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I am intervening partly to give the minister a wee minute to get a sip of water. Does she recognise that we need to keep mums well throughout their pregnancy and ensure that they are supported to have the best possible mental health during that journey? In that way, when issues creep up in post-partum situations, there are existing support mechanisms in place for them.

Absolutely. It very much helps us all if we work collaboratively in the sphere of women’s health. I hope that we will have a similar level of conversation in the next stage of the abortion law review, which will take us into a slightly different space from the question purely of access. I thought that the conversation that we had on safe access zones was quite grown up and even tempered, and I hope that that can be taken forward on the next issue.

Although I recognise the strides that have been made between 2021 and 2024, I also want to shed light on some critical areas that remain unaddressed or that require more attention. It is important to highlight issues such as access to fertility services, comprehensive support for endometriosis and systemic inequalities in health outcomes for women from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds. The report demonstrates that a stronger focus is also needed on addressing delays in diagnosis for conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women and on ensuring equal access to healthcare services across urban and rural areas. There also remain significant data gaps that act as a barrier to understanding and addressing women’s health needs comprehensively. Conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, endometriosis and other underresearched areas still suffer from a lack of robust data, which impedes progress on effective diagnosis and treatment.

Several organisations that are directly involved in improving women’s health have reached out to us, and I will use the short time that I have left to highlight some of their very important observations and asks. #MEAction Scotland highlights that myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome is a complex chronic illness in which 80 per cent of patients are women. It is thought that there are approximately 58,000 cases in Scotland, but that remains an estimate because we continue to lack robust data. There are several reports of women being disbelieved and dismissed by doctors, and diagnosis can take years if it happens at all. #MEAction Scotland points to the need for healthcare education to accurately quantify disease burden, along with the urgent need for data to be collated nationally in order to understand the full picture.

As the motion rightly notes, one of the biggest thank yous should go to all those who have spoken to us about their health issues and their often very long journeys to diagnosis. For many, that journey has already happened or concluded. They often give their experience—sometimes at their own cost—to make sure that no one else has to go through what they did. For some, that has been decades of campaigning, and we should rightly take on their wealth of experience from that.

We must continue to build on the momentum of the 2021 plan to increase awareness of women’s health. The first phase of the plan has provided a solid foundation to build on, but the rest of the work must not be delayed. Women across Scotland are counting on us to continue advocating for them and their rights. Continued commitment to the unmet goals is crucial if we are to fully realise the vision of the women’s health plan and deliver a Scotland where all women can achieve the care that they need.

The women’s health plan that was launched in 2021 marked a significant commitment to addressing the distinct health needs of women across Scotland and aimed to close gaps in care, improve health outcomes and promote health equity. The very existence of that plan has brought much-needed attention to issues that have historically been sidelined and significantly underfunded.

The plan recognised that taking a dedicated approach to women’s health is essential for the wellbeing of women and of our wider communities. It also acknowledged that there is an urgent need for societal and cultural shifts in attitudes to women’s health and that much more must be done to address the long-standing health inequalities that women face. It set out a way to achieve those lasting changes, and I welcome the updates that we have received throughout the life of the plan. The final report that is the topic of today’s debate sets out the important progress that has been made and raises the areas in which work is still to be done.

A number of commitments, and the significant progress that has been made towards them, should be celebrated. I am a little embarrassed to say that, when preparing the “progress” section of this speech, I forgot to mention my own act of Parliament. That might be because it is in my nature to want to move on and do the next thing. I thank the minister for her kind words about my Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) Act 2024. I also thank the Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport for her kind words when she had the women’s health role, as well as thanking the ministerial teams, the campaigners, and those with lived experience who gave evidence.

No one will be surprised to hear that I welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment in the plan to review abortion law and its recognition of the importance of having a legal framework that reflects both current practice and the needs of patients and healthcare professionals. Parliament has rightly acknowledged abortion as part of healthcare for those who need it. Law reform is not the only area in which abortion care must progress: late-stage abortion and the recruitment of staff who can carry that out must also be addressed.

