Chamber and committees

Good morning, and welcome to the 32nd meeting in 2022 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. Apologies have been received from Rachael Hamilton.

Our first agenda item is consideration of an affirmative instrument. I welcome to the meeting the Minister for Community Safety, Elena Whitham MSP, and her officials. Kieran Burke is from the access to justice branch of the Scottish Government, and Emma Thomson is a solicitor in the Scottish Government legal directorate.

I refer members to paper 1 and invite the minister to speak about the draft regulations.

That completes consideration of the affirmative instrument. I thank the minister and her officials for attending the meeting, and I suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a change of witnesses.

Welcome back. Our next agenda item is to hear more about a petition on Makaton sign language. Our predecessor committee kept the petition open and included it in its legacy paper for us to consider. I welcome to the meeting the petitioner, Sandra Docherty, who is accompanied by David Bain, and I invite Sandra to speak to the petition.

No; take your time.

Brilliant—thank you so much, Sandra. That was really good. If we were to stop now and do nothing more on the petition, you should know that you have already achieved a significant raising of awareness in this place and probably further afield. I thank you for that, because it is really important.

We will now go round the committee and ask a few questions. I will start. The petition talks specifically about the use of Makaton in the legal system. I wonder whether you might want to talk a little about that and about whether, if we are going to look at this issue, we should look more widely than the legal system. We are the civil justice committee, but we are also the equalities and human rights committee, so we span all those areas.

Brilliant—we will keep the petition open, write to the Government and decide in a future work programme discussion how we will take the matter forward. I thank Sandra and David again. We will now move into private session.

Thank you very much, minister.

There are no questions or comments, so we will move straight on to agenda item 2. I invite the minister to move motion S6M-06777.

Motion moved,

That the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee recommends that the Legal Aid and Advice and Assistance (Miscellaneous Amendment) (Scotland) Regulations 2023 be approved.—[Elena Whitham.]

Motion agreed to.

Thank you very much. That was a really good summary of the issues.

The committee members were unanimous in their view that the law needed to change when we took evidence. We were keen to do something that Richy Edwards mentioned, which was to make sure that, as we went through the parliamentary process, we did not retraumatise people who gave evidence or even folk who were watching the committee. That was a really important point that you raised, Richy.

Do you think that we have managed to work out a way of doing that? We have heard from the bill team that it felt like progress had been made in doing the bill a little bit differently, but it would be good to hear from Richy Edwards, and anybody else, on that.

Take your time.

I suppose one of the questions is how often people who communicate using Makaton will come across people in the legal system and elsewhere who can understand them and communicate back in Makaton. We may want to look at that to ensure that, whatever information people have, or even if they sign, “I want a glass of water before I go any further”, they can communicate that, be understood and get a response.