Chamber and committees

I just want to come back to a couple of things and explore them in a bit more detail.

Alexander Stewart mentioned the letter that the EHRC wrote to the cabinet secretary, setting out the change in your position. That letter refers to a

“wider group who identify as the opposite gender at a given point”,

and expresses concern that, under the bill’s proposals, that “wider group” might be able to obtain a GRC. Can you explain the term “wider group”?

I thank Beatrice Wishart for lodging an important motion and congratulate her on securing the debate. I also thank her for hosting the parliamentary event on this topic last month. I was not able to attend that event, but I had some very interesting and helpful follow-up conversations with Eodex and others about the Stop Sea Blasts campaign. I heard about the catastrophic impacts on cetaceans and other marine life that most current commercial disposal mechanisms have and the proven alternatives, such as low-order deflagration, that Beatrice Wishart and others have so clearly described.

In the chamber, members are used to—or, at least, we are getting a little more used to—a fair amount of noise and disruption during business. Sometimes, some of us might struggle to hear because of this disruption, but mostly, we deal with it. Imagine if we used our auditory system for navigation, communication and feeding—for staying alive. Without this system, we would be completely cut off from our fellow creatures, we could not eat and we could not travel anywhere safely. In fact, we would have no idea where we were, what dangers or threats were nearby, or anything about our surroundings. We would be, essentially, helplessly vulnerable.

What if we were near an explosion that took out our auditory system completely? Within 2km of the blast, it is almost certain that we would die because of the pressure waves caused by the explosion. Research shows a complete kill zone of between 0m and 50m, but an almost certain death zone of up to 2km from the blast site. Up to 10km away, we would suffer permanent threshold shift or permanent damage to our hearing. Up to 20km away, we would suffer temporary threshold shift or temporary hearing damage, but that might be enough to distort our feeding and communication to such an extent that the trauma is overwhelming and the consequences result in permanent damage. Beyond 20km, there may still be some long-term behavioural impacts as a consequence of the trauma.

To put this into perspective, if we in the chamber were all cetaceans, a blast at Haymarket station would kill us and a blast at Edinburgh airport would render us all with permanent hearing loss—we would become disoriented, hungry and traumatised and we would likely die. That is exactly what happened to the 19 pilot whales who beached themselves and died at the Kyle of Durness, as Beatrice Wishart and others have highlighted.

We have a responsibility to act to ensure that we are not complicit in the deaths of cetaceans and other sea life. We must not stand by and accept the release of toxins and the destruction of our sea beds that result from high-order deflagration.

I am interested to hear the minister’s closing speech. In addition to responding to the questions and points raised by other members this evening, I hope that she will provide an update on what the Scottish Government is able to require of BP, Shell, SSE and other energy operators who undertake deflagration in Scottish waters, especially in the North Sea off the north-east coast. That is especially important given the ScotWind licences that those companies have and the work that they need to do in preparation for the development of offshore wind farms. What plans are in place to ensure that proven alternatives to high-order deflagration will be used? The Stop Sea Blasts campaign and others are clear: so-called low-yield deflagration is not the same; it must be low-order deflagration and it must be proven to work—not just hypothetical.

In closing, I thank Beatrice Wishart once again for bringing this important topic to the chamber and I thank the Stop Sea Blasts campaigners for all that they are doing to raise awareness and for taking action to protect our marine species and ecosystems.

Dundee and Angus College staff and others have been in touch with me about management delaying negotiations and causing additional strike action and disruption to students by refusing to meet for over one and a half weeks. There are concerns that that is an attempt to wear the unions down and anger at the disproportionate bloating of management and rising management pay compared with that of lecturers. If principals’ pay had increased in line with lecturers’ pay, it would be around £90,000 a year rather than £164,000 a year. Does the minister agree that it is unacceptable for college management to delay talks to grind the unions down, which has resulted in another week or more of strikes and disruption? Will he instruct college management to get back around the table until a fair pay deal is reached? Should we limit the pay rises of management to ensure that staff and student support services do not suffer?

Universities in the north-east of Scotland and across the country have made enormous contributions to Scotland, Europe and the world. Medical science has been transformed by the discovery of insulin and the development of the magnetic resonance imaging—MRI—scanner, both of which have connections with the work of University of Aberdeen academics. Abertay University was the first in the world to offer courses in computer game design and has spawned a whole generation of game designers.

Scotland’s universities attract students and researchers from across the world for their reputation of excellence in research and teaching. However, universities are nothing without their students, their academics and their support staff, and the way in which some universities are treating their staff puts the future of our institutions under serious threat.

Staff are taking a stand by striking, and I am glad that the Parliament has the opportunity today to express support for their fight for fairness. I thank all those staff, University and College Union members and branches, others who have been in touch in advance of today’s debate, and of course colleagues for supporting my motion and enabling the debate.

Pensions are a vital element of any fair society and should allow us to live in dignity after a lifetime of hard work. However, dignity is not what university staff will get now that new arrangements for pensions have been forced through. Staff will see a cut in their pensions of between 35 and 41 per cent. More than a third of someone’s nest egg for their retirement—their deferred wages—will be gone, because university management insists on basing pensions on a largely imaginary deficit.

The universities superannuation scheme—the pension scheme that operates at many universities in Scotland and across the United Kingdom—was last valued in March 2020, when economies across the world were in free fall as a result of Covid lockdowns.

