Chamber and committees

I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Scottish Greens in this stage 1 debate. We will support the principles of the bill at decision time today.

I thank the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee for its work on the bill over the past few months and for producing its detailed report earlier this month. As someone who has not been involved in the development or formal scrutiny of the bill, I have found the report useful in better understanding the different elements that we are talking about in the debate. I also thank Citizens Advice Scotland, StepChange Debt Charity and other consumer and money advice groups that have sent me information or had conversations with me about the bill.

I sometimes find it quite extraordinary that, in this country, we still rely on laws that are older than many other countries in the world. I thank the Scottish Law Commission for its considerable work over the past decade to update our legislation on this subject.

As other members have already said, the bill seeks to modernise our laws in relation to transactions concerning corporeal and incorporeal moveable property. Put simply, it will make it easier for businesses to raise finance using their moveable property, such as vehicles, equipment, intellectual property and future invoices.

The process of assignation could release funds that are vital to enable businesses to smooth out any cash flow issues and keep operating. It could be particularly beneficial for small to medium businesses and microbusinesses, which might be rich in incorporeal assets such as intellectual property but poor in other assets. Given Scotland’s IP-rich research and development and innovation spaces, that could be transformational. As we seek to support resilient local and regional economies with diverse and sustainable sectors, I am sure that the legislation will be instrumental and will provide significant benefit to the Scottish economy as a whole. I am interested in exploring what options might be available to ensure that the legislation can enable prioritised finance for SMEs; however, that is for later discussions.

I will follow with interest the on-going discussions about how we will be able to distinguish between sole traders and individuals and on the points that have been made about the provisions on assignation of claims over financial instruments.

Another area that I would like to address is the minister’s commitment to removing consumers, in general, and individuals from the bill. I thank the minister for taking seriously the concerns that have been expressed by Citizens Advice Scotland and other money advice bodies and for listening to many members in the chamber who have urged him to act on those concerns. The potential for harm to be done to consumers might be very small, but the negative impact on people’s lives could be devastating.

I agree. Even if the number of people who might be affected is smaller than we might think—even if it would be only one or two people, although they might suffer devastating consequences—it is worth removing individuals from the bill for that reason. That listening is an excellent example of both the parliamentary scrutiny process and the open dialogue that the Greens have with the Scottish Government. Both processes are working well to make our legislation better.

That listening also points to the need to review, as the DPLR Committee has suggested, how we ensure that our consultation and other engagement processes are up to date. It is clear that much has changed since the process of developing the bill began, more than a decade ago. We must ensure that other legislation that—for good reason—takes considerable time to develop and draft before the parliamentary scrutiny process begins does not encounter the issues that this bill has encountered.

I appreciate that there is still detailed and technical work to be done—particularly, as we have heard, with reference to the drafting of amendments that will remove individuals from the bill while still enabling sole traders to raise the finance they might need to sustain and improve their businesses. I thank those tasked with that important work and look forward to following their progress.

No, I am not going to take an intervention from you.

Human rights seek to redress imbalances of power, mitigate unequal distribution of resources, lift up the oppressed and provide dignity, freedom and justice to all.

The new Tory idea of rights has been shamelessly paraded in its ludicrously named Bill of Rights Bill, which would be more accurately described, I think, as the rights removal bill. According to that conception, rights are not really rights at all; they are rewards for being on the right side—rewards for being adult, healthy, British, cisgendered and fortunate enough not to have experienced persecution, forced migration, disability, mental illness, homelessness or imprisonment. Rights are the icing on the cake for those who already have the cake.

In fact, it is worse than that. In the looking-glass world of Tory ideology, privilege itself is renamed in the language of rights. The privilege of owning another person’s home, having a loud media voice, indulging in gender gatekeeping and having the time and money to travel are somehow placed in the scales against real fundamental rights to a home, to freedom from persecution, to a private and family life, to join a trade union, to strike and to protest. The rights that we stand for are not just the comfortable ones—the ones that do not impinge on our prejudices, our inherited assumptions or our convenience.

