Chamber and committees

Okay. I will leave it there.

That was a very short answer, Elliot. You tried to wriggle out of that one.

Good morning to the witnesses. It has been incredibly refreshing to read two reports from the commission that were written in plain English and that say what is wrong and what should be done. We are not used to seeing such reports from bodies such as yours. That is a note of praise.

I want to ask you about transport, as transport is mentioned in your reports from 2020 and this year. In “Making the Future: Initial Report of the 2nd Just Transition Commission”, which was produced this year, a “broken transport system” is mentioned. The language is quite tough. The report says:

“Scotland’s public transport network requires vast improvement and must be made more affordable”

and that it requires

“significant investment from government and re-prioritisation of funds”.

Will you expand on that?

I will ask you some more questions about what you have said.

I thank Monica Lennon for her intervention. She is absolutely right that NHS Lanarkshire is in a state of crisis, as it has been for too long. We need to see an action plan to get our area out of that completely unacceptable situation.

We have all been inundated with constituents who are desperate for help. I have a couple of personal testimonies. One is from an East Kilbride resident who said that they found themselves requiring support from a GP. They went to their medical practice and requested an appointment for a painful foot. They were told that there were no appointments available that day and that there were no pre-booked appointments available. That kind of thing is commonplace.

I have other examples, but I will not go through them because I am aware of the time. The situation that we face is not good enough—not just in Lanarkshire, but across Scotland. Frankly, the buck stops with the cabinet secretary and no one else. He should do something about it, or fall on his sword.

I thank Labour for bringing the debate to the chamber. The only time that we get to hold the Government to account on health is during Opposition time. Even then, we know that we and Labour will lose the vote, because the SNP and the Greens will band together to defiantly say that we have somehow got this all wrong.

Humza Yousaf often talks about challenges and recovery from the pandemic while forgetting that, under the SNP, the NHS was creaking before the pandemic.

Of course, as we have already heard, the background to the debate is the leaked discussion among health chiefs at which various ideas were floated, including charging people who can afford to pay. We already have a two-tier health service under the SNP. Constituents who cannot even get to speak to a GP have contacted me to say that they have gone private. One case, in particular, stands out: it is of a person who ended up paying thousands to see a GP privately, then paid for a minor procedure. That is just not acceptable. Quite apart from the “Thinking the unthinkable” leaked discussion, we already have a health service in which people who can pay get health treatment and those who cannot, or will not, do not.

We are all proud of our national health service, but, under the SNP, it is becoming the national have-not service. That is the reality on the ground. What happens in general practice affects what happens elsewhere in the health service. If people cannot see a doctor, they might well end up at an A and E department instead, or get sicker and go to hospital when that could have been avoided.

We need to know what is happening on the ground. However, we currently have no idea which GP practices are offering phone calls, no calls or face-to-face appointments. That would not be acceptable at the best of times, because data is needed in order to plan, and it is certainly not acceptable now.

In my area of Lanarkshire, things are particularly bad.

I am glad that the Minister for Transport recognises the value of car clubs, but they are a bit patchy across the country. Will she commit to doing an audit of all car clubs to see where they are and what their range is?

I will come to Helen Martin in a moment, but I just want to jump in here. You are right—you have produced reports, including a recent one on the construction industry, which I have just flicked through. It is very interesting, and it raises issues that many of us have heard many times before, but my concern is that although this might well be fascinating stuff, what is going to come of it? You have sat down with people in the construction industry and have produced a report, but how are we going to monitor change? Will the report lead to anything, and are you going to be the driver of change? If not, what is the point of it all?

It seems to me that it is a collaborative thing, and there is probably a role for the committee. You are here today, and we can work closely together in monitoring this stuff.

My next question is my final one, because I know that others want to come in. I think that it was Mary Alexander who mentioned that you receive some Government funding. How much is that?

Patricia Findlay, if you answer this, could you keep your answer a bit shorter, if that is okay? The question is for whoever wants to answer it.

I have been looking at the convention’s website, because I wanted a definition of what we mean by “fair work” which can mean different things to different people. The definition on your website is 76 pages long. That is quite a lot. How on earth are employers meant to take all that in?

Regardless of what Patricia Findlay just said, what has the fair work convention achieved so far? Have there been any tangible outcomes?

I do not know who wants to respond—maybe Mary Alexander or Helen Martin wants to come in.

I will not be as brief as Pam Duncan-Glancy, but I will try to be as brief as possible.

I have a couple of amendments in the group, which are, in my view, quite straightforward.

The bill proposes that it will be a criminal offence to make a false statutory declaration or a false application. A person who commits such an offence is liable to imprisonment for up to two years and/or a fine. However, what would constitute making a false declaration and what prosecutors would have to prove should a person be accused of doing so are not clear.

It might be said, “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” If I were to say that I had been living as a woman for three months and I had not, I would not be telling the truth. Of course, it is not clear at all from the bill what living as a woman or a man means legally. We will come to that in discussing later amendments.

If I took something belonging to you, convener, that would constitute theft, and I could be prosecuted. If I had broken the speed limit to get over to Edinburgh, I could face penalty points. If I tried to pin the blame on someone else for that offence, that would be a lie, and I could be done for that. However, if I said that I had been living as a woman, how would anyone prove that I was lying? Given that we do not know what living as a woman means in the bill, it would be pretty difficult to establish whether I was telling the truth.

The bill creates a serious offence, which is punishable by imprisonment. It is surely incumbent on ministers to set out what would constitute making a false declaration. Amendment 22 would compel them to do that, and it would also compel them to set out what evidence would have to be provided to show that someone had lied. If ministers cannot do any of that, it is difficult to see how an offence could be prosecuted, because we would simply not know what the offence was. If we do not know what constitutes an offence because we do not know how to prove or disprove it, there can be no offence.

I say to those who are in favour of the bill—I think that the majority of the committee are in favour of it—that it needs to be much tighter. If amendment 22 is rejected, there will be legal challenges galore coming along the tracks. If the committee is minded to accept it, amendment 28 would make any regulations that are made as a result subject to the affirmative procedure, which would give an extra layer of parliamentary scrutiny.