Chamber and committees

You make the link very clearly between an individual taking a case and the systemic issues for the betterment of society in many ways. You talked about that earlier and I think that that link is important to highlight.

I ask the same question to Hyo Eun Shin about where the burden of court costs should lie. Has the Scottish Government got this right or not?

In closing for the Scottish Greens, I reiterate my thanks to all those who have worked so hard, so co-operatively and so effectively on the long process, which began with the first discussion paper of 2010, of bringing the bill so far. I am grateful to members for their positive contributions to the debate, and I am heartened to see such wide-ranging examples of cross-party consensus. That goes to show—I say this to Mr Mundell, in particular—that there really is a first time for everything.

Many of the debates about the bill are not so much about its substantive provisions but about what needs to be explicitly stated and what is already the case under existing law. Those judgments have to be made in relation to issues as various as data protection and the power to choose environmentally sustainable and socially just investments. We have heard about how little the office of judicial factor has been used over recent years and how the complexity and, in some cases, the antiquity of previous legislation have contributed to its rarity, but we can hope that, once the bill becomes law, people will know not only that judicial factors exist but that they can help with some very contemporary problems.

We have heard about the flexibility of the proposed legislation and the way that it recognises the fact that a judicial factor acting to protect the clients of a solicitors firm, a judicial factor paying a missing family member’s mortgage and a judicial factor winding up a deceased person’s estate might be very different people carrying out very different tasks.

We have heard about what else needs to be done—what amendments, guidance and further action the committee and others are seeking in order to make the bill as effective, its processes as transparent and its implementation as thorough as possible.

The issues that relate to missing people include cost and complexity, the situation when the missing person returns and the interrelationship with the Presumption of Death Act 2013. Those issues particularly demand our attention and care.

The Scottish Greens look forward to those developments and will do what we can to support them. The bill brings long-standing legal traditions into our contemporary context, asking and answering the questions of how we can learn from the past and how we can do justice now and for future generations. We will all seek to do our best to get those answers right.

I extend my thanks to the Scottish Law Commission, the committee members and clerks, and those who responded to the various consultations on the bill—especially the charity Missing People. The meticulous, informed and considered work by all involved has been both impressive and encouraging, and I hope that, in the formal stages to come, we can speak and act with the same levels of wisdom and empathy.

I do not suppose that many people will be screaming from the rooftops, or that there will be many headlines, about the debate or the bill that we are considering. Most people, I imagine, go through their lives without ever encountering a judicial factor. It is a shame, perhaps, that the chamber is not packed with journalists eagerly reporting every one of our speeches, because the subject of this afternoon’s proceedings is a salutary example of what the Scottish Parliament can do, quietly and steadily, without fanfare or grandstanding, and with real co-operation across parties and with other institutions, other bodies and wider civil society.

The work of the Scottish Law Commission is hugely important for the development of responsible, relevant justice in Scotland. Its law reform recommendations allow us to combine the unique traditions of Scots law with policy and processes that meet the needs of people and communities today and, I hope—and as Martin Whitfield indicated—into the future, too.

That is illustrated by the Scottish Law Commission’s and the committee’s work on the bill to explore ways in which the appointment of a judicial factor could help in a range of difficult situations. One such is when a person goes missing, for they leave behind them, with their families and friends, not only anxiety, pain, loss and uncertainty but the practical difficulties involved in managing their financial matters. The charity Missing People offers a lifeline to those who are either missing or thinking about going missing and also to those who are affected by a disappearance. Like me, many members here will know of people whose lives have been saved by the charity’s sensitive and painstaking work. Missing People has engaged closely with the development of the bill, in recognising how the appointment of a judicial factor might be a way of enabling families to deal effectively and efficiently with the financial issues that arise from a disappearance.

I understand that the bill has not been able to do everything that the charity had hoped for, but I warmly welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to work with it to address the outstanding issues, including the development of appropriate guidance and procedures. I support the committee’s call for the bill to be amended to make absolutely explicit its applicability to families who have been affected by disappearance. I, too, will be interested to hear the minister’s closing remarks on that point.

In working to make the bill’s processes as straightforward and seamless as possible, we must acknowledge that not all relevant relationships will be within Scotland or will be concerned with devolved matters. I therefore welcome the Scottish Government’s on-going discussions with the UK Government on the potential for a section 104 order, which would oblige UK ministers and bodies that deal with reserved matters to provide information on the same basis as for matters within devolved powers.

On behalf of the Scottish Greens, I welcome the bill and look forward to working with other members, in the chamber and beyond, to help make it as valuable as possible in addressing the needs of people and communities in Scotland today and in the future.