Next year will be the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I want to stand here then, celebrating the demise of the Tories’ shameful rights removal bill, welcoming our further embedding and extending of human rights in Scotland, especially for children, and looking ahead to the next challenges, because human rights are universal, for all of us as humans. Until we make that real, here and everywhere, our work must continue.

I am very grateful to Bob Doris for lodging his motion, securing the debate and giving us the opportunity to discuss how we can better support some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We should view people who are in the asylum system as being part of our society—Scotland can and should be a welcoming place. It is right that we provide sanctuary to people who are fleeing unimaginable horrors: war, environmental catastrophe, threats to their personal safety because of any aspect of their identity, or any other risks. We would want others to support us if we were in such need.

If we were in the position of seeking asylum in a foreign country, perhaps without any connection or tie such as language, culture or anything familiar, the last thing that we would want to face is destitution. As defined under section 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999,

“a person is destitute if”

they do

“not have adequate accommodation or any means of obtaining it (whether or not ... other essential living needs are met); or”

they have

“adequate accommodation or the means of obtaining it, but cannot meet ... other essential living needs.”

The UK’s asylum system is hard-wired to produce destitution among people who seek sanctuary here. Indeed, the threat of destitution is used as a deterrent and, as part of the hostile environment, is an explicit policy choice by the UK Government. We cannot disagree that having less than £50 a week to cover all costs is not enough to enable people to meet their “essential living needs”.

As we have heard, destitution can occur at all points in the asylum system, but people are most vulnerable to it when asylum claims are refused or they are in their first six months after arrival in the UK. Of course, women and LGBTQIA+ people are disproportionately at risk.

The inhumane UK Government seeks to treat people who get to the UK via “irregular” routes—small boats, for example—worse than those who come via other routes. No one gets in a small boat to cross a dangerous body of water unless they have no option. Criminalising them or treating them as less than human is not the right response.

So, what should we do? As long as we do not have control over our immigration system, we need to keep campaigning against the UK’s hostile environment. We must keep pressure on the UK Government to grant asylum seekers the right to work, as other members have said. We know that we have a skills shortage in Scotland and that we have folk who are desperate to work here.

However, there are other things that we can and should do within devolved powers. We must ensure that our different approach to asylum, which is to offer genuine sanctuary, is backed up by the radical action that is needed to keep people safe. We should be testing the limits of the devolution settlement by doing such things. We cannot tolerate a UK Government that is forcing people into homelessness and poverty through blind ideology.

The Scottish Refugee Council recently presented its 10-point action plan for social inclusion of asylum seekers and refugees to the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. That plan identifies where preventative action could not only result in savings compared with the cost of current approaches, but could deliver a more humane and just service for people in need. When the cabinet secretary closes the debate, I ask her to address particular points from that plan: that asylum seekers and refugees need to be explicit groups in the Scottish child poverty action plan; that guidance should be provided on what should be in the legal duty to prepare, review and implement local child poverty action plans; and that we close the data gap that exists around the number of people in Scotland who have no recourse to public funds.

Those anti-poverty recommendations are clearly within devolved competence. We must accept them and implement them as soon as we can. By doing so, we will make a material and positive difference to the lives of people in asylum and resettlement or relocation programmes.

I thank individuals, communities and organisations—which include, among so many others, the Scottish Refugee Council, the Red Cross, Crisis and Refugees for Justice—for the work that they do day in and day out to support asylum seekers and refugees, doing battle on their behalf. I am grateful to them.

Saturday 10 December is international human rights day, and it also marks the end of the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. I thank colleagues across the chamber and individuals and organisations across Scotland for their contributions in highlighting the importance of those 16 days and the work that we still must do.

I also acknowledge the members’ business debate that some of us contributed to earlier today, on “How Will We Survive? Steps to preventing destitution in the asylum system”. I thank Bob Doris for giving us the chance to consider how we might better enable asylum seekers to realise their rights. No one is illegal.