I hope that the law review will carefully examine the gaps and inadequacies in current legislation, assess the need for changes and consider how to bring about concrete change. However, that process must be urgent. There is no room for delay, and I hope that we will see progress and a clear path being set out to achieve that before the end of the session. Scotland needs a responsive and timely approach to the issue.

I feel that, so far, the plan has involved a genuinely collaborative approach. The meetings that we have had with ministers and the women’s health champion, Professor Glasier, have been informative, but they have also felt like a genuine dialogue. Although I will move on to discuss some things that we should be doing better on or looking at, I will do so in the context of genuine collaboration and making progress for women. I am pleased to hear that Professor Glasier has agreed to stay on as the women’s health champion.

I thank all members who signed the motion and so enabled this debate to happen. Before I go into detail about the motion, I extend my thanks to the many parents across North Lanarkshire who have contacted me to share their personal experiences of how the proposed cuts will affect their families. They include Laura, Jim, Leonna, Diane, Lorraine and Kerry Anne, who join us in the public gallery today. The determination, commitment and continuous campaigning by those parents has been inspiring and uplifting, and it should be a reminder of the power and importance of local issues.

Some 590 parents have signed the petition to overturn the decision to reduce the number of children’s school buses across North Lanarkshire. The decision is a disaster for children’s safety. I hope that North Lanarkshire Council and the Scottish Government can take immediate action to deliver a workable solution.

For background, for those members who represent other areas of the country, I highlight that in North Lanarkshire, local councillors have implemented cuts to school buses for secondary pupils by increasing the qualifying distance that children have to live from their school from two miles to three miles, and have also proposed a similar approach for primary schools, with the qualifying distance moving from one mile to two miles. That will have a significant impact on a large number of young children, causing them to rely on their parents to drive them to and from school every day. Families and teachers from across the region have already spoken out against the decision.

It is clear that these cuts will put children’s safety at risk by packing more cars on to the already crowded streets around school grounds—areas where children are walking and cycling in large numbers. It will also increase pollution and carbon emissions around schools at a time when we are becoming increasingly aware of the damage that that can cause, and it will add an extra burden on parents and carers, who are already struggling.

It is already having an impact on secondary schools, with some reporting an increase of up to 30 per cent in the number of cars, with pupils leaving the campuses to get to parents’ cars, which are waiting in queues, and pupils having to walk along the grass verges of dual carriageways. How on earth can anyone think that that is safe?

My inbox has been inundated with correspondence from parents, teachers and members of the local community, who are rightly very concerned about children’s welfare. I have had particularly moving conversations with parents of children with additional support needs, who rely heavily on their school buses and the importance of routine that the school bus allows their children. I will share some words from a parent to whom I spoke recently. She said:

“My child doesn’t have social awareness or safety awareness due to his autism. On walking from home to school, he would need to cross two very busy main roads and cross through a park which another high school sits at.

On Hamilton Road there is a gap of roughly half a mile between traffic lights to get safely across the road, and on Airbles road the distance is longer. He wouldn’t be able to process when was best to cross the road between traffic which would lead to a breakdown with anxiety over how to get across.

It’s the same with trying to access public transport. Most buses are either full or nearing capacity when they reach his stop. The heightened noise on the buses would be over stimulating for him and this could also lead to a stressful and traumatic experience.

I believe there has been a gap in understanding of the needs of all children with Additional Support Needs and not just the ones with mobility issues.”

I absolutely agree that the guidance on safe walking routes is a matter for the council, but because the council is using the Scottish Government’s school transport guidance as an excuse, does the member not think that we should tighten that up to make sure that it cannot be used by another council to make the same decision that North Lanarkshire Council has made?

There has been an element of consultation in some places—the parents definitely do not think that it is enough—but in others, schools were told that they did not have to engage with the consultation process, and then found that their buses had been cut, so I agree with Mr Kerr on that point.

