Chamber and committees

When planning what participation support is needed for parliamentary activities, including committees, staff generally recommend a targeted approach that is based on the audiences that have been identified as priority groups for each piece of work, taking into account the barriers to their participation.

Accessibility options that are relevant to the audience are developed with partners. For example, information as part of the inquiry into healthcare in remote and rural areas was developed in easy-read, as we knew that adults with learning disabilities would face additional barriers. Work planned for the Disability Commissioner (Scotland) Bill will include providing BSL and easy-read versions of the call for views. Lastly, Karen Adam will be interested to know that a public consultation for our new BSL plan, due to run from 2024 to 2030, is scheduled to take place this summer. It will involve the use of citizen space and will be made fully BSL accessible.

We recognise that people who have accessibility requirements are interested in many issues, as the member outlines, not just those that are specifically linked to their access needs. By focusing on the removal of barriers, we think that we have the balance of interests right between improving access and limiting the cost to the public purse and so on. The Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee’s recent report welcomed our work to develop systematic and cost-effective approaches to the use of different languages and formats in order to increase the accessibility of our consultation and participation work. Of course, we are always eager to do more and would welcome further conversations with the member on any ideas and suggestions that he might have.

When projects will change the way in which members and their staff work, officials will build in opportunities for consultation and feedback and will often roll out the change to a smaller pilot group in order to gather feedback, tweak implementation and prepare appropriate training and communications.

There are times when it is necessary to introduce certain changes at short notice—for example, to protect against emerging cybersecurity threats. The corporate body is keen to hear from members if and when they feel that we, collectively, can do better to keep them and their staff informed of any changes or developments.

Every party in the Parliament signed up to ambitious climate targets, but they can be met only through bold action to deliver. The Scottish Government’s plans for warm green homes were praised today by the Climate Change Committee, but the very people who are condemning the Government for lack of delivery are the same people who are trying to block progress and spread misinformation on the heat in buildings plan, the DRS, low-emission zones and workplace parking levies, and who continue with climate-wrecking activities. Is it not time for members on all sides of the chamber to get off the fence and get behind what has to be done?

The SHRC’s report highlights many areas of concern across the prison system. Despite relaxation of the Covid-19 restrictions, it is clear that some prisoners do not get appropriate access to outdoor exercise, and that inappropriate use of segregation remains a concern, without improvements in practices having been secured. Those things are of concern regarding the overall health of prisoners, but can also mean that prisoners’ mental health, specifically, cannot be safely managed while they are in custody. Can the cabinet secretary provide reassurance that those and other issues relating to conditions in detention will be addressed? Will timescales and updates be reported to Parliament?

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the recent report by the Scottish Human Rights Commission to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which referred to the need to improve conditions across the prison estate and improve access to appropriate healthcare for those in detention. (S6O-03225)

I thank the committee for its detailed work and report on this issue and, of course, the third sector organisations that have shared immensely important and helpful briefings.

This is another debate that, in a just and compassionate world, we would not need to have. No child should be living in poverty anywhere, and the fact that so many do, in a hugely prosperous country such as ours, is a source of deep collective shame. We sometimes speak glibly about equality, but there is no greater inequality than this: whether a child goes to bed hungry and cold primarily depends on how much money their parents have. In turn, except for a privileged few, that largely depends on what kind of work the parents do.

When we think about it objectively, that is a ridiculous and incredibly unfair situation. It is one that we can mitigate and, to some extent, with the Scottish child payment and other social security measures, we have done. I am proud of the part that the Scottish Greens have played in that regard. Important as those measures are—as we have heard, they are keeping many children away from the brink of poverty—they, alone, are not enough.

As the committee’s report demonstrates, addressing parental employment must be an important and urgent part of our response. For that response to be effective, we need some fundamental changes. We need to change some mistaken beliefs and assumptions. We need to change the way in which we view, value and deliver childcare. We need to change our economy—what it does, what it enables and who it works for.

One myth is that parents are not already working. As the Poverty Alliance has pointed out, more than two thirds of children in poverty live in a household where at least one adult is in paid work, but that work pays too little or covers too few hours to meet a family’s basic needs. That is shocking. Whether we are talking about deliberately exploitative employers, small enterprises that are, themselves, squeezed by financial pressures, or care and transport deficits that limit availability for work, that is a failing system. In other words, it is not families that are failing.

That is why it is so important that the best start, bright futures delivery plan aims not only to increase access to employment but, specifically, to increase earnings. That is why fair work really matters—work that provides an effective voice for employees, opportunities to develop and learn, job security, human fulfilment and real respect.

We know that being a parent is work in and of itself. That, too, should be valued.

Another myth is that all types of family are facing the same challenges. I share the disappointment that was expressed by Close the Gap that the committee did not choose to take a gendered approach to its investigation. It is not an eradication of the existence or importance of fathers for us to recognise that most primary care givers and the vast majority of lone parents are women, and that those women are encouraged to seek jobs in low-paid, inflexible and undervalued sectors. On the contrary, acknowledgement of those realities allows us to see and articulate the particular challenges that are faced by single and care-giving fathers, which might often be less about financial pressures and more about societal attitudes and assumptions.

Collectively, we need to change the way in which childcare is seen, valued and provided. The recent funding announcement was very welcome, but the problem is wider and deeper than childcare workers’ pay. Childcare, as we have heard, needs to be affordable, accessible and flexible, and it cannot be limited to school hours or a traditional 9-to-5 working day. With the decline in the number of childminders, family members and informal networks often come forward to fill in childcare gaps, but, for many people, those are unavailable, including when family members move for work or study.

The special challenges that student parents face were rightly highlighted in the committee’s report, and I urge all colleges and universities to follow the sensitive approach that some have pioneered.

We should recognise, too, that different children have very different needs—socially, developmentally, physically and emotionally—and that those needs change throughout their childhood and adolescence. We need to employ our imaginations as well as our intelligence and recognise the many dimensions and relationships of our own lives, and we must not expect those of families in poverty to be any less complex or nuanced.

I particularly commend the childcare vision and principles that are set out by Close the Gap and One Parent Families Scotland, and I hope to see them widely accepted and implemented.

We need fundamental changes in our wider economy. As the report wisely highlights, nothing short of a whole-system approach will be enough. Inclusion Scotland and the Poverty Alliance have both outlined some of the most critical elements: the need for accessible, safe and free public transport; 10-minute neighbourhoods; living hours provision; and flexible and home working. All those things should be made available much more widely.

A just transition is deeply needed—away from the obscenity of an £8 million pay package for BP’s chief and towards a just green economy that is, at its heart, an economy of solidarity and care. However, that is not only about renewable technologies, important though they are, but about all the work that creates, builds and grows a healthy Scotland and a peaceful world.

I close by speaking directly to the families and children who are in poverty and to the parents who struggle daily to give their children what they need and deserve: you are not invisible, you are not forgotten and this is not your fault. It is our job to sort it out.

I have a couple of questions about how we use procurement and how procurement activities can be designed for social, environmental and other goods. Julie Welsh’s answers to the opening questions talked about the challenges around net zero targets and the climate change imperative. How are the sustainable procurement duties enabling or supporting the work that you are trying to do? If there are challenges and barriers, what do we need to do to unpick them?

You are doing that alongside your local government colleagues.

We have had a conversation about whole-life costing, and there is something about whole-life accounting and the benefits and disbenefits that are associated with that. Is there anything that you want to say on some of the social issues? There is a duty around tackling inequality and gender pay gaps and those kinds of things. Again, is that a data thing? Is it about not necessarily having the information to track that data through supply chains and products?