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Okay. Another aspect of the dynamic that we consider is packages and groupings of SSIs in relation to bills that have been passed. Significant legislation has been passed in recent years, such as the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 and the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019, which have a significant number of delegated powers because they are complex acts. In order for this committee and the relevant subject committees to plan workload, it would be useful to be given advance notice of SSIs. Do you know whether there are any sets of SSIs in the pipeline for landmark pieces of legislation such as those two acts? Can you keep us updated on progress on them?

Okay. Thank you. Just on that, I mentioned two acts and you mentioned others for which delegated powers have now been drawn down, but the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 and the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 are particularly significant acts. Can you give a commitment that you will go back to your civil servants and ask them to consider when the SSIs for those acts might be introduced and write to the committee to indicate when that is likely to happen?

Minister, I am keen to bring you back to the correspondence from Charles Garland from the Scottish Law Commission. We had an interesting meeting with the gentleman, particularly in relation to the 27 pieces of draft legislation that are shovel-ready, as it were. Would it be possible for you to commission a review of those 27 items and assess whether there are opportunities for the Government to introduce some of them in a timely manner?

The committee mentioned that those pieces of legislation could be sponsored by members through the non-Government bills unit, as members’ bills. That could be an alternative route.

There is a national interest in having that body of work carried forward as quickly as possible. It might be useful to carry out an assessment of the archive of material to see what opportunities there are. It would be useful if that could be set out in writing to the committee so that we could see the Government’s view on those 27 items.

Nice to see you, minister. We are trying to get a feel for what our workload will be so that we can anticipate as best as we can the number of future SSIs in relation to non-Covid aspects of legislation. How will the Scottish Government prioritise non-Covid SSIs to ensure that the necessary SSIs are lodged and scrutinised by the Parliament in a timely manner?

That would be appreciated. Your predecessor tended to write to the subject committees at regular intervals to highlight the volume of SSIs that could be anticipated to fall within a six to 12-month period. Do you intend to continue that practice?

I echo that challenge to the DWP on the issue of a “like for like basis”. It is also important that we test the provisions of the Scotland Act 2016 on where the competence for devolved benefits and the topping-up or enhancing of existing benefits lies. It is an important issue that we need to interrogate; it merits thorough exploration by the Parliament.

There has been a risk-averse approach in the civil service in designing the benefit, which could cause significant harm to the people in Scotland who we are trying to assist. Fundamentally, the entire system of arbitrary tick-box exercises for assessing eligibility is absurd and has no basis in clinical evidence. It is a policy that is bigoted against disabled people. Redesigning the policy to move away from that would be advantageous from my perspective.

The idea that the Scottish Parliament should default to the same policy is not reasonable. We need to test that issue as such a presumption might be having a chilling effect. The petition is a valid way to interrogate the provisions. There is also the wider constitutional element in testing where the threshold of the 2016 act sits and what discretion the Parliament has. It is important that we do not make people who are suffering significant hardship wait until 2023 for some sort of risk-averse approach to be introduced on a like-for-like basis, and then test it after that. We need to move more urgently.

Constituents who have contacted me have raised a wider issue that merits investigation. The use of such products and the potential defects that result in significant chronic pain and other medical complications are not well understood, but the significant level of anecdotal evidence merits formal investigation. Insufficient effort has been put in to achieve that, so the petition is worth while. It would be reasonable to initiate inquiries with the cabinet secretary in the first instance by inviting him to say how the Government will proceed with a formal investigation.

I agree that the current planning framework is not well defined enough in respect of ancient woodlands, and it could benefit from being enhanced, as proposed by the petitioners, to turn ancient woodlands into what are in effect enforced wilderness. As that would be beneficial from a policy perspective, there is a legitimate basis to keeping the petition open.

I thank everyone for their enlightening submissions. In particular, I note that the budget for the project has already been approved by Transport Scotland. I would like to know whether that is a general provision or whether the detailed specification is locked in, by which I mean: is the budget conditional on there being an automatic dependent surveillance broadcast system, or could there be a primary and secondary radar system?

I note that the Prospect trade union held a strike at the end of July, which escalated matters. It would be worth finding out what the latest situation is in that regard. We could find out whether the workforce and their representatives would be willing to make a submission on the issue.

Those are the key things that it would be good to know at this point.

The concerns raised by the petitioners are incredibly important and colleagues’ submissions today have been enlightening. I am curious about the role of NHS health boards in those areas and how accountable they actually are. That is the elephant in the room here, is it not? They are meant to be the democratic voice of stakeholders in those regions, but it is clear that they are not performing that role effectively, given that this issue is now arising from groups that have been formed more organically underneath that structure. Consideration needs to be given to how effective health boards are in representing the interests of their areas. Should the committee write to ask the health boards how they can respond to the concerns raised by the petitioners and how they can redesign their services to respond to the issues raised by the petitioners?

How transparent are the appointments to those health boards? Is there an election process that is well known about? Should they not be considered to be as important as local council elections, for example, with regard to developing representation? That is therefore an element to consider: how democratic and accountable are health boards? They are quite opaque.