It has been suggested by members of the local authority that children and young people should simply use the service buses instead. However, we have had reports of buses not stopping, and of buses that are overly busy. In some places, there is only one bus an hour, and if it is full, children face a long walk or a wait outside school for the next one. North Lanarkshire Council says that it is following Scottish Government guidance, but there seems to be no consistency across local authorities as to how that is being interpreted.

As an MSP from the Scottish Green party, which proudly introduced free bus travel for everyone under 22, I find the suggestion that children as young as four years old should use public transport as an alternative to their school bus to be concerning. Since the scheme was introduced, thousands of young people have benefited, taking more than 50 million bus journeys, and it has saved family members money during a cost of living crisis. However, it should not be used to plug gaps.

Yesterday, I walked one of the proposed walking routes with parents and pupils in Motherwell. I sincerely hope that other members will take up the opportunity to walk the route; I know that some have already been out, and the parents were really pleased by the support. The route is simply not safe. We walked along busy roads and narrow paths, and over broken glass. One of the children told me that they would not be comfortable walking the route without an adult because they did not feel safe.

We, as politicians, try to put across arguments in a compelling way, but it is only fitting that the final words of my speech are from one of the pupils who has been affected. Ella, who is 10 and from Motherwell, sent me a video detailing the challenges as she sees them. She said:

“The people in charge of North Lanarkshire Council have decided to stop our school buses in order to save money. I don’t think this is fair. It’s the wrong decision.

The school bus gets lots of children to school safely and on time. If I didn’t get the school bus, I’d need to walk a really long way in the rain to and from school. Between my house and school, there are big dangerous roads that are especially dangerous for young children like my brother and sister. They’d be tired and cold before we even get to school. 129 children from our school will lose their bus next year. I worry that our school campus will get really busy and dangerous with lots more cars.

This is also bad for climate change. I thought grown-ups were trying to stop as many cars being used on the road. Then why take away our buses? It doesn’t make sense. I want the grown-ups in charge to put our safety first before saving money.”

I share Ella’s concerns. The proposed cuts will put children’s safety at risk by packing in even more cars. For some parents, having to take children to or from school will cause more hassle in the mornings, as they will be trying to get children to both secondary and primary schools because of the cut to the buses.

Will the minister reflect on the situation now, compared with the 1980s, and the fact that those limits were put in place before I was born? With regard to the level of traffic, we are living in an entirely different time to the time when those limits were created. Roads are now much busier and much more dangerous for children. The fact that those limits have not been reviewed in so long demonstrates an absolute failure on our part to ensure children’s safety.

We will be discussing those issues, but we need to hope that councils will take sensible decisions that will not put children’s safety at risk, which is why this is such a disastrous cut, and because of the lack of consultation, as Stephen Kerr has pointed out.

I realise that I am running out of time, Deputy Presiding Officer, so I will finish. I am calling on the Scottish Government to look again at the guidance to ensure that this cannot happen in another local authority area, and for the Scottish Government and North Lanarkshire Council to do the right thing for children by reversing the decision for secondary school pupils and committing to protecting the current bus entitlement for primary school pupils.

It has been a good debate—it has been a challenging debate for us all, but it has certainly been a good one.

I absolutely agree with the minister that we need to ensure that care-experienced people feel that we are committed to change and that, as a Parliament, we are committed to making the system better for all care-experienced people. It is so important that we take a proactive approach to keeping families together, to alleviating poverty and, ultimately, to making those families feel supported and valued.

I echo the minister’s thank you to all those who have given their time and effort to make things better. In my contributions today, I have referred to many stories and personal experiences that people have given me to make things better for those who come after them. The sharing of those stories is selfless. Often, we cannot change that experience, but the people who share those experiences often want to make sure that it will not happen to anyone else.

The definition of care experience is important, but there has to be a balance. It is important that we ensure that it is specific enough to have meaning and to inform, but not so specific that it excludes some people’s experience. I am very glad that it is being developed with people with lived experience, to ensure that that becomes a reality.