Human rights day is celebrated every year on 10 December, the day on which, in 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As many in the chamber would like to remind us, the UK indeed played its part. One member of the declaration’s drafting committee was Charles Dukes, who was a socialist, a trade unionist and an imprisoned first world war conscientious objector.

Seventy-four years later, when this UK Tory Government has so dishonoured that tradition—so forgotten the basic meanings of “universal”, “human” and “rights”—we would do well to look seriously at the declaration and at why it was, and still is, critical. The context was a world broken by war, suffering and loss. Worst of all, as the preamble sets out, it was broken by the silent horrors brought about by ideologies of

“disregard and contempt for human rights”.

Without recognising that we are all human and share the inherent dignity, equality and inalienable rights of which the drafters wrote, we have no hope—any of us—of achieving real freedom, true justice or deep-rooted peace. Those human rights—our human rights—were so important that even the member states of the United Nations, representatives of Governments far from radical, acknowledged that, without human rights protection, people would be

“compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression”.

Those who complain that human rights, or this debate, are being politicised have once again completely missed the point. Human rights are always political, because they are always there to protect the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich, and the excluded from the comfortable and complacent. If politics is about anything, it is about power—

I will follow on from Fiona Hyslop’s question on the allocations from the just transition fund, which are key to our having any hope of achieving our targets.

I and others—in particular, communities in the north-east—are concerned that millions of pounds have already been allocated to large companies, many of which are backed by the fossil fuel industry, which has made record profits in recent months, while just £4.2 million has been allocated over four years to community-led participatory budgeting. One of the key concerns is clearly that it is not enough just to give money to companies. The just transition needs to be genuine, and I am not sure that we will get that, unless we have the strategic work that Fiona Hyslop alluded to.

I want to talk about two specific projects. As you will be well aware, £14 million has been awarded to a contentious project in Torry, which is a community in the south of Aberdeen that has among the lowest life expectancy in Scotland—it is more than a decade shorter than it is in other parts of the city. It has not benefited at all from the oil and gas economy. In fact, all of Torry was bulldozed for the oil and gas economy.

There is a clear mismatch in relation to what we term “justice” when a community such as Torry has its only remaining green space concreted over for something that will assist the broader just transition but will not represent justice for that community. How do we tackle that kind of injustice if we do not have the dedicated focus to community leadership that is missing from the current allocations?

Can I ask one more question?

The question is about another project. At the moment, the Scottish Government has under way an independent review on how to cut climate pollution from Scotland’s existing incinerators. As you will know, the Ness incinerator in Aberdeen was awarded money from the just transition fund for research into the feasibility of carbon capture and storage. Putting aside the fact that nowhere in the world has CCS been used successfully in an incineration plant, I am curious as to whether you think that that award pre-empts the work that the Scottish Government has commissioned into how to cut carbon emissions from incinerators—given that it means that we are saying that we are going to fund an incinerator to bake in demand for waste generation.

Good morning, minister. Thank you for what you have said so far and for being here.

As you said, we have ambitious targets to meet in Scotland, but that is part of a bigger picture—the idea of what we see termed as “Keeping 1.5°C alive”. That rapid shift and pace of transition must happen with, as you mentioned, engagement and conversations with workers about job creation and the broader shifts in energy and the economy.

We will get into the details of specific community issues when we talk about the just transition fund for the north-east and Moray a bit later. However, in relation to the economy more generally, how can we ensure that we future proof our work and do not lock in disadvantage and inequality? You mentioned in your opening remarks that former mining communities are still suffering from the previous energy transition that we went through. How can we use this transition to ensure that we improve equality and make things fairer now for people who have not reaped the benefits of the oil economy that we have had for the past 50 years?

That links to Fiona Hyslop’s question about working between and across departments and portfolios. There has been quite a lot of talk about using a mission-based approach or a challenge-based approach that does not result in silos in different departments. What challenges exist in that regard in the way in which the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament work? What do we need to change in the next decade if we are to not only meet the targets and do all the things that we want to do but ensure that we do cross-cutting work that means that we do not fail on the equalities measures, never mind the energy measures?