Chamber and committees

I am going to get into trouble for going on, so I will not say anything further.

The Deputy First Minister said that she had records from when Fergus Ewing and I were on the education committee. I wonder whether she has the Official Report from Thursday 12 January 2023 in that bundle. I can read to you what your predecessor said at that meeting. He said:

“I have listened carefully to the group that has made representations to me, all the members of which are Fornethy survivors and are part of the wider group. I do not believe that, as things stand, there is an inherent impediment to applications to the redress scheme coming forward from people who spent time at Fornethy. I acknowledge that the nature of the environment in which individuals were spending time at Fornethy could be considered to fall within the ambit of the scheme, so I do not think that there is an inherent impediment to applications coming forward and being considered. To put it slightly more bluntly, I reject the idea that the scheme is not for Fornethy survivors; I think that it is possible for Fornethy survivors to be successful in applying under the scheme.”

The former Deputy First Minister went on to say, looking at the issue of whether the local authority was acting in loco parentis, if you want to put it that way, that he did not believe that the situation at Fornethy matched up with what you say. He said:

“If a young person was at a holiday camp and was dropped off and picked up by their parents, it would be difficult to substantiate the view that the state was exercising responsibility. However, I do not think that the situation at Fornethy ticks that rather neat middle-class box—if I may say so—that I have just outlined to the committee. The more I understand about the situation at Fornethy, the more I find it difficult to reconcile it with the idea of some form of voluntary endeavour, and I think that the matter hinges on that point.”—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 12 January 2023; c 14, ]

You have come here today and have told us repeatedly that you are following what your predecessor, who introduced the legislation, intended. There it is, in black and white. It is something quite different from what you have suggested today.

He said that people were effectively directed and put there and that the state was involved in facilitating that and probably, in a lot of cases, a little bit more. You are here now and could push the envelope a little bit—open this up again—so that some of these people would stand a better chance of getting justice. I do not know why that is hard.

Do you accept that there is a point at which the evidence is sitting here today—formed by this group? If you have lots of people saying that the same thing happened to them, it is quite unlikely that something different happened.

We would be saying to the Redress Scotland panel exactly what Parliament, the previous Deputy First Minister and several individual MSPs said repeatedly throughout the bill process—that, if those people come forward, their testimony will be believed. It will be taken as fact. We would be saying that there is provision for exceptional circumstances and that, if the testimony and evidence from those thousands of people is joined together, we can start to build a pretty accurate picture.

Some of the people involved have spoken to medical professionals and other people over the years. These concerns existed before the redress scheme came into being. People did not just appear and join survivor groups—they did not just appear and interact with services across the country when they thought redress was on offer. There are historical records. They might not be as good as the official records but, frankly, it is not the people’s fault that the organisations did not keep good records and destroyed those that they had.

If you block people from even getting past “Go”, they do not get to the case-by-case decision. That is what is happening at the moment. The guidance and the things that you are saying are stopping people from getting to the case-by-case decision.

I should say that I know David’s family well and it is lovely to see them in the public gallery. I have the utmost admiration for Sharon, his mother, who in very difficult circumstances has sought to see what she can do to help other families.

I have seen the SPICe briefing but, for me, it comes back to a point that Mr Ewing made on a previous petition: what if Sharon Duncan, the wider Hill family and some of the organisations that they are working with are right, and the National Screening Committee is wrong? Certainly, if it were my child, I would want to know that that question had been exhausted.

I would be keen for the committee to write to organisations with a relevant interest—Cardiac Risk in the Young, Save a Life for Scotland, the British Heart Foundation, St John Scotland and Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland—to seek their views and expertise on what is called for in the petition, and to find out about any work that they may be undertaking on conditions affecting sudden cardiac death.

I would also be keen for the committee to write to the UK National Screening Committee to ask when it expects to review the evidence for screening for sudden cardiac death, and to write to the network for inherited cardiac conditions seeking further details and an update on its sudden cardiac death project.

In addition, I would be keen to go back to the Scottish Government. It has provided quite a helpful response on the petition, but I would be keen to interrogate further its role in informing the National Screening Committee’s work. It is one thing to ask questions and make representations, but I do not know how much more it can do.

Certainly, David Hill’s family and Sharon Duncan, his mother, are not in a unique position. There are families like them in every part of Scotland, as we have seen through activities that have been undertaken in Parliament since David’s death. The least that those people deserve is for us to try to understand how the process works and be absolutely sure that all the evidence has been taken into consideration.

I would not dare disagree with it.

Members indicated agreement.

To be honest, I am appalled by that answer. I understand why the report was commissioned, but I do not think that it is consistent with what the then Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills said as the bill went through Parliament. I was on and off the Education and Skills Committee throughout that time. He acknowledged that it was unlikely that documentary evidence would be available in every circumstance. He did not talk about certainty; he talked about the balance of probabilities. He offered repeated reassurances that people would be believed and that the principle would be that, where survivors came forward and offered testimony, it would be taken as fact, not that it would be questioned.

The second thing that I find pretty hard to swallow, given that it was discussed during the passage of the bill, is the relationship between parents and the local authority that has been presented. It is not true; it was not factually correct then and it is still not correct to this day. Local authorities, through social work and education, wield a huge amount of authority over families. When they suggest things and direct things, vulnerable families feel under pressure to accept them. It is not a relationship of equals and it is wrong to categorise it in that way. Given what we hear from survivors, I had hoped that we would be looking to find a way to say yes rather than finding reasons to say no.

I am interested in what the Deputy First Minister has to say on the commitments that were given through the bill and on the relationship between parents and local authorities that she has set out. Even now in 2024, that is not my experience of what it is like for many families in my constituency.

Surely we should be responding to what did happen rather than what should have happened. It is another example of the system failing that people have come up against. The system has not been working as it should, so we would not expect you to dismiss that and say that it should have been done differently. That is what it sounds like.