Many of us in this place are pretty scunnered at the lack of a human rights bill and incorporation of UN treaties into Scots law. I get that very clear connection and the different position that we find ourselves in.

To pick up on a point about accountability and who will do this work, do you consider that your proposed disability commissioner will have the resources to do that? Given the systemic failures that you have well outlined, if the role is pan-disability, will one person be sufficient?

When we heard from the minister, she spoke about mainstreaming. We heard in other evidence—you will have picked this up as well—about some of the tensions around mainstreaming, including with regard to intersectionality. I suppose that this follows on from my other questions. How would a disability commissioner deal with every aspect of a disabled person’s life in every aspect of society? How would we get those levels of accountability in the powers of one office?

Good morning, Mr Balfour. Thank you for your opening comments and for the time that you have previously given me to discuss your bill. It is much appreciated.

I hear clearly from you this morning and from previous evidence the concerns with the disability equality strategy and your point about how we will get action if not through a disability commissioner. How do you approach the inherent tension in what we have heard about the need for a disability commissioner to focus on disabilities and the huge range of disability issues that people face? You talked about focusing on issues such as education, employment and social care. Why is a commissioner the answer, rather than using existing structures to focus on mainstreaming or on employability for everyone?

I extend my condolences and deepest sympathies to every person who has been affected by these tragic deaths. Year after year, the figures offer a grim picture of the situation. Although I recognise the efforts that the cabinet secretary outlined to prevent deaths, they are clearly not enough.

Alcohol harm in Scotland is a public health emergency and a human rights issue. The cabinet secretary referenced the earlier consultation on restrictions on alcohol advertising and marketing, but no legislation was confirmed in last week’s programme for government. Many advocates criticised the lack of progress on that issue. Will the cabinet secretary confirm whether the Scottish Government is committed to introducing those measures in this parliamentary session? If not, what actions are being taken in that area?

On behalf of the Scottish Greens, I welcome the bill and the reforms that it contains. Those reforms, as we have already heard, represent a further step in the implementation of the Angiolini review into complaints handling, investigations and misconduct in relation to policing.

I thank members of the Criminal Justice Committee for their meticulous scrutiny of the bill at stage 1 and look forward to further discussion of the points that they have raised. I also thank the committee clerks and researchers for all the work that they have done and for their support for the committee and thank all those who contributed at stage 1, including the individuals and organisations who gave evidence as witnesses or who submitted briefings and other information during that process.

We live in a society where the institution of the police holds considerable power, both in the acts or omissions of individual officers and in its corporate response to scrutiny. That power has often been misused—sometimes with the tragic consequences of which we have heard some examples today—so it is our duty as lawmakers to recognise, respond to and help to redress those wrongs.

People who have experienced harm from police action or inaction deserve to receive respectful, timely and appropriate treatment, through processes that are clear and fair and have outcomes that include full and candid truth telling, reparation where that is needed and an assurance that lessons have been learned.

There is much in the bill that can, if properly implemented, help both to reduce the level of misconduct by police officers and to improve the process by which misconduct and injustice are investigated and addressed.

It is important that every police officer understands, accepts and lives out the ethics that we expect of them. Those ethics have, rightly, deepened and developed in recent decades, but they cannot always be taken for granted.

It is important that every police officer bears and follows the duty to be open and truthful when something has gone wrong. The existence of that duty will be a benefit to the majority of police officers, who will want to be able to fully explain what has happened without the sense that, in doing so, they are somehow letting down their colleagues or their corporate body.

In the implementation of these provisions, it is crucial that the rights of workers, police officers and civilian staff are properly protected. We must have clear and independent processes for calling the police to account, including senior officers and those who leave the force before their actions are investigated. We must have a means of ensuring that, if a police officer has behaved badly in one part of the UK, they are not able to do the same elsewhere. Robust vetting procedures can help to ensure that the right people are recruited and that they continue to be the right people to be trusted with the exercise of police power. The work of the Police Investigation and Review Commissioner must be effective and efficient, getting both its functions and its governance right.

However, legislation alone cannot bring about all the changes that we need to see. There are fundamental problems with the institution of a police force—any police force—that will not be easily fixed. It is not an accident or a weird anomaly that Police Scotland has been acknowledged by its own senior officers as being institutionally racist and discriminatory. It is not an accident that the victims and survivors of police misconduct, injustice and brutality are overwhelmingly those who are already marginalised, whose identities are already viewed as problematic and whose voices are already silenced.