I found Oliver Mundell’s contribution very interesting; I often feel that same sense of déjà vu in health debates. I think that that links to Roz McCall’s comments on the pace of change. We can never take comfort in the pace at which we are achieving change for care-experienced people. Martin Whitfield made a point about how long it takes for change to happen and what that time looks like in terms of the lives of young people.

I met the same young people as Willie Rennie met, and I think that the frustration of those young people is absolutely reflective of how long it takes for tangible change to be achieved. Some of the things that we have talked about this afternoon take time, and there is no way around that. Although it is true that we could certainly have gone quicker on some things and achieved more by now, we need to consider whether we are managing expectations and giving timelines to care-experienced children and young people as a whole, so that they can feel in control of the whole journey, too.

Kevin Stewart mentioned the need to listen and the small issues that we can help to resolve. We should never underestimate the extent to which things that we see as relatively simple can become all-consuming for people. At the same time as focusing on the large systemic change that needs to happen, we also need to solve the practical issues.

That is especially true for those young people who are moving on from care. On one of the first occasions on which I met Who Cares? Scotland, young people told me about all the things that they had found challenging on leaving care and moving into their own place, which involved having to deal with being adults long before many of the rest of us would have had to. Advice on the little things that I took for granted, which my parents gave me when I first moved out, was often never given to those young people. That should lead us to always stop and not make assumptions about anyone else’s experience. Crucially, we should listen to those who have already had to navigate that situation alone.

Clare Haughey mentioned the need to track change and progress, and no one will be surprised to hear me say how crucial data is.

It is hugely important, yet Willie Rennie highlighted how patchy data collection is in local authorities. It is simply not good enough that we do not know how, where or why some things happen. How will we know if the initiatives are having the effect that we want without effective data collection? We will not even know if something is a problem without having accurate standardised data from across the country that is collected and challenged at a national level.

Local variability also needs addressing, and tracking what is going on well—or not going well—in certain in areas is vital to ensuring that we keep the Promise everywhere.

Foysol Choudhury’s remarks about those from racial minorities and how people can be multiply disadvantaged are really important. We need to ensure that intersectional issues are taken into account for those young people and that we tackle all the barriers that they face.

Katy Clark talked about the arbitrary limits for support for care-experienced people. Many people do not understand why the age limits have been picked. For many of their peers, support from families does not just end at a certain date or age. We need to look at how we can support people throughout their lives. Giving them that value is hugely important to make them feel loved, as Rona Mackay and others mentioned.

Another issue that has been highlighted with me is health inequalities for care-experienced people. Again, that is about access and structural inequalities, but often stigma and cultural issues can be just as painful. I have previously spoken to care leavers who have become parents. Their perception of judgment and extra monitoring, because of their background of care experience, made difficult what should have been a positive and joyful time. They felt a level of suspicion and monitoring that others did not receive. They felt that people were concerned about how they were looking after their baby and that, as a first-time parent, they were under a huge amount of scrutiny and were concerned that it was implied that they might not know what they were doing.

That illustrates that it cannot be the responsibility of only one minister to ensure that the Promise fulfils its objectives. Many pieces cross into many other portfolios, so we must ensure that everyone is focused on this. We also must ensure that whatever systems we design are accessible for care-experienced people.

Nicola Sturgeon paid tribute to all those who have given their time, experience and lived experience. We would not be at this point without all those who have put their efforts into supporting all of us to be able to deliver on the Promise. We must live up to the expectation that they have so rightly placed on us to achieve the Promise, and the Scottish Greens look forward to continuing our work with the Government on the bill and on the issue going forward.

I, too, thank the minister for holding this hugely important debate. Like others, I reaffirm the Scottish Greens’ commitment to achieving the Promise.

I do not think that anyone could argue with what the Promise is at its heart. The recognition that important structural and societal barriers remain for care-experienced people reminds us of the urgency with which such barriers should be dismantled. What we have done so far and how we have pushed progress forward are really important. If the importance of an issue could be measured purely by the number of briefings and emails that we receive on it, this issue would be a high priority for the chamber.

