Chamber and committees

Do you think that it will be before Christmas?

I have been once before in relation to the treatment of young footballers.

I will get straight into the points that I want to raise. First, the recommendations that led to the proposals to downgrade Wishaw neonatal unit have not been subject to a robust or thorough equality or human rights impact assessment. That is an issue in relation to parents and families but also in relation to babies, because they, too, have rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—a right to life, a right to survival and a right to development—and that has not been properly taken into account.

Secondly, the clinical advice that has been used to justify the decision is now five years old. Thirdly, neither the current minister nor her predecessors have ever visited the Wishaw neonatal unit to speak to the staff there to get their expert view. Fourthly, as Jackie Baillie and Monica Lennon have mentioned, the concentration of the provision of these intensive care resources will bring about capacity and resilience issues. It is extremely difficult to understand the feasibility of families from central and southern Scotland having to go to Aberdeen, which will have one of the proposed three centres.

There has been centralisation of these services in other parts of the UK, but there has not been any proper evaluation of those that could be factored into any decisions that the Scottish Government takes. ScotSTAR and the Scottish Ambulance Service will be significantly affected by the changes and they have not been fully involved in the process. There has been no assessment of the impact on their services.

Finally, this is an issue in Lanarkshire and in Wishaw but there is also an issue about how we provide these services across the whole of Scotland. That is an issue for every member of this committee and every member of this Parliament. We simply ask this committee to take up some of these issues in relation to the extent to which the assessments have been made, the impact on staff, the impact on capacity, the impact on resilience and the impact not just on human rights but human lives.

That is okay. I will bring Graham Simpson in to ask a quick question in a minute, but it is striking that, in the introduction to the report, in paragraph 6, you say:

“Digital exclusion is strongly associated with poverty and people with certain protected characteristics.”

You go on to say, in paragraph 13, that digital exclusion is caused by affordability, by whether people have digital skills, by whether they “fear or mistrust” digital systems and by poor connectivity or being unable to afford to keep up with technological change.

In paragraph 16, you reiterate that the major causes of digital exclusion are poverty—including being on benefits—and age, because older people are presumably less likely to be able to access digital technology. You say that people with disabilities and those who are socially isolated must overcome barriers to access. That gives a clear sense of those people among our citizens who are predominantly excluded from public services that are digitally provided.

Thank you very much. Before we move to the major part of our agenda this morning, do members agree to take next week’s meeting in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Agenda item 2 is a discussion on the “Tackling digital exclusion” report, which was produced just a few weeks ago. I am pleased that Stephen Boyle, who is the Auditor General for Scotland, is joining us this morning. Alongside the Auditor General are Jillian Matthew, who is a senior manager, and Bernie Milligan, who is an audit manager, both from Audit Scotland. We are also pleased to welcome Mike Neilson, who is a member of the Accounts Commission, because this is a joint report between Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission.

As usual, we have a number of questions that we would like to put to you, but before we get to those, I invite the Auditor General to make a short opening statement.

I will begin on a positive note. You regularly come before the committee calling for public sector reform. One strand that many people identify with is the introduction of digital technology. The report is about how that is implemented and who is included in or excluded from that. Will you elaborate on why you think that digital technology is central to that public sector reform agenda? In your opening remarks, you mentioned some examples that are given in the report. Social Security Scotland is mentioned in particular. Can you say more about the examples that you have identified as good practice?

Before I bring in Colin Beattie, I will go back to exhibit 2, which looks at the human rights of people who are potentially affected by digital exclusion. It identifies examples of that, including blue badge holders; people not being able to access council tax reductions or their welfare benefits accounts; ethnic minority citizens not being able to access services that they are entitled to, because of language barriers; and welfare sanctions for people who cannot upload their journals online.

The report highlights that the application process for a blue badge is online only. How does that sit with the stated aims of COSLA and the Scottish Government on the lenses of inclusion and offering signposted alternatives? If the application process is exclusively online, it will, almost inevitably, exclude people who are entitled to a blue badge.

We are short of time, so we will move on to Colin Beattie to ask the next questions.

The Scottish Government’s strategy document says:

“We will ... ensure that all public services are designed through the lenses of inclusion, offering signposted alternative ways of accessing services for those who cannot or do not want to use digital routes”.

To what extent is that happening? You have mentioned the example of Near Me but, across the whole of the public sector and the provision of public services, how often are those services

“designed through the lenses of inclusion”?