The historic roots of the police in Britain and beyond lie in colonialism, the suppression of democratic movements and the capitalist imperative to defeat organised labour. Those foundational purposes might not be overtly present today, but they determine why we have something called a police “force” at all and they cannot help but underlie what Governments, media, political discourse and police officers expect that force to do.

In many ways, we can be rightly proud of Police Scotland when comparing it to other police forces across the UK and around the world. Much good work has been done, and much more is continuing. We have all, I imagine, had positive encounters in our work and in our personal lives with police officers who are kind, thoughtful, sensitive and empathetic. However, we must recognise that Scottish exceptionalism in that, as in other areas, is not always justified. Policing by consent too often means only the consent of people like us in places like this.

So, yes, the Scottish Greens will vote for the principles of the bill today. We will work with others across the chamber and civil society to make it as fair, effective and worth while as it can possibly be during the coming weeks and months. However, as I have indicated, we have some broader questions to ask—not just here, but here is a good place to start.

In closing, I look forward to hearing more of the debate this afternoon and to returning to the issues in the days and weeks ahead as we grapple with amendments to the bill, as we must.

I thank colleagues for their contributions to the debate. As someone who does not sit on the Criminal Justice Committee but follows its work from the outside, I always find it interesting to see how different committee members and others from outside, such as myself, understand and interpret committee proceedings.

If we were starting from scratch to empower our communities to deal with the problems in their midst—problems of violence, theft and damage; problems of how to keep people safe at large gatherings on streets and highways; problems of contested uses of public space; and problems of acting, as the police so often do, as the agency of last resort for people with histories of pain and trauma—I do not think that the creation of the institution of a police force would be our chosen answer, or at least it would not be the only one.

We need to think about how to reform the way in which police do their work and how they are accountable; how to enact those reforms and ensure that they are properly implemented; and how to scrutinise and exercise the power that the police have. It is right that we as citizens expect the highest of standards in all aspects of the work that the police do. As Jamie Greene, Russell Findlay and others have said, that process of reform is not a one-off—it must be on-going.

Policing by consent relies on trust, and it takes only one bad experience or one negative headline to destroy that trust. Unfortunately, we have had more than one bad experience or one negative headline as far as institutionalised discrimination in the police is concerned. The committee heard too many examples of breaches of that trust by individuals. Once that trust is broken, it takes concerted effort and no small amount of time to rebuild it. The bill is part of that process of reform and of rebuilding that trust.

I share the concerns that some members have raised that many of the Angiolini review recommendations are not dealt with in the bill. I would welcome the cabinet secretary providing further information as to how her Government will approach those, if not today, then in the future. I will not rehearse the points about the elements of the bill, which we have already heard so much about this afternoon, such as the ethics code, the duty of candour and the changes to the PIRC and its governance. However, I am interested in the details of the amendments that have been suggested, and I will listen with interest to the cabinet secretary’s closing remarks in that regard. I hope that on-going discussions during stage 2 will address some of the questions that Pauline McNeill and others have raised.

As I said earlier, I believe that, as part of the on-going reform of our police service and the way in which it works, we need to think about how we might divest the police of functions that are better carried out by other agencies and other workers, without the punitive load that the police inevitably bring to every encounter, whether or not they want or intend to. Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves whether what we say is the central function of the police—to keep people safe—will ever be compatible with what historically has been its actual raison d’être: to preserve the establishment and the status quo, to protect elites by suppressing some marginalised groups and to resist the transformation of society that we now, in our overlapping crises, need more than ever to survive.

I know that many police officers recognise those contradictions and want to be part of a positive transformation. While we make the incremental changes that we can, including through this bill, let us keep faith with those within and outside the police who look to us for a vision of something more—one of a police system that serves all members of our community and of a society in which we can all trust it to do what it is here to do.

This is a time of want and of need. People are afraid. Some are angry, and some are beyond desperate. Far too many children are hungry, cold, sleeping in unsafe places and excluded from going on the ordinary trips and having the toys that their classmates take for granted. Westminster politicians who, before they were elected, were telling stories of cohesion and solidarity are now in government, speaking the language of austerity. They wear their self-imposed fiscal policies like medals of military virtue, justifying cuts that bite to the bone.

Scotland, it seems, is imprisoned in a cage of consequentials, unable, as is claimed, to break the consensus and do what its people—its children in poverty—need it to do. I am not talking about 2024, although I could be. Thirteen years ago, in 2011, the Christie commission published its powerful, wise and widely acclaimed report. It was a time of conscious austerity, when social, economic and political pressures weighed heavily on Scotland’s communities. We were warned that budgets would buckle unless Scotland embraced a radically new collaborative culture—one that recognised the devastating effect of inequality and learned to prioritise preventative measures.

