Chamber and committees

Who should carry out the external validation?

Okay. That would be useful.

A letter was published yesterday by the public policy institute, Enlighten. It was written by 13 senior medical professionals and executives in Scotland. It was an open letter, published in the press and, I think, on Enlighten’s website. Top people have signed up to it. It says:

“We recognise that many people are well served by the NHS in Scotland, and that thousands of dedicated and hard-working people ensure that compassionate and effective, sometimes lifesaving, care is provided on a day-to-day basis. And yet, as has also been acknowledged, the current system of delivering health care and social care in Scotland is unsustainable, often stretched beyond capacity, overly complicated, difficult to navigate, often inefficient and is perceived as not always meeting the needs of people living in Scotland.”

There is a lot more to the letter, but it says—and this is where it relates to your report—that the NHS is “overly complicated”. The letter is potentially touching on governance, which is what your report is about. Could you explain why you think that governance is so important and why changing the governance and simplifying it will make a difference to the people who use the NHS in Scotland?

Thanks, chair. Have you finished your questions, chair?

That makes the point. You have five boards that have marked themselves down, and maybe they deserve to be marked down—I do not know—but having someone external to make sure that they are not being too hard on themselves would be useful. I will leave it there, convener, thank you.

Does Craig Hoy agree that it is troubling that we have a system whereby one person can overturn a democratic decision such as the one that was taken here or ones that are taken in councils, especially against such a weight of public opinion?

I am not sure that I can be as sexy as that.

I congratulate Stuart McMillan on securing the debate. It would be remiss of the convener of the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee not to congratulate the Scottish Law Commission on reaching the age of 60. As a former convener of that committee, and as someone who is around the same age as the commission, I had to add my voice to Mr McMillan’s.

It has been my pleasure to visit the commission—although I have not yet been to its new offices; perhaps there will be an invite—to chat to the commissioners and to meet the current chair, Lady Paton. It is good to see them all here today.

I want to mention a couple of pieces of work of the commission. One is current and one is past. The current one, which shows that we can achieve things in this Parliament if we work together and engage with the Government, is the work that the commission is doing on tenement law. That directly followed on from a report that was produced by the cross-party working group on tenement maintenance. The group was established in 2018, with Ben Macpherson as its first chair—I took over when he, justifiably, became a minister. We produced a series of recommendations for the Government, including a requirement for tenements to be subject to a building condition inspection every five years, the establishment of compulsory owners associations and the establishment of building reserve funds.

The Law Commission was tasked by the Government with looking at the owners association issue. It has been working on that since 2022, and it hopes to be in a position in the future to provide the Government with a report detailing its recommendations and to produce a draft bill by the spring of next year. I thank Professor Frankie McCarthy, who is leading on that, and her small team for their diligent work and for keeping us informed. It is likely that, by the time we see legislation, it will have been 10 years, spanning three parliamentary sessions, since MSPs first got together to tackle the issue, and that is a frustration.

I have also been involved in scrutinising Law Commission bills on judicial factors, moveable transactions and prescription and title to moveable property. However, I finish by mentioning an important piece of work that I was not in Parliament to work on but in which I had a small part, and that is the work that led to the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011.

For those who do not know, the 2011 act means that people can now be retried in Scotland for serious offences for which they have been cleared, if new and compelling evidence—such as DNA evidence—is found. The matter was raised in the Scottish Parliament by Annabel Goldie after a speech that I made at a party policy conference, in which I told how the man who was accused of killing my sister in England could be retried because the law there allowed it, but the law in Scotland, where she was born, would not. New evidence was found in that case, and he was retried and is still behind bars. I am pleased that the 2011 act has been used in Scotland.

The Law Commission deals with difficult areas of the law. Its work is vital, and we should all be thankful to the current commissioners and to those who have gone before. I will not be around—I am afraid to say—in another 60 years, but I very much hope that the 2085 version of Stuart McMillan will lodge a similar motion for a debate in the Parliament to celebrate the Law Commission’s 120th anniversary.

So, we have a project director who is an employee of the college and has been able to sign off payments to the company of which she is the director—stop me if I am getting any of this wrong, by the way. That seems to me a situation that is entirely wrong. Would you agree with that?

Yes, please.

So the individual knew the former chair. Do you know what the nature of that relationship was?

They just knew each other.