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I agree. There is a potential reconsideration of the regulations on cannabidiol—CBD—products, although they are currently legal, so the point about the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is a bit of a red herring. Further investigation of safe dosage levels is needed, and we could undertake potentially informative clinical trials in Scotland. Furthermore, a cross-party group on medicinal cannabis has recently been established, so it might be useful for the petitioner to consider participating in that as a way of furthering his objectives.

I echo the moving testimony from Monica Lennon in representing her constituent; it is an incredibly touching issue. We have all had interactions with constituents and others in the past, with the same themes repeated around how, when people feel that they are in a crisis situation, help is not there. That is a devastating realisation for a lot of people, who perhaps assumed that, if the worst came to the worst, someone would be there to help.

I echo the useful points that Tess White made about the need to widen our investigation and inquiry. I think that we should pursue that.

I suggest that we also include prisons in the scope of our inquiry. I visited Barlinnie relatively recently and experienced the mental health crisis in the midst of our prison system. People who are suffering severe mental disability and mental health problems are incarcerated in conditions that are not appropriate for their condition. People who are suffering acute mental illness are, in effect, being warehoused in prisons. That is another element that needs to be discussed. I therefore suggest including the Scottish Prison Service in the organisations that we invite to discuss the issue with us.

I have a further reflection on reimbursement. Many families will not have the cash flow to fund the costs up front. Given that, under the Scotland Act 2016, the Scottish Government has greater latitude to introduce new benefits, consideration could be given to setting up a special grant for the very small number of families who are affected. Such a grant could support families with up-front payments to enable them to travel and stay in a location that is quite far from home.

For the record, the school that I referred to is the Sunnyside school of conservation, which has developed a specialised curriculum. It would be well worth the Government taking action to benchmark against that.

Okay. Another aspect of the dynamic that we consider is packages and groupings of SSIs in relation to bills that have been passed. Significant legislation has been passed in recent years, such as the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 and the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019, which have a significant number of delegated powers because they are complex acts. In order for this committee and the relevant subject committees to plan workload, it would be useful to be given advance notice of SSIs. Do you know whether there are any sets of SSIs in the pipeline for landmark pieces of legislation such as those two acts? Can you keep us updated on progress on them?

Okay. Thank you. Just on that, I mentioned two acts and you mentioned others for which delegated powers have now been drawn down, but the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 and the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 are particularly significant acts. Can you give a commitment that you will go back to your civil servants and ask them to consider when the SSIs for those acts might be introduced and write to the committee to indicate when that is likely to happen?

Minister, I am keen to bring you back to the correspondence from Charles Garland from the Scottish Law Commission. We had an interesting meeting with the gentleman, particularly in relation to the 27 pieces of draft legislation that are shovel-ready, as it were. Would it be possible for you to commission a review of those 27 items and assess whether there are opportunities for the Government to introduce some of them in a timely manner?

The committee mentioned that those pieces of legislation could be sponsored by members through the non-Government bills unit, as members’ bills. That could be an alternative route.

There is a national interest in having that body of work carried forward as quickly as possible. It might be useful to carry out an assessment of the archive of material to see what opportunities there are. It would be useful if that could be set out in writing to the committee so that we could see the Government’s view on those 27 items.

Nice to see you, minister. We are trying to get a feel for what our workload will be so that we can anticipate as best as we can the number of future SSIs in relation to non-Covid aspects of legislation. How will the Scottish Government prioritise non-Covid SSIs to ensure that the necessary SSIs are lodged and scrutinised by the Parliament in a timely manner?

That would be appreciated. Your predecessor tended to write to the subject committees at regular intervals to highlight the volume of SSIs that could be anticipated to fall within a six to 12-month period. Do you intend to continue that practice?

I echo that challenge to the DWP on the issue of a “like for like basis”. It is also important that we test the provisions of the Scotland Act 2016 on where the competence for devolved benefits and the topping-up or enhancing of existing benefits lies. It is an important issue that we need to interrogate; it merits thorough exploration by the Parliament.

There has been a risk-averse approach in the civil service in designing the benefit, which could cause significant harm to the people in Scotland who we are trying to assist. Fundamentally, the entire system of arbitrary tick-box exercises for assessing eligibility is absurd and has no basis in clinical evidence. It is a policy that is bigoted against disabled people. Redesigning the policy to move away from that would be advantageous from my perspective.

The idea that the Scottish Parliament should default to the same policy is not reasonable. We need to test that issue as such a presumption might be having a chilling effect. The petition is a valid way to interrogate the provisions. There is also the wider constitutional element in testing where the threshold of the 2016 act sits and what discretion the Parliament has. It is important that we do not make people who are suffering significant hardship wait until 2023 for some sort of risk-averse approach to be introduced on a like-for-like basis, and then test it after that. We need to move more urgently.