Chamber and committees

Indeed. It was the preface to the prologue. [Laughter.]

I feel very strongly that that approach could transform rural Scotland by providing not just £5,000 per megawatt, which is looking a bit jaded and out of date now, but a real ownership stake. That is when the real opportunities to transform rural Scotland will arise, by using the fund to invest in young people’s training, education and future.

I thought that making those remarks might help the minister to see that opportunity knocks but that we are in danger of the postman going on to the next house. That could happen in this case.

I wonder whether we should inquire—maybe the clerks can inform us about this now—whether the Criminal Justice Committee reached any conclusion. Plainly, it heard detailed evidence, and we have not. That is narrated clearly in the material before us, but it is not clear what the Criminal Justice Committee will do about it. It may be that it will make recommendations in its budget report.

Would it be prudent for us to make informal inquiries to see where matters stand with the Criminal Justice Committee? It has started to look at the issue in detail, so it does not seem appropriate that we duplicate that work. On the other hand, our duty to the petitioners is to make sure that we do not prematurely close the petition when we do not quite know where its fate lies.

I support that recommendation. We might also wish to seek from the Scottish Government an update on what testing and training are provided on the use of naloxone. Many moons ago, between 2007 and 2011, when I was the drugs minister, we promoted the use of naloxone by, for example, police officers. If applied, naloxone can reverse the effects of opioids, and, in certain circumstances, it can save lives. It is not without its controversies, but that measure was introduced years ago. I raise it because, in relation to drug testing, it has the potential to save lives and is very valuable.

It would be helpful to get a fairly comprehensive account from the Scottish Government about how naloxone has been rolled out, whether the police are now using it, as was wished to be the case, whether there are any barriers, and what is being doing with it specifically. We are all alarmed and concerned at the number of drug deaths in Scotland, and, in some circumstances, naloxone can save lives.

Thank you very much for your evidence this morning. It has been informative, revelatory and quite explosive. My constituents want to know why we have not delivered our promises, and you are steering us towards the answers today. I just want to probe a couple of bits of that.

You said that the officials had provided you with the timing of when each section could be done. You read that out helpfully for the record. In other words, you did not say, “I want you to do this work by such and such”; you said, “When can it be done?”, and they provided you with the memo of 28 May 2012, which said that it could be done by 2025. Is that correct? It was not your deadline; it was when they said that the job could be completed by.

I have a short final question. Mr Neil, why do you think that the A9 dualling project has fallen so very far behind schedule?

We may need to ask your successors what they did—

I note the cabinet secretary’s response, which is brief. What it does not say is that, although the statement was made to the Scottish Parliament on 29 June that the proposals would not be going ahead, one of the Green MSPs said shortly afterwards that the Scottish Government was

“committed to bringing forward these proposals”,

so what was in the statement was immediately contradicted in the press. Since then, the cabinet secretary has said that she will bring forward other measures.

The industry itself is highly sceptical. The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation has talked about the measures being brought back in by the back door, and when I speak to fishing representatives in Clyde, Shetland, the Western Isles and elsewhere, as well as the SFF, I hear grave concern. Instead of closing the petition now—the issues have not really gone away, which is the point that I am making—could we write to the Scottish Government to seek an update on its alternative plans to enhance the protection of the marine environment and whether they will include HPMAs? That appears to be the case, even though such a move appears to have been ruled out.

In addition, could we specifically request the Scottish Government to tell us what engagement it is having with Duncan Macinnes and the Western Isles Fishermen’s Association, with Elaine Whyte and her colleagues in Clyde and with all the bodies that represent inshore fisheries? They have tremendous knowledge and are doing tremendous things, but they have just been completely skated over.

Finally, 37 per cent of our seas are already designated as marine protected areas, but there has been no mention by the Scottish Government whether there should be a review of the existing designations of MPAs. It has always seemed to me—as a logician, I would hope—that before you embark on a series of brand-new measures, you should work out how effective or otherwise the existing measures have been as well as the economic impacts. As a former fisheries minister, I know that the impacts issue is highly controversial, because the fishermen feel that they have never been properly assessed and are repeatedly underestimated. We need look only at the number of vessels closing—we are losing vessels all over Scotland. It is a dire situation.

I am sorry—perhaps I have gone on too long, but I feel that we should keep the petition open and ask in writing for a lot of detail. Indeed, I am pretty sure that that is what the petitioner and many others would want us to do.

I want to raise a wider issue about citizen participation. As we know, the purpose of this committee—good morning, minister—is to act on the side, as it were, of David versus Goliath, which is the Government.

It is a shame that the fleet was so prematurely deprived of Alex Neil, its admiral, but—[Laughter.]

I will try not to be too predictable, then. Just extending the metaphor one more time, our purpose is to provide David with a sling so that there is some equality in the weaponry. To be serious, we find that many of our petitions relate to concerns that ordinary people—citizens of Paisley or Inverness—have with Government agencies, the authorities and the powers that be. In fact, those petitions probably account for more than half of the total.

I want to raise a specific example. Last week, the convener of the Finance and Public Administration Committee, Kenneth Gibson, pointed out the cost of the commissioners, also known as tsars. There is a plethora of those commissioners in Scotland, and the cost amounts to £80 million over a five-year period. We will discuss the A9 later, but a 10-year saving on the tsars—if we decided to purge them in Scotland—would save £160 million, which just happens to be £10 million more than the cost of the proposed dualling of the section of the A9 from Tomatin to Moy. Minister, you may not have direct portfolio responsibility for the tsars, but, given that we really need to look at making savings, do we get value for money from our tsars? Are they any more relevant to our citizens than the Romanovs were to the Russians in their daily life? Would it not be worth considering a purge of the tsars and, if so, does history not tell us that October is not a bad month in which to carry it out?