Chamber and committees

Currently, almost 100,000 residential homes across Scotland stand empty. Those homes must be rapidly brought back into use. Some councils are leading the way on that, and the minister talked about the work that is under way to share good practice, but it is clear that a lack of funding is holding many of them back.

Does the minister agree that the provision of a match fund to enable local authorities to scale up existing empty homes teams could make a significant difference to that total and that it could bring at least 3,000 homes a year back into use? Will he commit to introducing such a fund as soon as he can?

I thank everyone who has contributed to the bill reaching stage 3 today, including my fellow committee members, Scottish Parliament information centre researchers, Scottish Government officials, the bill team and civil society organisations.

Sadly, there has been a certain amount of misunderstanding about what the bill does and why it has been introduced. As we have heard, all that the bill does is to amend the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018 by removing a three-line definition of the word “woman” in section 2 of the act—no more.

The passing of the bill is not a victory for anyone or any ideological position. The amendment of the legislation follows decisions by the Court of Session—decisions that specifically did not say that the definition was wrong. All that the court said was that it was outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament, on the ground that protected characteristics are a matter reserved to the United Kingdom Parliament in Westminster.

We might very well think that it is a pity that the devolution settlement is so inconsistent as to place human rights within our competence and equalities outwith it. We might also think it more than a pity that the rights and wellbeing of our transgender friends, colleagues, neighbours and relatives, which have been so much better protected here, must be subject to the toxic scapegoating of Westminster and media discourse. Yet again, it seems that independence will be the only way to secure a truly fair and inclusive Scotland.

However, the bill is not about those issues, important though they are. It is simply, as the committee report notes, “a technical fix”. It was not strictly essential, for the definition has had no legal effect since April 2022, as Paul O’Kane has outlined, but the bill has been introduced in order to bring the formal statute book up to date, to provide clarity and to prevent any potential confusion. The use of a stand-alone bill to make the amendment might seem disproportionate, but we are assured that there were no powers in the 2018 act or any other act that would allow the change to be made by way of regulations.

I and my Scottish Green colleagues will therefore be voting in favour of the bill at decision time, as a matter of legislative clarification. We stand, as always, in solidarity with transgender and non-binary people across Scotland and beyond, and we continue to strive for a future that we can all be proud to share.

I want to make some progress, please.

However, those answers never made very much sense and have only perpetuated a status quo that has cushioned those who are more than comfortable already. Now, in a time of climate chaos and obscene inequality, they make no sense at all. If our economy does not address the climate crisis or the inequality emergency, it is, at best, pointless in practice and simply enables and exacerbates them.

There are many perverse realities in our current economy, such as the one that the member highlights. My colleague Lorna Slater will speak later in the debate about how the vision that we want to present can be made real and tangible in order to deal with some of those perversities and create the kind of industrial strategy that Scotland so desperately needs.

Our answer to the second question—what is it that we want to grow?—is key. It is not the sterile statistic of GDP, but our capacity to thrive as a nation, as cities, as towns and villages, as families, as communities and as unique and inspiring human beings. Under the current devolution settlement, our resources are limited. Indeed, our agency is significantly challenged. That is why, as Greens, we argue for an independent Scotland that has the powers and capacities to act as radically, as swiftly and as compassionately as the intersecting crises require.

However, we cannot let those resource and agency limitations distract us from the work that we can do today. If we advocate for independence for a very different kind of state, it is more important than ever to pay attention to what we are doing now and to exactly what kind of future we are investing in. Does it plant seeds of care and creativity as well as of science and technology? Does it support co-operatives and social enterprises as well as ambitious entrepreneurs? Does it measure success by equality and wellbeing as well as by productivity and export? The current model does not do those things. The purpose of modern state capitalism is to socialise the costs and risks of society and the economy while privatising the profits. That does not plant those seeds of care and creativity or generate and sustain equality and wellbeing.

