Chamber and committees

Thanks—that is really helpful.

Lynne has just spoken about top-down directives and the mismatch or disconnect with the local level. Maureen, you spoke in your opening remarks about the curriculum not necessarily being relevant to a Traveller community’s lives and their experience. Can you give us other examples or explain a little more how we have not got that right?

Getting that right will be a significant challenge for education across the board.

Leslie, you, too, have talked about education and continuity of services. How could we use partnership working better to build continuity and embed it in the design of our services and functions? How does that sort of thing play out, and how does it support the young people with whom you work?

Thanks—that is really helpful.

Lynne, can I have your comments on that too, please?

We have already heard about the Scottish Government’s victims task force report, which highlights worrying levels of attrition, with survivors dropping cases because of lengthy delays. I know that both the First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans take the issue very seriously. How can we better support survivors to access justice, given that defendants can demand in-person trials, which causes further delays? What can we do now to speed up non-harassment orders and interim interdicts, or other emergency protections, while the backlogs are addressed?

I thank Clare Adamson for lodging the motion and Gordon MacDonald for speaking to it in her absence. I wish Clare a speedy recovery. I apologise that I cannot stay for the whole debate, but I am grateful to be able to speak. I thank the Deputy Presiding Officer for letting me leave early.

Fair trade is not just good in itself as a system of standards for buying and selling specific commodities. It is also a model for how we can do trade better, both globally and locally, and how we can build fairer, healthier and more peaceful and sustainable relationships within Scotland and across the world. The climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, international arms and the conflicts that they exacerbate—all those things remind us that none of us are islands, even those of us who live on them. We are linked together in global relationships of responsibility, complicity, shared history, future possibility and, I believe and hope, solidarity and care. The fair trade movement offers us a way to acknowledge those relationships and to build them together.

Fair trade is an urgent and effective remedy for particular instances of trade exploitation—those networks of oppression that dominate international trade in sectors including the cotton, banana and chocolate industries. Fairly traded supply chains represent a vital alternative to those horrors. However, fair trade is a hugely important framework for a wide range of goods and commodities, and not only the most egregiously exploitative. We have the opportunity in our positions of privilege to make sure that the decisions that we make and those that we influence are aligned with fair trade principles and practice.

The Fairtrade premium is at the heart of the Fairtrade system, and what it tells us needs to be at the heart of how we look at our economies. The premium is paid to suppliers not as individual farmers or businesses, but for the benefit of the communities that they belong to. It reminds us that we are not the atomised actors of traditional economic theory, coldly calculating our maximised self-interest. We are communities, ecosystems and neighbourhoods that are intricately bound together in shared experience. Our economies, like the economies of co-operation that are supported by the Fairtrade premium, are there to enable that shared endeavour, and not the other way round.

Communities in the majority world—the global south—are facing deeper and crueller challenges than ever before. They include the intensification of climate impacts, as we have heard; the health and vaccine inequalities of Covid; fortress nations clanging the gates shut against refugees; and land grabs to feed the rich and fix the net-zero balance sheets. This is not a question of charity; it is a question of basic justice and fundamental human rights. The best fair trade organisations know that. They do not just seek increased markets and better conditions for the suppliers that they deal with; they are looking for transformational change at every level, and we, in the Scottish Parliament, as well as people in our Fairtrade towns and cities across the country, can be a part of making that happen.

I am proud to have signed the fair trade pledge and to celebrate the work of the fair trade movement, not least in the continent of Africa, where I was born and grew up. However, significant as those benefits have been for many in the majority world, fair trade needs to go much further, much wider and much deeper. We need to challenge not only the worst, most brutal and cynical forms of trade exploitation but our everyday assumptions and our unthinking expectation that the majority world will be a giant supermarket shelf, crammed with monoculture goodies to feed our pleasures. In a world where we are rightly looking to feed ourselves more locally and sustainably, we need to ensure that everyone can do the same.

I look forward to the day when we need no fair trade pledges, no Fairtrade certificates and no Fairtrade labels—when fair trade is simply trade and the alternative is unthinkable.

I welcome the Scottish Government debate on active travel. I also offer my apologies to members for arriving late and my thanks to the Presiding Officer for giving me dispensation to do so. I am standing in for my colleague Mark Ruskell, who is absent from the Parliament for a while.

With Greens in the Government, Scotland’s world-leading commitments to radically transform our transport system in line with our net zero ambitions have finally been backed up by significant long-term investment in active travel. Our vision for integrated, safe and inclusive local active travel infrastructure that prioritises walking, cycling and wheeling for everyone can finally become a reality.