With regard to steps forward, The Promise Scotland, in its briefing ahead of the debate, highlighted the Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Act 2024. My colleague Ross Greer managed to secure amendments to that legislation that sought to improve the way in which secure transport is delivered and scrutinised, because the transport provision for young people in secure care had been a bit of a missing link in the gradual raising of standards, quality and accountability over recent years.

The hope instead of handcuffs campaign raised the profile of the issue, too, highlighting that children in Scotland were being inappropriately restrained when in the care of secure transport providers, with handcuffs, for example, being used in situations in which they simply were not necessary. The use of restraint against children has, rightly, been the subject of significant scrutiny and debate in the Parliament and in council chambers across Scotland, and I am glad to note that progress has been made specifically in relation to schools, with greatly improved guidance being produced.

The availability of secure transport has also been an issue. The Education, Children and Young People Committee heard that, due to the lack of specialist providers in Scotland, transport providers were coming from hundreds of miles away to take young people relatively short distances. That was not good either for young people or for providers themselves. However, as the “Plan 24-30” document says:

“Keeping the promise will never not be urgent. Childhood is short, and precious. ”

That should focus minds on how we continue the pace of change and adapt current plans when issues arise.

Support for families and early intervention have been raised by several organisations. Helping families to thrive, and giving support and guidance before a crisis, are essential to keeping the Promise. The whole family wellbeing fund has been hailed as a positive step forward, but many families are still finding it difficult to navigate systems when they need help.

We must also remain aware of how budgets impact on the financing of third sector and other organisations that provide support and advocacy to families, as well as the effects on funds such as the whole family wellbeing fund. Projects under that fund cannot sustain many third sector organisations on their own. We know that financial positions are difficult, but often it is all too easy to cut funding for some of that vital work in order to plug gaps in statutory services. The reality is that many third sector organisations are either catching people who do not qualify for support, or preventing people in need from accessing statutory services in the first place.

I have attended a few events with organisations such as Who Cares? Scotland at which I have spoken directly to young people who are care experienced and have heard from them what they need from us, and I have found kinship care and relationships with siblings being mentioned often. There is a perception that kinship care is often dismissed as it can be too difficult to establish, or that only immediate family were considered for it. The definition of “kinship care” in the Scottish Government’s guidance is actually pretty broad, but it seems that, in certain cases, it might not be being explored to its full extent. I was going to ask the minister for an update on work in that space, but I am grateful to her for outlining some of the measures that are under way. I am particularly interested in the guidance to the social work sector to support kinship care. If she has any further information, either now or at a later point, I will be hugely grateful to get that detail.

As Roz McCall mentioned, there has been some progress on keeping siblings together, but the briefing from The Promise Scotland once again raises the issue of the lack of contact with siblings for care-experienced people. It is an issue that I have heard repeatedly from children and young people right across the country, and it appears that we are not yet getting it quite right every time. There needs to be a consistency of approach for siblings who have individual plans and orders through the hearings system to ensure that the system that is supposed to support them is not putting in place competing orders with different contact requirements. Not taking wider circumstances and important people in the care-experienced young person’s life into account is not getting it right for that child or young person.

The language that we use around care experience can also carry stigma. In the process of preparing for the debate, I read about some work that Clackmannanshire Council has undertaken to make the language that it uses about care experience more accessible. That could be the language used in reports, or in meetings, and it would ensure that the young people being talked about know what it is that people are saying, so that they can have meaningful input into their care. That very much prompted me to go back through this speech to see whether I had lived up to those accessibility standards.

We are talking about the simple things—things that we know make a lot of what we do more accessible, such as not using jargon or too many abbreviations, and making sure that the child or young person understands what is being said before moving on to the next topic. That might sound patronising, but the entire document is about how those little things encourage children and young people to be equal partners in their own care, to be able to participate and to explain their own view and experience.

I know that I am rapidly running out of time, and there are several more things that I wanted to cover and which I hope to be able to address in closing. In the interests of time, though, I will leave it there for now.