Chamber and committees

I have questions about how to prevent relationships from becoming adversarial. We have covered the things that can be done with communication, as well as the important point about masking.

Chloe Minto, you mentioned the number of files that Govan Law Centre has dealt with and how there are only eight for care-experienced children. It would be lovely to think that that is because their needs are being met, but I suspect that there might be other challenges around that. We spoke about capacity when it comes to challenging local authorities, and if a local authority employee is caring for a young person, it might be hard for that person to challenge their employer. Do you know why the centre has dealt with so few of those children?

The independence of the tribunal service came across in evidence last week. Does the Govan Law Centre know the demographics of the parents who are contacting its services? I am curious about who is being missed out and who is not making it to your services.

I am going to press you on the question, although I realise that it would be amazing if we had the answer. We could all probably walk out, implement it and do it, but it is not straightforward. I want to press you a little bit on the notion of pausing. What do we require to pause? As you say, everyone is for early intervention and prevention until we get to the point at which we have to stop doing something. It would be helpful for the committee to understand how the system could pause in that way and what would need to happen. I get that that is quite a big question.

I will stop you there for a second. I do not think that anyone in the room would disagree with the idea that public services need to wrap around children, families or whoever the service users are. My question is about what practitioners need. All of us appreciate the strain that our public services are under in relation to demand and workforce, and we acknowledge how hard everybody is working. Given that that is the case, I imagine that some of the high-level talk about restructuring public services would cause alarm among practitioners. What do people who are working with children on the ground now need in order to be able to make things better for children? That might be a question for folk who are involved in such work.

I am sorry—I am catching your eye, but you are on screen, so I was trying to interrupt you via the system. I wanted to ask about the wider issue. I cannot imagine another situation in which we would even be discussing policing what people are thinking. We have examples quite close to home of protesting that would probably be seen as more mainstream being cracked down on. Do you have any views on that?

That is helpful.

You have referenced it, so you might well have seen that, last week, I asked a Police Scotland representative whether they would be comfortable with policing people’s thoughts in terms of prayer, and they responded clearly that they would not, and that they would not anticipate asking somebody what they were praying about. If the legislation should go ahead, is protection needed through an exemption for silent prayer?

Thank you. I will ask Eilidh Dickson the same question.

What do other panel members think?

Good morning. I thank the witnesses for their evidence so far—I appreciate it. My questions were going to be about human rights considerations, but I think that we have already covered that issue quite a bit. However, you can come back in if there is anything further that you wish to say on the matter.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, you talked about your arrest for silent prayer. Could you describe exactly what happened in that situation?