Chamber and committees

Thank you all for your attendance this morning. We must move swiftly on.

I suspend the meeting for, at most, five minutes.

Item 2 is further consideration of the humanitarian impact of the crisis in Ukraine. We are joined this morning by an online panel of witnesses: Graham O’Neill, policy manager, Scottish Refugee Council; Andy Sirel, legal director and partner, JustRight Scotland; and Marie Hayes, Scotland director, British Red Cross. Thank you all for joining us. I am sure that you are all extremely busy at the moment, and we appreciate your taking the time to be with us this morning.

I have a niggling concern. As I am from North Lanarkshire, I have been involved in a couple of resettlement schemes for refugees, the most recent of which was the Syrian resettlement programme—indeed, I think that North Lanarkshire is regarded as a success in the area of refugee resettlement—and I know that, once they had come to Scotland, the refugees needed time and space as well as support in that process.

I am therefore somewhat troubled by some of what I have seen in the media coverage of the current crisis. Although we all welcome the Dnipro Kids children in particular, who are due to arrive in Scotland today, the fact is that these refugees need privacy and must be treated with dignity and respect. I have some concerns in that regard, but I would like to know our witnesses’ thoughts on this matter. Mr O’Neill, would you like to start?

Thank you for providing specific examples that bring home the human impact of what is happening. We have a session with the Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development later, and I am sure that issues relating to safeguarding and disclosure will be raised with him. I hope that we will get more information on that.

Jenni Minto has questions about previous settled status schemes.

My colleague Ms Minto will ask about the learning on the matter but, before that, I will bring in Dr Allan, who joins us online, for a supplementary question.

I will bring in Ms Hayes in a moment, but I know that Mr Ruskell has an interest in this area. Did you have a question, Mr Ruskell?

I invite Ms Byrne to speak.

I am extremely sorry—I was looking at the wrong panel list.

Minister, you mentioned seasonal workers. One of the concerns that witnesses on the previous panel expressed was that they do not know who the seasonal workers are. We are in a situation where the third sector is having to step in and support people who are in financial need or who have not been able to maintain their employment and accommodation status. Have you discussed access to that data on seasonal workers with the UK Government? If the Scottish Government gets the data and you know the numbers, can you share some of it with the third sector organisations that we fund to support people?

Thank you.

Ms Murray, you point to the

“well-established research base”

showing

“that participation in culture provides several wellbeing and social benefits, at individual, community and national level.”

Coming out of Covid, with the challenges that we are all facing, how ready are we to adopt that research and realise those benefits?