Since then, the health of the scheme has recovered significantly. A recent financial monitoring report, which the scheme’s own trustees provided, confirms that, were a new valuation conducted now, the deficit would be reduced by at least 85 per cent. However, with some honourable exceptions including the University of Glasgow, which has called on the next valuation to be used to increase pension payments, management insist on pushing ahead with the clearly outdated March 2020 valuation. University principals and managers appear content to spend public money—Scottish public money, which has been voted on by this Parliament—to fund a deficit that has massively reduced.

That is where the Scottish Government comes in. Pensions are not regulated by the Scottish Parliament, and universities are autonomous, independent organisations. However, they are funded by public money, so the Scottish Government has a clear role to ensure that university management act responsibly and to encourage management back to the table to negotiate properly with trade unions.

Staff are striking not just about pensions but about fairer pay, an end to unsafe workloads, the rolling back of casualisation and action on pay gaps that women, black, Asian and minority ethnic and disabled staff face—the four fights campaign. Average pay in the sector has been cut by around 25 per cent since 2009 and, with inflation set to peak at 10 per cent, at least, the situation will only get worse. The same period has seen ever-rising workloads for staff, with the average higher education staff member working around 50 hours a week.

Like so many other public sector workers during the Covid-19 lockdowns, university staff went above and beyond, and they are still doing so. Underresourced counselling staff had to deal with a huge demand for their support from students. Library staff worked incredibly hard to ensure that students off campus could access learning resources. As well as dealing with the disruptive impact of Covid on their research, academic staff converted entire degree programmes to be taught online. That process would usually take years, but it was done in weeks, facilitated by legions of information technology staff.

Universities might simply have shut down under the pressure of what they needed to do, but they did not, and that was because of their staff. That staff were rewarded for all that work with a pay increase of 0 per cent in 2020-21 is nothing short of sheer contempt.

Staff are striking against increasing casualisation. More than a third of academic university staff are on a fixed-term contract. Talk to any academic and they will tell you of the years that they have to spend shuttling from contract to contract, constantly having to uproot themselves and move to a new university. Many of our students are taught by postgraduate research students, who teach alongside their studies on highly insecure contracts.

Given the falling pay, rising workloads and more precarious contracts, it is no wonder that the gender, black and minority ethnic and disability pay gaps stand at 15.5 per cent, 17 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively.

Faced with all that, staff have voted to strike in huge numbers. Last month, 77 per cent of those who were balloted at the University of Dundee voted to strike again for fairer pensions and, at the University of Aberdeen, 73 per cent voted to strike. Some local unions will not go ahead with further strike action, but that is nothing to do with the resolve of staff and everything to do with Tory trade union laws that have deliberately made it harder to strike.

In a UCU survey, two thirds of staff said that they were likely or very likely to leave the university sector within the next five years because of pensions, pay and working conditions—potentially, two thirds of the workforce lost in five years. Those working conditions are the learning conditions of students, many of whom this Parliament rightly spends hundreds of millions of pounds on so that they receive an outstanding education. However, that level of excellence is under threat because of the pressures on staff. Those pensions are paid to researchers who conduct life-saving medical research. The ever-falling pay and the ever-rising workloads will make it harder to retain expertise on climate change and the other challenges that we face.

In short, this is a problem not just for our university staff or the higher education sector but for us all. If our universities lose our hard-working researchers, lecturers, library staff, learning technologists, postgraduate teaching and research assistants and many more, we will all be worse off. It is time for university management to come to the table and negotiate in good faith. It is imperative for Scotland that they do so. We must take a close look at what is happening with pensions if deficits that do not really exist are allowed to take nearly £80 million out of workers’ pockets.

I pay tribute to university staff. The current disputes have roots that go back years, and staff have struggled against unfair treatment for a long time—too long. I say to them that unions work, strikes work and solidarity works. Their action is not only the way to better pay and conditions for themselves, it is part of a process of rethinking how universities can be: not businesses, but places in which we can imagine a better world and create and develop the tools to build that world. They should be in no doubt that they have the full support of the Scottish Green Party in doing so.

I thank the minister for his comments about fair work. Does he think that it is acceptable that women and younger staff are most affected by the pension cuts? The plans bake in discrimination. Deficit recovery payments to repay a deficit that does not really exist any more will require cuts to pensions, which will most likely affect younger workers and women.

To ask the Scottish Government what its position is on whether industrial relations in the college sector could be improved by applying fair work conditions to funding provided via the Scottish Funding Council. (S6O-01075)

I invite Euan Leitch to respond on the same issues.

Adrian Watson, I would like you to address the same issues, but also to touch on funding. Is there scope for central funding to support local organisations and communities to do some of the visioning work that Craig McLaren talked about? Is there also scope to provide, if not a centralised resource, somewhere where communities and local authorities could at least access the skills and knowledge that they need? You mentioned that there is a lack of skills in Aberdeen City Council because people are retiring. Will you say a little bit more about that?

Good morning, and thank you for your comments so far. I want to dig a bit deeper on issues such as master planning and local development plans, which were discussed earlier.

Craig McLaren talked about town centres needing to be places where people want to be. That needs to apply to a range of people: to go back to one of Michelle Thomson’s points, all people need to feel safe. What do you think about the value of local development plans? How important should they be? How do we link the different master planning and visioning exercises? How do we feed those into development plans in a robust way that means that developers cannot override them and things cannot be changed on what often appears to be a whim?

It is crucial in this whole process that we ensure that we are listening to the right people rather than taking a majoritarianism approach, so that we develop places where everyone wants to be, not just the people with loud voices, those who have resources or those who have access to having their voices heard.

Do you have any other comments on enhancing community engagement through local development planning? I refer to the front loading of the process, as well as its implementation.