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You referred to the consultation about whether or not the threshold should rise above the 50MW level. The consultation does not give an indication of where the Government thinks it might usefully end up. We know that, in England it is at 100MW for wind and solar, and there are views about whether it might be variable across different energy disciplines. Why was the Government shy about indicating what its thinking is on what the threshold might be?

I will return to you, Mr Ewing, but I know that Davy Russell is keen to come in. David Torrance is going to cover another area, and I also want to bring in our guest member—I have always encouraged our colleagues across the Parliament to join us to discuss petitions in which they are interested, and Oliver Mundell is with us today.

I will bring in Davy Russell first.

I detect that the Government is perhaps sympathetic to the idea that the current level is, as you put it, out of date and has perhaps been overtaken by events.

We are in our final few minutes, Mr Ewing.

Do you think that it might be published before the autumn of 2027?

The next continued petition is PE2067, which is another one concerning an issue that is well known to the Parliament. It was lodged by Sharon Duncan following the death of her son and our colleague David Hill. It calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to commission research to establish how many people aged 14-35 are affected by conditions that cause young sudden cardiac death; to clarify the number of people who die annually in Scotland from those conditions; and to set up a pilot study to establish if voluntary screening can reduce deaths.

We last considered the petition on 5 March 2025, when we agreed to write to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care and to the Italian embassy. We then took evidence from the Minister for Public Health and Women’s Health on 12 November and agreed to consider the evidence at a future meeting.

The submission from the consulate general of Italy in Edinburgh highlights evidence of screening leading to an 89 per cent decrease in the incident rate of sudden cardiac death among young competitive athletes—a figure that I think the committee found quite compelling. The Scottish Government has reiterated that it adheres to UK National Screening Committee guidance in this area; the UK NSC evidence summary shows that international guidelines do not recommend population-level screening, although they support pre-participation screening in competitive athletes. We understand that the UK NSC considered the study highlighted by the consulate general of Italy in its 2019 review, and it is now conducting a new review of relevant evidence over the following three years.

At the evidence-taking session in November, the minister informed us that the 2025 Scottish cardiac audit programme has included

“data on inherited cardiac conditions for the first time”.

Additionally, we heard that work is on-going

“to develop a proof of concept for a sudden cardiac death registry”—[Official Report, Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, 12 November 2025; c 3.],

with the aim of including preliminary data in next year’s Scottish cardiac audit programme.

We also heard from the British Heart Foundation that it has funded clinical nurse specialist sudden cardiac death roles in order to expand and roll out a successful west of Scotland pilot to implement a new clinical pathway for sudden unexpected death, sudden cardiac death and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The aim is to achieve full national coverage by the end of the 24-month period, with progress being monitored throughout.

In the light of all that, do colleagues have any suggestions as to how we might proceed with the petition?

Thank you, Meghan. Colleagues, are we content to support Davy Russell’s recommendation that we keep the petition open and pull together the various outstanding themes into a submission to the minister?

Members indicated agreement.

Good morning, and welcome to the first meeting in 2026 of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee. We have just six meetings left after this one to deal with what is still a very considerable number of petitions, and it will be a difficult task, given the importance underlying many of them. Therefore, a lot of what we will be trying to do is to identify what we can still hope to achieve in the balance of time left to us.

Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Are members content to take in private item 5, to consider changes to the determination on the proper form of petitions, and item 6, to consider the evidence that we hear today?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you. I will make a couple of points before I bring in colleagues. Although I talked about the petitions being quite technically varied, community engagement is an underlying theme, which is sometimes prominent and sometimes discrete.

In relation to outages as a result of last week’s weather event, you said that, mercifully, we have been much more fortunate than we were a year ago. Was that in any way due to resilience planning in the interim, or were we just luckier this time than we were the previous time we had bad weather?

One issue that we discussed at the meeting that I referred to earlier sits rather apart, so I will discuss it separately. PE2071, which was lodged by Sally Witcher, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to take action to protect people from airborne infections in health and social care settings—specifically, to improve air quality in health and social care settings through addressing ventilation, air filtration and sterilisation; to reintroduce routine mask wearing in those settings, particularly using respiratory masks; to reintroduce routine Covid testing; to ensure that staff manuals fully cover the prevention of airborne infection; to support ill staff to stay at home; and to provide public health information on the use of respiratory masks and high-efficiency particulate air—HEPA—filtration against airborne infections.

We last considered the petition on 5 March 2025, when we agreed to write to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care. In a response issued by the chief nursing officer directorate, the Scottish Government reiterated that it has no role in the development of the “National Infection Prevention and Control Manual”, or NIPCM, or the “Care Home Infection and Control Manual”, the CH NIPCM.

The petition notes that antimicrobial resistance and healthcare associated infection Scotland are the national clinical infection prevention and control experts, and it highlights the ARHAI’s response.

During the evidence session in September 2025, the cabinet secretary said that he would write to the committee with a timescale for publication of the infection prevention and control strategy. In his letter of 30 October, the cabinet secretary stated that a 10-year IPC strategic vision and priorities statement was being developed collaboratively by the Scottish Government’s IPC strategic development and oversight group by spring 2026.

In her most recent submission, the petitioner considers that the pandemic and its cumulative health impacts remain on-going and that that is being ignored by the Government. She notes that, this winter, the NHS has again been overwhelmed by airborne infection, and she argues that much of that could have been avoided had the actions and measures suggested in the petition been put in place. She adds that she can still find no evidence of expert input and quality assurance on infection prevention and control, and she questions the accuracy and completeness of ARHAI’s advice.

We have the petitioner’s further submission and the follow-up from the cabinet secretary, which confirms that the infection control strategy will be published by spring this year. Do colleagues have any views on what more we are able to do at this stage, given that the cabinet secretary’s letter says that a document will be published in spring 2026, which will be after the Parliament has dissolved?