For far too long, our transport systems have been cast in the image of car users. Our cities and towns have been designed for cars first and people second. People who rely on public or active transport have often been ignored, leaving too many of us—often women, children, disabled people and marginalised communities—poorly served by transport networks.

As a woman who cycles, I have spent many hours planning out the safest routes ahead of commuting, balancing safety and condition of the route—I hate cobbles—with time, distance and hills. I have experienced at first hand the feeling of terror when passed closely or overrun by reckless drivers on vehicle-heavy roads, and at times I have been discouraged from commuting altogether.

Sadly, I am not alone. That is the experience of many women and girls. A recent Sustrans survey found 79 per cent of women and girls to be in favour of more protected cycle routes. The scale of the challenge of providing safe, green and accessible local infrastructure is significant, but the prize of safer roads, reduced air pollution, increased physical and mental health, and tighter-knit neighbourhoods is worth the blood, sweat and tears that such a modal shift will require.

Our communities already know that, which is why they have been coming together to collectively showcase the safe and accessible environment for walking, cycling and wheeling that Scotland can lead the way on. In Edinburgh, the #OurStreetsOurNights campaign that is led by the InfraSisters is advocating for safe and inclusive night-time infrastructure for women and girls. In Glasgow, the Hijabi riders group has been working hard to tackle the common barriers that prevent Muslim women from cycling, which include safety concerns, lack of confidence and the costs associated with buying a bike, as well as religious barriers, by organising group cycling events across the city and teaching members how to carry out their own bike repairs.

In my region, in addition to the activity that Jackie Dunbar mentioned, cycling groups such as Belles on Bikes are promoting a community of care. By creating a welcoming and safe environment in cycling for women, those groups are proving the point that active travel, rather than being only for able-bodied men in Lycra, is for everyone.

The need for safety for women and girls is echoed across our transport system, with Transport Focus discovering that 85 per cent of women and girls forward plan their journeys in an effort to identify the safest possible public transport routes. I welcome the new Minister for Transport’s efforts to address the gender gap in transport through the upcoming consultation and to embed the element of safety in the Scottish Government’s plans for an all-inclusive national conversation.

After May, our newly elected councils will have an opportunity to utilise their new powers under the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 and recent investments in public transport, such as the community bus fund, to deliver truly integrated local transport networks that link public transport with active travel. In order to ensure that active travel networks are designed with safety in mind, they must be delivered in tandem with national ambitions for a 20 per cent reduction in car kilometres and 20mph by default.

The time has come to finally take back our streets and transition away from a driver-heavy culture towards integrated, safe and inclusive local infrastructure that prioritises walking, cycling and wheeling for all of Scotland.

I see the care economy as being about more than just giving people the care that they need so that they can go out to work, but I take your point that it is part of a much wider situation and connects to other things.

It is good to see renewable energy, heat in buildings and decarbonising transport being highlighted as opportunities in the strategy, but how will constrained public funding be structured to enable action in those plans and the delivery that you have spoken about?

That answer is really helpful, and it highlights why I linked those two points. I was thinking about the ability to see the connections between negative or detrimental consequences and supporting those who can mitigate such consequences, thinking about the circular economy in a way that we have not seen previously with this type of strategic investment. I look forward to your update next year.

Good morning, cabinet secretary. Thank you for your opening remarks. I will follow on from Jamie Halcro Johnston’s question on measurement. I am interested in exploring two areas, one of which is around the indicators of progress, and measurement feeds into that. Obviously, the inclusive development index is welcome, but how can we take it further to measure intrinsic environmental wellbeing and, importantly, to include the benefits of a care economy? That is implicit in the document, but it does not come out as a significant single thing by itself.

Thank you for expressing your willingness to come back to us. I appreciate that and I know that others on the committee would appreciate regular engagement with you.

Following on from Fiona Hyslop and Colin Beattie’s points earlier, I appreciate that it is early days but I am interested in exploring the challenges that you face in meeting the strategic objectives. There will be a limit to the life of some of those projects, and challenges in relation to them. What do you need to overcome those challenges?

My next question is linked to that, although it deals with a slightly separate matter. Given the overarching purpose of the bank and its strategic objectives, it is clear that good examples of sustainable development are offered by the bank, but those projects—some more notably than others—could have negative social and/or environmental consequences. In your longer-term thinking about the life cycle of a project and the consequences thereafter, do you consider circular economy spin-offs or building in the initial aims across the full lifetime of the project?