Chamber and committees

Yes.

Good morning, panel. The pandemic has been extremely disruptive to children and young people at a time in their lives when they might have expected stability. What are the long-term impacts of the pandemic likely to be in relation to children and young people, and in particular those affected by health inequality? I ask Ed Pybus to respond to that first.

Good morning, Mr Lyon. The lack of engagement with local communities on the future of air traffic control in the areas concerned caused real problems. Why was there a lack of engagement? Can you assure us that, if anything is going to change in the future strategy for the area, you will engage with the communities?

Why were HIAL staff and recognised trade unions not involved in the development of the air traffic management strategy from the outset? How do you intend to involve staff in the development of any future strategies? Would that not have helped industrial relations?

I agree with the suggestion.

We should write to the Scottish Government to ask whether it intends to take any further action to collect and evaluate information on the use of judicial discretion under section 19A of the Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973 to disapply time limits for bringing legal proceedings in certain actions and what action that might be.

We should keep the petition open, but in doing so, I would like us to write to Social Security Scotland to highlight the concerns of the petitioner and the recommendations for improving its system that are set out in Macmillan Cancer Support’s submission. It recommends regularly publishing processing times for benefit applications broken down by condition, ensuring that processing times for special rules cases are kept to the minimum period of around a few days, reducing the processing times for applications for non-terminal patients to 11 weeks or less and considering maximising the use of paper-based assessments and making greater use of evidence from medical professionals to limit the need for unnecessary face-to-face assessments.

As the Scottish Government is already considering the speed limits for HGVs, and as Transport Scotland has indicated its willingness to engage directly with the petitioner on the matter, I think that we could maybe close the petition under rule 15.7 of standing orders.

Can we write to the Scottish Government to ask what public body might be involved so that we could contact that body directly to see whether it would support the proposal?

I think that we should write to NatureScot to seek reassurance that its processes are in place for licence refusals and that the reasons for any refusal are transparent and clear to the recipient, and are applied consistently across Scotland. We could also ask whether NatureScot has appropriate guidance for staff on the procedure for licence refusal to ensure that the issues raised by the petitioner in regard to transparency and clarity have been addressed by consistent procedures.