Chamber and committees

Thank you, cabinet secretary. I briefly suspend the meeting to allow a changeover of witnesses.

That would be good—thank you. As you know, the committee is keen to have a more collaborative approach with Government in the development of legislation in that area, so we will appreciate being kept up to date on progress.

Another issue that we talked about to some extent in the chamber, and which was covered in our inquiry, involved the intersection between reserved and devolved areas in relation to conversion practices. Have you had any further discussions with the United Kingdom Government on how we ensure that there are no unintended loopholes in any future legislation?

Before we move to questions, a number of the panel mentioned grass-roots engagement. I put on record that, as part of the committee’s on-going work programme, we are determined to go out and engage directly with the community when that is appropriate. That is certainly in our plans for the future. We will now move to questions and I hand over to Maggie Chapman.

Do you want to bring in anybody else, Pam?

Thanks for that, Fulton. We have clearly made progress, but we know from some pretty horrific evidence that we have some distance to go still in tackling some of that racism. Pam Gosal has the next question.

Pam, your microphone has switched off.

Yes.

I see from the chat that Suzanne Munday is saying that that is an issue that the community raised with the Minister for Equalities and Older People, Christina McKelvie, recently. We are speaking to the minister next week, so we will maybe raise that point then as well.

We are coming to the end of the time that we have. We have covered a lot of ground, but do any of our committee members have a burning question that they want to ask?

I will follow on from that point. I may just stick with Davie Donaldson, initially. Obviously, the racism that Scotland’s Gypsy Traveller community experiences is not internationally unique. Every day, we see the horrors of what is happening in Ukraine, where the Gypsy Traveller community experiences the same sort of racism as does the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community in Russia. Does anyone want to say a few words about that and about the experience of refugees who come to Scotland? I will go to Davie first, because it follows on from what he was saying.

Yes, that is okay. We will hear first from Maureen Finn.