Chamber and committees

I am not entirely clear about how the Scottish Government intends to introduce its human rights bill, so I am not clear whether there will be a vehicle for delivery in it. People could argue that human rights are all our rights and that they already exist. However, we still have people who do not have a right to food in Scotland. My proposed bill is designed not only to enshrine the human right to food in Scottish legislation but to provide a vehicle for its delivery, because that is hugely important.

If you were to push me, I would say that I would have liked to have seen the right to food at the heart of a good food nation bill. That is why I spoke to the Scottish Government in the previous session. We already invest £100 million—huge amounts of public money—in our food system. I hear from workers in that system that the front-line producers of food are the people who are going hungry. They produce the food but still do not have a right to food.

I would have wanted to see a right to food at the heart of a good food nation bill. However, my proposed bill, which would have a vehicle for delivery, would work alongside that. It is not one thing; it is not about ticking a box. It will take some time to implement a right to food and to change the system, because our food system is so disjointed. That is why everyone has been calling for a good food nation bill, which would not only highlight our natural resource but ensure that the way that we produce food does not leave people behind. My proposal is part of that.

Including the right in a good food nation bill would be my preference, but it does not look like that is possible. I hope that, if we have a right to food bill, it will work alongside a good food nation bill and changes to our food system to ensure that everybody has a right to food.

I am sorry—that was a bit of a long way round to a short answer.

I will come on to the process points.

If the Government wishes to introduce the bill in another form, I do not think that anything that I propose today—that is, approving the right to go forward without another consultation—would interfere with that. I would certainly make sure that the bill’s aims were met through the Government’s human rights bill.

I will get Nick Hawthorne to cover the process.

Not necessarily. I think that policy people would have been working from home, as many of us were, and might have had more time to look at the proposal. However, given that there had already been a consultation on the good food nation bill, to which they might well have responded, they might have felt that they had put their views on the record, so there was no need to repeat the process.

I do not think that the number of responses was particularly low—71 people responded on behalf of organisations and 181 individuals responded, which is a reasonable level of response—but it should be borne in mind that this consultation followed on from the consultation on the proposed good food nation bill. A number of the people who responded to that—about a third of them, I think—recommended that there should be a right to food, so people had already responded clearly to one consultation on the issue. With a consultation on a Government bill, people expect the Government to introduce the bill whereas, with a member’s bill, they are not so sure that that will happen. I think that that accounts for the level of response.

I understand that Elaine Smith sent her consultation to a number of public bodies, such as local authorities and health boards, as well as the trade union movement and interested stakeholders. She made sure that it was out there, and it was well received. Although not every health board or council would respond to such a consultation, some did, and they responded very positively.

I should say that I am a member of the Co-op Party—that is in my entry in the register of members’ interests. The party is very keen on the proposal.

I am working with the Co-operative Party and with stakeholders; I have had meetings, reasonably regularly, with people who responded to the consultation on the previous bill proposal. A number of those people wanted to become much more involved, so we have set up a steering committee with organisations and individuals who are keen for the proposal to go forward and I am working closely with them.

I have been in touch with the respondents to the consultation and they are still incredibly keen. One of them—I should remember this—consulted recently and did some polling. The overwhelming support in the public for the introduction of a bill was there for all to see.

We all take food for granted, in a way. During the pandemic, many people realised that it could not be taken for granted. There were times when people were afraid to be tested because they were afraid that they would have to isolate and would not have food. Suddenly, people began to realise and live other people’s day-to-day experience of wondering where they would get their next meal. If anything, that has moved the right to food up in the public consciousness. Therefore, it is still as important, if not more important, to have a right to food.

The effect of consulting again would just be delay. We should have introduced a right to food in the previous parliamentary session. That is what people expected but the pandemic slowed the process down and stopped it happening. If we owe anything to the people who were hungry during the pandemic, it is to put the right processes in place to ensure that people are fed.

Thank you for allowing me to speak. The petition obviously follows a petition to your predecessor committee, and some of the new members on the committee might not be aware of the issue.

Basically, there are two treatments for essential tremor. Essential tremor is very disabling, because it makes people shake. It can affect things that we all take for granted, such as drinking and eating in public, and it can even affect the way that someone speaks. The people who suffer from it tend not to mix socially. It is a very difficult illness to deal with and it tends to have a very late diagnosis. Mary Ramsay, who is my constituent and the petitioner, was not diagnosed until her 40s.

Mary Ramsay has had brain surgery to deal with essential tremor. Brain surgery works and is a proven treatment, but the difficulty with it is that people need to go back and have the electrodes moved. People who have brain surgery for essential tremor have a lifetime of procedures ahead of them. Focused ultrasound is non-invasive—there is no brain surgery involved. It is a one-off treatment, and it is life changing for those who receive it.

In England, focused ultrasound is an approved treatment that NHS England funds. People from Scotland can be referred to NHS England for treatment, which seems totally crazy to me, because we have the machine in Dundee and we could be treating people here and now in Scotland, at a much lower cost.

The petition is not from people in my constituency, but the committee will have seen that the Caithness health action team made a submission to the committee in support of it. Their concerns are similar to those of others in that people in that area have huge distances to travel to access medical treatment. Some funding is available, but it is not adequate and does not remove the financial disadvantage. There is also a social disadvantage for people with caring responsibilities—for example, children have to be looked after while they are away—all of which creates huge problems for people. That is a consistent problem throughout the Highlands and Islands area that I represent and it has been an issue for me for all the time that I have been a member of the Scottish Parliament.

