Chamber and committees

I return to the issue of escalation. The First Minister’s letter of last week rightly focused on the situation in Gaza, but we are also aware from an increasing number of news reports of the illegal displacement of Palestinians in the west bank, and there could be an unfolding humanitarian crisis there in time. What is your assessment of that? How does that impact on the Scottish Government’s response, whether through a forthcoming resettlement scheme or other humanitarian efforts? Are you factoring in the potential for a crisis that goes much beyond what we are seeing in Gaza at the moment?

A number of communities across Scotland have formal civic links with communities in Palestine. I have noted that Dundee is twinned with Nablus and that Glasgow is twinned with Bethlehem, while Stirling has had an informal twinning with a refugee community in Jerusalem. To what extent can those informal and more civic links be used to address the humanitarian crisis that could unfold?

I am interested to know whether Scottish Water sets a maximum ratio between the highest-paid and the lowest-paid workers and what that is.

We are very aware of that approach; the question is whether what you have planned will be enough in the future. If you think that there will be even more extreme weather events, do you need to scale that up? Will that be adequate?

That would require joined-up working between you and SEPA.

Yes—the question was about commercialisation benefits.

I come back to the comments about extreme weather and the impact on Scottish Water’s infrastructure. I am interested to know exactly what the impact has been. Given what we have seen in recent months, with intensifying extreme weather, have you identified any changing patterns?

Has storm Babet thrown up any thinking around whether particular regions of Scotland are more vulnerable than others and need to be prioritised for investment? What are we learning as a result of the extreme weather events that we are seeing? How is that affecting your investment strategy, and how is it putting pressure on the assets that you have?

My last question is on the legislative framework. Is there a need for any change in the legislation to enable you to adapt to the impacts of climate change?

On what you said about targeting the most important areas for monitoring, I presume that those are designated bathing areas. I accept that, and acknowledge that there is investment going into that, but many people now use bodies of fresh water—rivers and lochs—for wild swimming, so they need information about whether those bathing places are safe to go into.

I have constituents who went for a wild swim in the River Tay, and everybody in that party—I think there were around 10 people—became ill a couple of days afterwards. It is very hard for them to pinpoint exactly what the cause was, but it was probably related to bacterial infection that they believe came from a combined sewer overflow incident in Stanley, in Perthshire. Their call to me and others has been for us to give them the information about that.

We realise that investment in the assets is needed to ensure that we do not get pollution but, at the very least, people need to know whether there has been an incident and whether they are putting their lives at risk by going into the water. That means that the issue is bigger than just our bathing waters, because there are lots of lochs and rivers where people go for a dip.

Is 1,000 monitors enough?