That is where this debate crucially connects with one of the debates that I spoke in last week, on our shared priority to eradicate child poverty. It is by looking at our economy through that clear and focused lens, by asking what impact each of our decisions about investment, policy or practice has on the poorest children and the adults that they will become, and by making their rights real and realised that we will find the direction for the economy that we need.

I move amendment S6M-13679.1, to insert at end:

“; acknowledges the important contribution that community and social enterprises, cooperatives and other not-for-profit structures make to local economies, including local resilience and community wealth building; recognises the need to promote science and technology, but also creative and caring work that sustains Scotland’s society and culture, and agrees that proper investment in the green economy is required to deliver the urgent transformations that are needed to develop an economy that has equality and fairness at its heart.”

I am pleased to open on behalf of the Scottish Greens. The title of this afternoon’s debate raises two fundamental questions: what do we mean by the economy, and what is it that we want to grow? Historically, and for many politicians and economists currently, the answer to the first question is extractivism, which is an economy that is based on colonial exploitation of people and resources, especially fossil fuels. The answer to the second question has been GDP. Those answers, taken together with the age-old notion that wealth will inevitably—eventually—trickle down, give us the current economic model.

I did not use those words. If Mr Mountain had listened carefully, he would have heard me say that, if our economy does not address the climate crisis or the inequality crisis, what is the point of it? What is it there to do?

As the Government’s motion recognises, we are in a different world now, and we urgently need to make a just and sustainable transition to an economy that meets its challenges and to forms of growth that recognise the realities. That means fundamental changes of approach, trajectory and objective, not simply substituting renewables for hydrocarbons, for example. We need to look at different answers—the answers that I and other Green activists have been talking about for years.

Central to this thinking is the concept of a wellbeing economy that meets the real and urgent needs of workers and communities, that respects the natural world and those who protect it, and that continues to flourish safely alongside future generations.

Every 13 minutes, a WASPI woman—a woman who might have lost several years-worth of her pension; maybe as much as £42,000—dies without justice, so I am grateful to Clare Haughey for lodging her important motion and for securing the debate.

Most of all, I thank the women, such as Linda Carmichael and Lorraine Rae in Aberdeen, whose positive and determined campaigning is celebrated and supported today. I thank them for all that they have done and all that they continue to do—Scottish Greens stand in solidarity with them, and we will do so until they receive the apology and the compensation that they deserve.

This is a debate about justice—justice for the women who have been directly affected and for their families and their wider communities. It is also about pension justice for everyone, because the injustices that the WASPI women have suffered mirror other pension injustices such as the wider gender pension gap, the devastating loss of pension benefits that has been imposed by unilateral scheme changes, and the excessive retirement ages for demanding and dangerous professions such as prison officers and emergency workers.

It is a debate, too, about equality. The women whose voices we echo today do not object to pension equalisation. They might justifiably do so, however, remembering the gross unfairness that characterised much of their careers. Many of them might point out that their wages were a fraction of what their male counterparts received; that they were barred from company pension schemes and obliged to choose between work and motherhood, and even marriage; and that they hit their heads on glass ceilings and are expected to live longer, with greater care needs, sustained by significantly smaller pension pots.

Good morning to the panel. Thank you for your comments so far. I want to ask some questions about the cluttered landscape, its complexity and the potential for duplication that Amy Dalrymple and Kirstie Henderson raised specifically and which everybody has touched on. It has been suggested to us that a new disability commissioner might complicate and fragment an already cluttered and complex landscape of human rights commissioners. However, it has also been suggested that that could be overcome by working together closely and by memorandums of understanding. What are your views on that?

Amy, as you raised that issue earlier, could you comment on it?

That is a helpful articulation of the position.

I have a quick question on the ease of navigation of the process. One of the arguments for the establishment of commissioners such as a disability commissioner is that they would be mechanisms of remedy or redress. You say that people should be working together collaboratively, but how do you see people who need redress and remedy navigating that pathway?

I ask Kirstie Henderson the same question on duplication and the cluttered landscape.