The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 1187 contributions
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 February 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 February 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
I will ask about some issues around the financial memorandum. You had an extensive evidence session with the Finance and Public Administration Committee, so I do not propose to redo that, but I will give you an opportunity to respond to some of the points that that committee has flagged up to us.
The first area that I will speak about has been touched on already, so maybe we do not need to spend too much time on it. You briefly mentioned training time costs which you suggested would be £200,000 in the first year. The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care says that the Scottish Government believes that training costs for doctors would be something more like £6 million. That is a huge difference.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 February 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
You mentioned Oregon and Victoria and how your cost estimates are based their two systems. Most of us, and anybody who has been watching the evidence, will understand why you did that. However, the finance committee raised the point that it heard evidence that you should have used Canada. I will therefore give you the option of quickly explaining why Oregon and Victoria, and not Canada, are the basis for your estimates.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 February 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
I want to ask about age. You decided that 16 would be the relevant age in the bill. There are good arguments for choosing 16 or 18 as that age: 16 is in line with the age of legal capacity in Scotland, whereby 16-year-olds can make decisions about medical procedures and treatments, and 18 is the age at which you are no longer a child under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. As I said, there are good arguments for both, so I am keen to hear a bit about what you did to come to your decision. What consultation did you do and who did you speak to?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 February 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Did you have any engagement with young people—16 to 20-year-olds—in coming to that conclusion? Would such engagement need to be done if we were going to change the age in the bill?
10:15Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 February 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
The finance committee has pointed out the happy coincidence, or coincidence, that the process of this bill is taking place while there is a bill going through Westminster, which means that awareness of the issue is perhaps higher than it has been previously. That suggests that the costs might be higher than you have envisaged. I guess that, when you did your calculations, you did not know that the Westminster bill was going to be at the stage that it is.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 February 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Thank you. Those were the main questions that I had in relation to the letter.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Cool.
Before I cover the questions that I was going to ask, I want to ask about proactive release, which you talked about earlier. Ultimately, proactive release is one of the tools that will help the landscape to become easier to navigate. In the past, there has been a suggestion that perhaps that could lead to information dumps, which would make things really difficult. You mentioned AI. Might artificial intelligence assistants take away the risk of an information dump, because those tools can go through screeds of stuff and pull out what people want in an accessible way?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
That is good. However, if that does not work, you have various levels of intervention. Will you give us a wee outline of how the interventions differ in resource intensity?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 30 January 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
It is good to hear about that progress, and it is good that we are able to shed light on what is happening because there is an intention to expand the scheme and people are terrified of being covered, so we need to help them not to be scared about what is coming and ensure that they realise that this is not just good in terms of public information but will be good for those organisations themselves.