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Do businesses get the business case for this? Is there work to be done around that?

Good morning. I will ask a specific question about delivery of services. An Institute for Public Policy Research report recently noted a perceived conflict of interests for local authorities, which have, obviously, responsibility for commissioning and delivering employability services. That report suggested that local authorities might be incentivised to prioritise in-house services over third-sector services. Is that a fair comment?

Is that a fair reflection?

Is there sufficient support for raising awareness among businesses through the various funding models? Is there a gap there? Last week we met lots of young people from The Usual Place in Dumfries. In addition to support for young people, it provides a general autism awareness course for businesses. It seems to slip through every single funding model because it is not one thing or another. The Usual Place is not about individual people, but is about trying to support businesses generally to understand autism, and it struggles to get funding. Is there a gap in terms of getting the message across to businesses about opportunities, or should there be specific support for the person in the workplace?

You made the important point that we have done gender and ethnicity. Why is disability way down at the bottom among priorities for businesses?

Are businesses feeding back on why they are not grabbing all the opportunities that you are proposing around support for the people whom you get into employment?

Elizabeth Baird, is it the same experience in Inverclyde? Why are we not getting the message across about the business case to lots of businesses?

Dave McCallum, you will see the pattern right across the whole of Scotland. There are clear variations in different parts of Scotland. In your experience, are there variations in the support that employers get? Is there anything that Skills Development Scotland can do to break down the challenges that witnesses are talking about? It seems to me that it is about follow-up support, and, when somebody goes into a workplace, that is about supporting the business. However, perhaps it is getting them into the workplace in the first place that is the challenge.

Is that because it is natural, at a time when budgets for local authorities are under such pressure, to retain services in the local council?

Thank you, convener, for the opportunity to address the committee, and I also thank the committee for its very robust and thorough approach to this important petition.

I have the privilege of being one of Marion Reid’s regional MSPs in South Scotland. As you will be aware, Marion established the Fornethy house residential school survivors group, and she is here today, along with as many of the survivors that we could find seats for. Because of that group, hundreds of women have bravely come forward. In many cases, they were sent as wee girls by the state to Fornethy in the 1960s to be subjected to unimaginable physical, mental and in some cases sexual abuse, under the care of the state. That is not in dispute.

The women’s bravery has, I believe, exposed how fundamentally unfair the redress scheme is. As you have said, convener, the then Deputy First Minister told the Education, Children and Young People in January 2023:

“I reject the idea that the scheme is not for Fornethy survivors; I think that it is possible for Fornethy survivors to be successful in applying under the scheme.”—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 12 January 2023; c 14.]

Last month, however, the current Deputy First Minister confirmed to the committee that the circumstances at Fornethy were explicitly “excluded from the scheme” by the Government. As she told the committee, regulations that were brought in by the Government after the primary legislation was passed in 2021 mean that so-called short-term respite care was excluded, but as the women themselves say in their latest submission to the committee,

“It only takes one event, one day to change your world view of life forever and the lasting trauma that brought. ... Are we not worthy because we were only abused for a short period?”

The Deputy First Minister said to the committee that, because the personal records in Glasgow City Council’s archives have not been found, it would, even if the circumstances and the criteria were changed, be difficult for survivors to meet the evidential requirement. However, what about the collective memory of those survivors—their painful stories, their recollections and, in some cases, the photographs and letters that they have? These women are not making it up, and redress has been made in other similar circumstances where records have been destroyed.

The Deputy First Minister told the committee that Fornethy survivors are excluded because of parental consent, but we cannot and should not apply modern-day notions of consent in the historical context that we are dealing with. Those wee girls were sent to Fornethy by the state, and they were abused by the state, and no one except those responsible for that abuse consented to that happening.

As the Scottish Human Rights Commission has consistently argued, all survivors who have been abused where there was state responsibility have the right to an effective remedy, and we are failing to provide that. For those women who were abused before 1964, in particular, civil court action cannot legally be pursued and, as time passes, criminal cases become less likely as the perpetrators pass away. For many, redress is their only remedy and their only shot.

The Deputy First Minister cannot come before the committee and put on record her acknowledgement of that abhorrent abuse that those wee girls suffered at Fornethy but then say that there will be no redress. I hope that the committee will stand by your very robust calls for change, if need be through a new scheme or a change to the scheme that prioritises pre-1964 survivors, and that you stand by these brave women.

We meet many people in our role as MSPs, and I doubt that I will meet a braver group of women than the Fornethy survivors. I pay tribute to them. In their latest submission, the women said:

“Trust is sacred. Our trust was broken as little girls and now again our very trust in the justice system that is there to help us and has the power to do the right thing by us, has been shattered.”

We need to do the right thing and restore that trust to those women.