Chamber and committees

I recommend that we close the petition under rule 15.7 of standing orders, on the basis that the Scottish Government recognises non-therapeutic male infant circumcision on religious grounds and does not regard male circumcision as comparable to female genital mutilation.

I am struck by the fact that the petition was lodged on 24 March 2021, which is two and a half years ago, and that, since then, we have had no less than four ministerial submissions, most of them fairly short.

I return to the arguments that the three petitioners advanced in their earlier submission. They made four specific suggestions. In brief, those were

“Reserving a place on the selection panel for the Chair of HIAL”,

“Assigning three of the seats on the HIAL board to people who live in the communities”,

retaining one of those seats

“for a co-opted member from the HITRANS/ZetTrans Board”

and allocating a place on the board to at least one council out of Western Isles Council, Orkney Islands Council and Shetland Islands Council.

I mention that in order to set out a thesis. I never wish to be unfair to any Government minister, but what surprises me is that, in the four responses that we have had from ministers, I cannot find a specific answer on any of those suggestions. I find that very disappointing and I would be inclined to pursue it. To enable us to pursue that in the best way, I would like to know whether the petitioners feel frustrated. They have put forward specific suggestions about how things could be improved, but here we are, two and a half years later, and we do not appear to have had an explicit, clear, direct answer on any of them. That seems to me to be, at the very best, somewhat unsatisfactory.

A point that was made in the very first submission from the Scottish Government, on 8 June 2021, was that, in some public bodies—the boards of the national park authorities were cited as an example—there is a requirement that some members be local residents. Therefore, that is not a wild or radical idea. It is a concept that is already present in the law, which is why I mention it.

Should there be a requirement that a certain number of board members should be resident in the islands and/or should extra weighting be given to residency in the decision about selection, for which a number of criteria to do with competencies will routinely be fixed? It seems to me that there should be a residency weighting so that the discrimination against people from the islands that exists in the way in which the system works at the moment, which we heard about from Naomi Bremner, in particular, although Rona MacKay also spoke about it, can be counteracted. There could be a 20 or 30 per cent weighting in favour of people from the islands for any board or other significant appointment, or a senior managerial appointment.

Are those ideas that the petitioners feel that it would be sensible for us to pursue? I was with the Ethical Standards Commissioner, who, I think, is responsible for public appointments. That is referred to in more detail in the submission of 8 June 2021, so I will park that.

Naomi Bremner mentioned her absurd experience of not being able to attend for interview, as that would have taken up three days of her life and would have involved her incurring expenses that she would not have got back. It is no wonder that she did not want to go.

Naomi, if you had the ability to participate by video call, in the way that you are doing at the moment, and there was a weighting in favour of you, as an island resident, would that help to counteract the problem that we have been kicking around to no effect for two and a half years?

I am broadly supportive of the petitioner’s aims. I should say that I do not think that I am part of a cabal. Cabals operate in secret, and we have not been doing that. [Laughter.] However, Nairn is still waiting for its bypass and I see the arguments about the practical and significant economic benefits of the bypass to Maybole, so I take that into account.

Mr Whittle, Emma Harper and, I believe, Finlay Carson are pursuing this matter with others. Although I come from the opposite end of Scotland, I think that the rural transport network really needs far more attention, not only in the Highlands but in the south-west of Scotland, and Mr Whittle expressed the feelings of frustration of people down there. They feel forgotten, as do the citizens of Nairn. Frankly, it is a rural issue that affects the whole of Scotland, and perhaps more resources—more cash from the capital budget—needs to be devoted to building roads, rather than some other schemes that I had probably better not mention. I suggest that we write to the Minister for Transport to pursue those points.

I noticed that the previous cabinet secretary with responsibility for transport urged us to close the petition. I wonder whether ministers should urge us to close petitions. I wonder whether that is for Parliament to do.

However, setting that aside for the moment, we could write to the Minister for Transport to seek an update on when the STPR2 delivery plan will be published and whether the delivery plan will set out timescales for the delivery of specific recommendations and information about the Scottish Government’s approach to prioritising those recommendations and, secondly, to ask whether the Scottish Government will redirect any STPR2 savings that arise from UK Government funding from the A75 to accelerate improvements on the A77.

The petitioner has been remarkably persistent in having campaigned on issues relating to mental health, particularly on treatment without consent, for 20 years, as I understand it. The issues are by no means straightforward.

