Chamber and committees

The third item on our agenda is an evidence session on the public health impact of vaping. We will hear from representatives of Public Health Scotland, anti-smoking charities and academics with expertise in tobacco control and vaping. I welcome to the meeting Professor Emily Banks, head of the centre of epidemiology for policy and practice at the Australian National University and visiting professor in the Nuffield department of population health at the University of Oxford; and Professor John Britton, emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of Nottingham. Both are joining us remotely. With us here are Sheila Duffy, the chief executive of ASH Scotland; and Dr Garth Reid, consultant in public health at Public Health Scotland.

We will move straight to questions.

Thank you for clarifying that.

Will you clarify something? What you said seems to contradict what Garth Reid and Professor Banks said about vaping rates being similar across socioeconomic groups.

The second item on our agenda is to decide whether to take item 4 in private. Do members agree to do so?

Members indicated agreement.

I see that Professor Banks wants to come in. I must ask her to be very brief, as we do not have a lot of time left, and a lot of members still want to ask questions.

Thank you.

All the witnesses have contributed a lot of helpful suggestions about things that could be done either to reduce the use and availability of vapes or to discourage children and young people from taking up vaping. Do the witnesses wish to bring to the committee’s attention anything else that they think it would be helpful to ask the Scottish Government to do in order to reduce vape usage, particularly amongst children and young people?

I thank the panel for joining us. The committee has found this to be an interesting and informative session that will help us develop our thinking as we move forward, and we will take on board Professor Banks’s point about taking vaping and tobacco together. Thank you for your attendance today.

At our next meeting, we will hold the first oral evidence-taking session for our inquiry into health and care in remote and rural areas, to be followed by an evidence session with the women’s health champion.

That concludes the public part of our meeting.

—does not hold the legislative powers over employment law, I know that this Government—

Fair work is a Scottish Government commitment to ensuring that everyone benefits from opportunity, security, fulfilment and respect in the workplace. Fair work and fair pay make sense for workers and employers across all sectors, helping to improve staff retention and productivity, reduce recruitment costs and contribute to a skilled and motivated workforce. Embedding those principles into Scottish policy making is also central to economic growth and it means that we can better tackle social inequalities, poverty and the cost of living.

Although employment powers are reserved to the UK Government, the Scottish Government is using and promoting fair work principles to make workplaces fairer and more inclusive. One such way is through promoting the employer accreditation schemes, including payment of the real living wage. In Scotland, 91 per cent of all jobs pay at least the real living wage—that figure is higher than that of any other UK nation—and more than 3,400 employers in Scotland have real living wage accreditation. I am proud to be one of those employers.

I will mention a number of businesses in my Rutherglen constituency that are real living wage accredited and which I have had the pleasure of visiting. They include but are not limited to ACE Place nursery and out-of-school care, Bardykes farm nursery school, Evolution Fasteners and Thistle Credit Union. Despite the challenges in the UK economy with rampant inflation, those employers know the value of investing in their workforce. That helps to improve staff morale, reduce absenteeism and support their efforts to retain and attract staff.

Considerable challenges have impacted on Scotland’s fair work ambitions in recent years. In my first parliamentary speech in 2016, I criticised the Tory Government’s ill-thought-out and unnecessary Trade Union Act 2016, which attacks workers’ fundamental rights to organise, bargain collectively and withdraw their labour. Seven years on, the Tories continue to attack trade unions through their minimum service levels legislation. I welcome the comments earlier this week from the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy, who said that the Scottish Government will continue to do all that it can to oppose that legislation and that it will not co-operate with establishing any minimum service orders here.

It is not only Westminster’s anti-worker policies that impact on Scotland’s fair work agenda. The UK’s hard Brexit—which, let us not forget, Labour has fully signed up to—has long threatened a race to the bottom on workers’ rights, and it has driven low growth, stagnant wages and the highest inequality in comparison with neighbouring countries. Additionally, the Westminster cost of living crisis has seen energy bills skyrocket and food prices soar, and mortgage rates have ballooned. Those have all hit workers’ take-home pay.

It is abundantly clear that workers in Scotland will get the employment protections that they need only when the levers of change are placed in the hands of the Scottish people. An independent Scotland could go much further in improving pay and workers’ conditions. The Scottish Government has already set out that independence will allow us to deliver higher minimum standards for statutory sick pay and parental leave; stronger access to flexible working; a repeal of the UK’s draconian anti-trade union laws; the banning of cruel fire-and-rehire practices; the provision of full employment rights from day 1 of employment; and the enshrining of workers’ rights in constitutional law.

I know that not everyone in the chamber shares our ambition for Scotland to be an independent country, but everyone in the chamber should back our calls for Scotland to have full powers over employment law. Of course, it is not only the SNP that is asking for that; some of the biggest trade unions in the country are. I remind members that I am a member of Unison.

Roz Foyer, the general secretary of the STUC, was quoted earlier. She wrote in The Herald that the STUC welcomed the TUC’s

“now-shared policy between”

their organisations

“on devolving employment law.”

The SNP has long campaigned for the devolution of employment powers to Scotland, but the Labour Party worked hand in glove with the Tories to block that during the Smith commission in 2014. More recently, Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, and the shadow Scottish secretary ruled out devolving employment law. Only last month, Labour MPs, including the new member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, dodged a vote on an SNP bill to devolve employment law. Labour’s newest MP failed to stand up for his Rutherglen constituents at the very first hurdle. Instead, he fell in line behind his London bosses by abstaining and proving that he really is Starmer’s man in Scotland. Labour would rather leave Scotland under Westminster control and at the mercy of Tory attacks on workers’ rights than give Scotland’s national Parliament powers.

I am deeply disappointed that, despite Anas Sarwar’s protestations only this week that he would “love” Holyrood to have control over workers’ rights in the first session of a Labour Government, there is no mention of that in Labour’s amendment. Could it be that the UK Labour bosses down in Westminster have pulled the branch office back into line? With Labour failing to join us—not only us in the SNP but the trade union movement itself—in calling for much-needed devolution in the face of the Tory cost of living crisis and draconian anti-strike legislation, we once again find ourselves asking, what is the point of Scottish Labour?

I am a proud trade unionist; I have been a trade union member all my working life. Before entering Parliament, I was a divisional convener for Unison.

Protecting workers’ rights against unpaid and exploitative contracts, supporting their democratic right to industrial action and championing safe workplaces have long been priorities of mine, which priorities are fundamental components of Scotland’s fair work ambition. Although the Scottish Parliament—