Chamber and committees

I hope that you understand the reason why resources are pushed towards asylum seekers. In international law, no distinction is made, but there is a distinction for rights and entitlements in the UK. The difficulty is that people are being forced into destitution and that is where the limited money has to go. However, it is important to pick up on such points as we develop the refreshed new Scots strategy.

We have managed to collect extensive data on where Ukrainians are moving to from the ship and where people are going and why. It is a lot easier to do that when they are all based on board the ship at first, with all the support services around them. Those statistics are being collected, and we have gained quite good insight for future planning in terms of how many want to go to Ukraine in the near future and how many are thinking much further ahead or want to leave Ukraine permanently altogether.

I am sorry—I have forgotten your second question.

I point out that the supersponsor status for Ukraine is unique, so there is not parity because the Scottish Government does not have that formal role in respect of other immigration routes. We would, if we had the powers that we have been asking for to enable us to set our own controls over immigration and our own rights and entitlements for those who are seeking asylum or for refugees—but we do not.

The many successes of the Ukraine supersponsor scheme—including the support that has been offered to people who have arrived here under it and the partnership working with COSLA, local authorities and third sector partners—demonstrate what can be done if we take the approach of treating people with dignity and respect, allowing them the right to work and making sure that varied types of accommodation are available to them, based on their needs. We saw the working between local authorities—council representatives from across Scotland came on to the ship to speak to people living there about what was on offer in their area. That is a great demonstration of what can be done if we take the human rights-based approach.

At the moment, colleges are working with community planning partnerships, because there will be different need and demand in different areas. Online training is a good example of that. There will be certain settings where it is difficult to get people into a room together, but in other places there are language cafes, which seem to work well for certain people—though not everyone—because the cafe is a relaxed, conversational, informal setting where some people are more able to pick up a language.

Because there are different kinds of ESOL provision, it is important that local communities can feed into that to ensure that provision is based on local need. That can be particularly true in rural areas; some people might prefer online lessons to travelling, although others might be unable to access online provision.

We are doing what we can to support asylum seekers. We do not exclude people, although we have seen that attitude in other settings. We are inclusive, and asylum seekers can access Scottish public services such as the NHS, schools and the baby box. The member will know that, yesterday, we published our vision for the constitution of an independent Scotland. We would enshrine human rights for everyone in a written constitution.

We are trying to take that approach even now, as a devolved Government. Our human rights bill is out for consultation, and we are seeking views on how best to incorporate international treaties, as far as possible and within our devolved competence, into Scots law. We do not seek to treat people differently on the basis of how they got here or what their personal circumstances are.

A lot of work is going on at the moment across Government to embed that approach. All ministers must have that human rights-based approach in mind and we are embedding equality in everything that we do. There is no gatekeeping to prevent asylum seekers from accessing any of the devolved services that we provide, including the baby box, education or the NHS.

Absolutely. It is important to keep remembering that, even though “new Scots” is an umbrella term for all different groups of migrants, the groups are not homogeneous—even among refugees and asylum seekers. They have various needs and expectations on arriving in Scotland.

On Hongkongers, theirs is the kind of lived experience that will be valuable when we shape the refreshed strategy. As we form the new strategy, we can absolutely engage with the people who have raised such concerns and ensure that they are taken into account. I hope that those people will feel that the next strategy is much more relevant to them, if they have managed to feed into the process.

There has been engagement with Mears Group in the past. However, as Fulton MacGregor will appreciate, the Scottish Government does not have a place in the contract between the UK Government and Mears Group—it is entirely between them. The UK Government sets the criteria for the contract, and Mears delivers it. That said, the committee certainly has a place in scrutinising how the relationship is working and whether the contract is meeting expectations.

I will bring in Aileen Harding to say more about engagement by officials.

First, I would say that the enshrining of human rights in Scots law will benefit absolutely everyone. However, asylum seekers are a particularly good example of the real-life impact of having those rights realised in a country and being able to access justice if those rights are not being met.

As for the ability to be supported by the Government, the right to access housing, the right to access education and all of those things have a real impact on everyone’s lives. However, when we look at asylum seekers as a cohort, now, in Scotland, we see that, for those groups, there are areas where the human rights in the treaties that we are looking to incorporate are not being met. If those rights are set out and if, of course, we stick to them and ensure that, in everything that we do—for example, when we are assigning budgets and making policy decisions—we have human rights in mind and are prioritising on the basis on meeting the human rights of everyone in the country, it will absolutely have a real-life impact.

A number of organisations have raised concerns about the specific issue of bankruptcy. Given that it is an existing criterion, does the cabinet secretary think that there might be a lack of communication or enforcement in that respect? Is the bill likely to mean that, in the future, people facing bankruptcy will be treated differently to how they are treated now?

Does the cabinet secretary think that it would be appropriate to have a different bankruptcy regime in Scotland? Is that needed?