There is a case for keeping the petition open. The reason is that, although we have a lengthy response from the Scottish Government in annex C of paper CPPP/S6/23/19/8, which goes into the high-level priorities for inclusion in a reform programme, if one looks at the various components of that—there are seven—every one is at an extremely early stage. The words used are “work towards”, “consider opportunities” and “early priority”—that kind of language. That is no criticism, because all the issues are complicated, but the petitioner is entitled to get a bit more than that, and the issues that he raises are important.

We should write to the Scottish Government to seek an updated view on the petition in light of its response to the Scottish mental health law review, and to ask when its consultation on the adults with incapacity law reform will take place and how the petitioner can engage with that.

The Government accepts that the law in relation to adults with incapacity needs attention. It uses the phrase “addressing long-standing gaps”, so it admits that there is a problem. The petitioner is entitled to know when it will deal with the problem, what the timescale is and how he and others can engage with the process.

I support Mr Golden’s suggestion to close the petition. However, it would be remiss not to add that the response that we have had from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service is tremendously detailed and might be an example to others who respond to the committee.

In its submission, the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service says that two individuals spent five hours studying what happened to the 47 cases concerned—I believe at my request—and that they have given a complete analysis of every single one of those and details of disposal. By my calculation, only 19 cases appeared to have led to a guilty plea and a sentence, with 28 cases either deserted, not called or having a not guilty plea accepted, but that is the justice system in operation. Therefore, in closing the petition, I would like to thank the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service for taking our request for information very seriously indeed and for the diligence with which it pursued that.

It is a live planning application. Having pondered that, I really cannot see how it would be correct for us to interfere in a process in which a clear set of rules has been established and the petitioners and others can submit their objections to the local authority for consideration within the determination.

We want to reach out to help petitioners in every case. However, in this instance, and this particular circumstance, I cannot see how—other than by interfering with legitimate existing proceedings—it would be for us to seek review of an on-going process. If people are dissatisfied at the end of it, they can lodge a further petition to Parliament on the perceived defects in that process. We have considered applications of that ilk before.

Lastly, I want to record that I am very grateful to the council for taking the time to give us an extensive briefing, not least on misinformation in the BBC’s reporting of the issue, which is unfortunate. I just wanted to allude to that while expressing our thanks to the council for pointing it out to us

I am very sorry. It is so easy to be rude to people who are attending online. I apologise.

Would it help if the committee made a request to the current Scottish Government minister—I think that we are now on transport minister number 4 in the current parliamentary session—to see what specific ideas they can come up with? Excuse me, Angus. I may be teaching my granny how to suck eggs, but I am sure that the three of you must have pondered on many occasions how to advance the situation. The reply seems to be, “Well, we advertise posts but we don’t get the applications”. That seems a pretty pathetic approach.

I know from my work in the islands over many years as minister that there are a huge number of very able, knowledgeable and experienced people all over the islands. I feel that the current efforts to reach out to empower those people, to benefit from their local knowledge and direct experience of ferries, seamanship, Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd or HIAL and to get them involved not only on the board but in senior management positions are not enough. We need to disperse jobs to the islands. When I was the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy and Tourism, we managed to disperse a couple of Crofting Commission jobs to the Western Isles. My God, it was difficult—I can tell you that. The grand promises that you start off with get diluted as they go through the sausage machine.

This is a very long question, but it seems to me that so many other approaches could be taken. Could the councils play a structured role in coming up with specific recommendations of people who might be suitable to serve on the main bodies of CMAL, CalMac and HIAL? Elected councillors are often really plugged into their communities. Is that a way—it is not one that is currently used—in which we could reach out to empower people on the islands?

Have you had any feedback from people who have been keen to apply to play a part but have been rejected? Has there been any systematic review or consideration of that? Has any work been done to consider why that has happened? Many of us suspect that the selection process results in what we might call the usual suspects, with a pool of kenspeckle figures getting picked again and again, and that it discriminates against newcomers, outsiders, outliers and, basically, people who live on the islands. I am afraid that that is my view from having been involved in quite a lot of selection work over the years. Perhaps I am at fault as much as anybody else.

If you are saying, as you did just now, that a cohort of people have been spurned—unfairly, in your view—and that that has created ill feeling, what can we do about that? Can anything be done? Has anything been done about it? I am sure that the committee would be willing to pursue that if there are concrete, specific things that we might be able to do about it.