I understand that the training for medics, nurses and all those involved in healthcare is geared towards teamwork so that people can collaborate when working together to provide healthcare. In remote rural areas, however, we ask people to work very much on their own without any back-up and to depend on their own skills and knowledge, but the training does not equip people to do that.

We also see that the NHS values specialisation. If a person specialises in a subject, their grading goes up, and that is true for doctors and nurses. However, at one point, I was speaking to nurses who work in the area that I cover who have a huge range of skills because they need to cope with anything that comes through the door and what is happening there and then, but they are on a basic banding. The breadth of their knowledge was not recognised; only the depth of their knowledge was recognised.

There are therefore huge disincentives for people who are generalists to become involved. One is from a training point of view, and the other is from a financial and career progression point of view. I therefore agree with the petitioners. We need an agency to take up the issue and work with it by looking at training and remuneration to make sure that we have health services in those remote and rural communities. It gets to the point where people are maybe not getting the health interventions that they need as quickly as they can, because it becomes very difficult for them. We do not need an A and E around every corner, but we do need to provide those kinds of services to people, without the same in-depth specialisms that there are elsewhere. People should have the same access to health services, regardless of where they live.

When the petition started, NHS Tayside and the University of Dundee were working together to fund and purchase a machine. They have now done that—the machine is available and is giving treatment in Scotland. However, that treatment is termed experimental treatment—I say “termed” because it is not experimental; it has been approved elsewhere. It is called experimental because it is under that locus that it can be used to treat people. A general practitioner or consultant in Scotland cannot always refer someone to the facility in Dundee unless they are talking about experimental treatment; if they do not do that, they have to refer the person to Professor Nandi and his colleagues in London. There is a huge waiting list for treatment in London, as you can imagine, and it seems wasteful that we have this treatment available in Scotland but Scottish people cannot access it.

Mary Ramsay recently sent me a video that I will make available to the committee. It features Ian Sharp, who has received the treatment. Mary Ramsay also told me this morning that she and Ian Sharp would be willing to come to the committee to give evidence about their experiences of the two different treatments. If they did, that might give you a better idea of what the treatments entail.

I urge the committee not to close the petition. We have come a long way, and I think that the previous Public Petitions Committee was instrumental in moving the issue up the political agenda—indeed, perhaps it was instrumental in getting the technology into Scotland. However, having the technology here is a waste if we cannot use it for the good of patients in Scotland.

I ask you to pursue the Scottish Government on this issue and to push for the treatment that is available in Dundee to be made available to people in Scotland. I also urge you to hear from Mary Ramsay and Ian Sharp, who can tell you what the treatment has meant to them and explain how life changing it can be.

I understand that there are two centres in London. For the invasive treatment, people in Scotland go to Glasgow or Newcastle. Newcastle might be looking to develop the new treatment, too, but, at the moment, people must go to London for it.

I will not repeat what Liam McArthur said, because the committee’s time is short. The petition is about two things: the new air traffic management system but also the downgrading of Wick and Benbecula. Members will have seen in the petitioners’ response some focus on the downgrading of Wick and Benbecula airports, as they will provide an aerodrome flight information service, which means that they will be able to take only booked unscheduled flights.

Wick is in the process of developing a public service obligation to encourage more traffic through the airport. It is important to note that, in the past, Wick has served as a base for North Sea oil, so it will be very difficult to have only booked unscheduled flights, especially helicopter traffic, that can land only if booked in an emergency from oil rigs and the like. Wick is not suitable for an aerodrome flight information service, and neither is Benbecula, because Benbecula is home to a Ministry of Defence range. Air traffic from all over the world comes to test weapons on that range, so having only booked slots available at those two airports makes no sense to me.

I urge the committee to consider what impact that will have on the local economy in relation to oil and the MOD’s work on Benbecula. I am concerned because the Benbecula facility was under threat a few years ago and was almost closed by the MOD. It was due to community intervention that it was kept open. It is a facility of national importance. I do not think that the MOD has been properly consulted on the proposals, although I am having difficulty getting information out of it. We need to look at the economic impact.

HIAL says that it is now exploring the option for staff to commute, so that it does not force people out of work. However, in my early discussions with HIAL about commuting, it made it clear that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would allow that as a transitional arrangement, but not permanently. Therefore, I suggest that the committee looks at the feasibility of that. Obviously, it would be difficult for people to be away from home and their families, given that they go home every night at the moment.

I also ask the committee to look at what is happening in Inverness. One of the reasons for the process, according to HIAL, is recruitment, but Inverness, which is where it intends to move everyone, is the place where it has had issues with recruitment. My understanding is that Inverness is suffering from staff shortages, to the point that the head of air navigation services is doing operational shifts to keep things going. Therefore, it seems crazy to move people to Inverness, if that is where it is most difficult to recruit. HIAL was really good at recruitment on the islands—it recruited local people who wanted to remain at home and trained them up. It had a process that could have been an exemplar in other areas, but, because of a problem in one area, it seems to have moved away from that.

Digital Scotland has classed the project as being an amber or red risk. I urge the committee to contact it to find out what its concerns are. I contacted Audit Scotland, which told me that the annual audit of HIAL was outwith its remit but that it has a responsibility for HIAL’s use of resources. Therefore, will the committee contact Transport Scotland’s auditors, who are responsible for the annual audit of HIAL, to see whether they have any concerns? I understand that the project is already delayed and over budget. It seems to be just another vanity project that will have a detrimental effect on the very communities that need the system to work and to work properly.

As Liam McArthur said, nobody is saying that nothing needs to change—we need radar in those airports and we need to make them more sustainable—but this project is not the way to do it. I urge the committee to keep the matter alive and to probe in those areas to get a better understanding of the risks involved.