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In 2021, the Scottish household survey revealed that just 21 per cent of people in the most deprived areas were involved in volunteering in the previous 12 months, compared with 33 per cent in the least deprived areas.
I was blown away by how different the experiences were in a rural area compared with what I have heard in some of the other engagement that I have had.
Has the Law Society or the Scottish Legal Aid Board done any work on the types of firms that are doing civil legal aid work, compared to those who were doing it 20 or 30 years ago?
If we had a long-term plan that suggested that regulation would start in one part of the UK and then be extended to another part of the UK, with a planned structure for that, that would be easier for businesses to implement, because they would know what was coming. We can compare that approach with the fairly piecemeal one that we seem to have at the moment...
In Scotland, we appear to be ahead of the game compared with many countries. In our sessions, we heard evidence about citizens assemblies, but many of them seemed cumbersome and unwieldy.
The immediate answer is that, in some senses, it is relatively easy for the UK, compared with other countries in the world, to align, but, in another sense, it is still difficult, because there would need to be a technical negotiation, which would not be simple.
I refer the committee to a paper that the commission published last October, which compared the powers of this commission with the powers of other national human rights institutions that are operating in the UK—that is, with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
In the response to the Scottish Government consultation, just over half—52 per cent—of respondents agreed that the 51 per cent majority stake rule for licensed legal services should be removed, compared with 48 per cent who disagreed.