Tragically, that has not happened. As Mary Glasgow of Children 1st pointed out three years ago, marking the 10th anniversary of the report,

“While Christie couldn’t predict the pandemic, he clearly understood that when public finances were tightest, the need for investment in prevention was greatest. Yet when budgets are squeezed, preventative spend is always the first to go.”

We can see that now, urgently highlighted by the programme for government briefings that we have received from civil society—those who see, day in, day out, the excruciating impacts of not doing prevention properly; of not breaking those cycles of deprivation and trauma; and of condemning another generation, and another and another, to the waste and misery of poverty, the vastly unequal risks of poor physical and mental health, victimisation, incarceration and early death.

As the Child Poverty Action Group reiterates,

“Prioritising further action to tackle child poverty is a long-term investment, not just for families, but for Scotland’s economic security and the sustainability of public services.”

The Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland shared a striking example of prevention in action—the way in which short breaks for children with disabilities can forestall the need for much more overwhelming, expensive and potentially damaging forms of intervention later in their lives.

“Mend the roof while the sun shines”, folk wisdom tells us. However, if we have not done that—if the sun never quite seemed bright enough, and if there was so much to be done to tidy the front garden—we need to get out in the rain and do it.

This is not about blame—opportunities have been missed by everyone—but this is, in every sense of the word, a crisis. The Scottish Trades Union Congress general secretary, Roz Foyer, said that the cuts announced this week mean that

“workers and communities across Scotland will be scarred for generations to come.”

Scotland’s children do not need any more scars. They need, as an absolute minimum, the policies that are set out in our Scottish Green amendment: an increased Scottish child payment to the value of at least £40 per week for every eligible child as soon as possible, but definitely by the end of this parliamentary session; support into employment for parents, especially lone parents and those from minoritised communities; a full, independent and then implemented review of childcare in Scotland, so that we can understand exactly what is needed where, as called for by Pregnant Then Screwed and many other organisations; and, of course, the completed roll-out of universal free school meals in primary schools, as had previously been promised.

This is about children’s rights—not just a pious aspiration to ending their poverty but a solemn, serious obligation on the part of the Government to make their lives liveable. Incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was the beginning of that process, but children’s rights do not stand alone. They cannot be fulfilled unless their parents’ and carers’ rights are protected, too. As Engender rightly points out, women’s poverty and children’s poverty are “inextricably linked”. Those include rights to life, to a decent standard of living, to privacy, to health and food, to a clean environment and to protection from discrimination.

We are all vulnerable, although some of us have thicker armour to wear. We all need respect, care, safety and pathways to remedy when those are withheld. That is why UNCRC incorporation should have been followed by a Scottish human rights bill, which was promised for so long and worked for so hard by many people and groups from across Scotland, while the world watched on with hope and encouragement. It is a bitter disappointment that both that bill and the one that would have protected Scotland’s children from pernicious and toxic conversion practices are missing from this week’s programme for government.

Poverty is a breach of human rights, as is so clearly articulated by the Poverty Alliance. We have a moral and ethical obligation to act to protect, support and love those who should expect to inherit the earth. Each and every one of us needs to work together to fulfil that vision and requirement.

I move amendment S6M-14322.3, to leave out from “; further notes” to “once and for all” and insert:

“, but also notes the Child Poverty Action Group’s finding that Scottish Government policy is not yet adequate to ensure that child poverty targets are met, and that bold, decisive action is required; believes that part of that bold, decisive action must include increasing the Scottish Child Payment to at least £40 a week by the end of the current parliamentary session, providing accessible employability support, especially for lone parents, and establishing an independent review of childcare in Scotland to ensure the provision of what is most needed, as well as robust rent controls to complement affordable housing; notes with deep concern the apparent change in position from the Scottish Government on free school meal provision for all primary school children, with the Programme for Government only committed to expanding free school meals to those in receipt of the Scottish Child Payment in P6 and P7; calls on the Scottish Government to urgently confirm whether it is still its intention to complete the full roll-out that was previously promised; believes that the previously promised Human Rights Bill for Scotland would have provided the framework for improving Scotland’s public services, delivering its minimum core obligations, and thereby eradicating child poverty; expresses its deep dismay that the Human Rights Bill does not appear in the Programme for Government; calls on the Scottish Government to ensure that the burdens of its financial decisions do not fall upon the shoulders of Scotland’s most marginalised people, including families in poverty”.