Seòmar agus comataidhean

I must apologise for being unable to come last night, but I am so pleased that my colleagues were able to be there.

I want to pursue some points that Laura Pasternak made in response to earlier questions about what she would like to see the committee do or recommend being done.

Laura, you said that legislation may require to be changed and you referred to supervision orders. Will you expand on that? Obviously, we want to try to help to identify precisely what needs to be done in terms of changes to both the law and practice. I appreciate that care is, by its nature, a general, nebulous concept that can involve all sorts of things. We have heard that it can involve access to finance, housing, arranging things, physical care and mental health provision. It covers a wide spectrum, which makes it quite difficult to have clarity, but we need clarity in order to be of whatever help we can be in recommending that necessary changes are made.

I suppose I have two questions. First, will you expand on the legislative change that you believe is required? Is it a matter of definitions? I think that, to some extent, what is set out in the Promise aims to avoid cliff edges and to remove anomalies resulting from certain care ending abruptly at the age of 21 or 26. Is that the definition that you want changed? Secondly, will you expand on what you believe should be done in relation to supervision orders?

I am sorry to be long winded. I used to be a lawyer, and in that work you get paid by the word. [Laughter.] It is hard to kick the habit. However, we are here to help and we want to get as much clarity as we can.

I would always encourage the minister to be as green as possible, convener.

I agree with Alexander Stewart. In the letter, we could point out that redress and enforcement aspects remain reserved to the UK, so that it is clear that our remit is constrained.

We could also refer to the fact that there has been a previous petition, and briefly append that petition and set out the outcome and the reasons therefore. Although I am keen to hear from Universities Scotland and NUS Scotland, we may well, when we hear from them, find ourselves in a rather similar situation to that of our predecessor committee. We owe them a hearing, but we should not raise expectations too high that we may not be able to fulfil.

This is a problem of access to justice that seems to be growing. I am aware that the Scottish Government intends to introduce a legal aid reform bill and an uplift of 10 per cent to legal fees. That is welcome as far as it goes, but it is a serious matter for someone to be unable to access legal aid at all. No access is effectively justice denied.

I think that we should write to the Law Society of Scotland to seek its view on the action that the petition calls for, and for information about its campaign on access to legal aid, in particular as it relates to people with disabilities. We have a duty to explore that aspect.

We should also write to the Scottish Legal Aid Board to ask whether it intends to undertake a monitoring report on access to legal aid for people with disabilities and if not, why not. We have a duty to ensure that that particular category of vulnerable people has access to justice, and we need to find out what barriers there are. It could be useful to provide that information to the Scottish Government in order to inform its intended law reform and perhaps influence that process down the line.

I have a couple of questions, the first of which is about the 2014 act, which Joanne McMeeking said a moment ago has not been fully implemented. Just for my benefit—I am sorry to say that I do not have detailed knowledge of this—do you mean that parts of the act have not been commenced, or that everything is in force and in operation but has not yet been brought into practice?

I see. It is not really the children’s hearings system itself that is failing, but implementation or follow through.

I will ask one more question.

Clearly, availability of sufficient funding is one of the major issues. Local authorities are under financial pressures and one feels, perhaps, that the third sector is very often the port of call when it comes to making funding reductions, either in total or in part.

Is it a serious issue that, very often, voluntary organisations that provide aspects of care in this area get funding on a hand-to-mouth, year-to-year basis? My experience of working with many such organisations in Inverness and the Highlands is that they often spend as much time trying to raise the money that they need in order to function as they do actually functioning. Therefore, the problem is funding being year to year, and for even less than a year, in some cases.

Is that a serious issue? If so, is the answer to move to three-year or five-year funding, which would provide more security for organisations and would enable them to hire people more readily? People would also be more ready to be hired, rather than their not taking a position because it gives them only 12 months’ security of tenure.

—to which I expect we will come, but, in the interests of equity, we should say that many parts of rural Scotland have roads that are not up to scratch or not fit for purpose. Emma Harper has made the point that one reason for keeping the petition open is that we do not have timescales for the implementation of the proposed works, which is an issue that we could perhaps press.

On a wider note, I am struck by the substantial costs of upgrading or doing anything to roads, especially dualling them. We are certainly talking about hundreds of millions of pounds for relatively short sections. However, I am also conscious of the safety issues, particularly the number of deaths, on roads in the Highlands and on many trunk roads around the country.

We should keep the petition open. We need to ask more questions; I have identified only one, but colleagues might well have others.

That is all that I wanted to know.

Indeed. I will quote from an interview in The Herald with your good self, Mr Harris, in which, if you are accurately quoted, you said:

“If we take into account the fact that there are costs for operating this system, and you anticipate that the producers will seek to pass that on, it will find its way down the chain.”

You have already admitted that there will be cost inflation above the 20p. I am saying that, as we move towards the scheme coming into effect—if it does come into effect—members of the public, particularly the poorest, will be increasingly worried about the impact that it will have in the middle of the worst cost of living crisis in living memory.