie, you suggested—I hope that you are right—that the framework means that there will be a more consistent, streamlined approach to ensuring that all young people get all the rights and transitions to which they are entitled. If that is not happening with co-ordinated support plans, however, why would it be different under the bill?

You do not have to answer to that; I am simply reflecting a point that the committee is wrestling with, which is why I want to give you the opportunity to say a little bit more about it. That is all.

This is specifically on the variation to the proxy voting scheme that the Presiding Officer is suggesting. Can I just check—I am sure that the answer is yes—that annex A, the letter from the Presiding Officer, is a publicly available document?

I ask that because it refers to two colleagues who had a loved one nearing the end of their life and sought to use the proxy voting scheme in those circumstances. It is unanswerable that that would be the right thing to do, but I had not realised that the pilot scheme that our committee agreed to did not build in such flexibility and discretion for the Presiding Officer. That is okay, because we always said that it would be an iterative process and that we would shape the scheme as we went along to reflect circumstances as they developed. I am keen to clarify that such a use would be allowed under changes to the proxy voting scheme.

If I am allowed to share them, my personal circumstances were that when my mother was approaching the end of her life, the Scottish National Party’s whips were wonderful and I got to spend my mother’s final week with her. There was no pairing and no proxy but, even as I sat at my mother’s bedside, I was still on my phone, doing my work and clearing emails. I would have liked to have had a proxy, which would have meant that I did not feel excluded or remote from the Parliament but instead had that link. That would have enabled me to avoid having to log on to vote virtually by permitting me to have a trusted colleague to vote on my behalf.

I think that the proxy scheme should cover such circumstances and that, if the Presiding Officer does not think that the scheme is suitably flexible at present, we should agree to change it to provide that flexibility.

In his initial comments, I think that Edward Mountain was saying that we should look to see what happens elsewhere—I am sorry if I have captured that inaccurately.

We talk about getting working conditions right in order for MSPs to be supported, but I have no idea what rights the wider parliamentary staff have when they face the exact same life circumstances. I do not know whether there is a role for us to play in drawing to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body’s attention the fact that we are seeking to consolidate what we think should be key rights in the workplace for MSPs and that we wonder how that is mirrored with regard to the wider rights that are extended to staff in this place. They will not all be employed by the corporate body—there will be a variety of contractual arrangements—but I am conscious that we are not the only people working in this Parliament.

When we are looking at whether we should put structures, definitions or criteria around who qualifies as a close relative, it is relevant to note that we already have a precedent in adoptive and foster parents and kinship carers. The term “kinship” does not always mean a blood relative; it is a wider and looser term that acknowledges the relationship of love and care that people can have with someone else without defining it further.

I think that we have already taken a more permissive and flexible view, and I do not think that it would serve us well to define what a close relative is. I think that we either give discretion or we do not. We have given the Presiding Officer discretion and I have every faith that that will be exercised appropriately.