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You referred to problematic drinkers. We could certainly have a discussion about what that means. However, “really problematic drinking”—which is the term that was used in the court’s findings—goes further than that, does it not?

Yes.

In Public Health Scotland’s report, civil servants decided to intervene and change the wording. For example, the wording was supposed to be “consistent”, but civil servants decided to write “strong and consistent”, which is the wording that appeared, not in the draft, but in Public Health Scotland’s final report.

We can see, as Tess White said earlier, that a 40 per cent reduction in alcohol treatment has occurred. Although the minister has said many times that that is not the silver bullet, that the issue is nuanced, and that lots of other things need to be done, the fact is that nothing else is being done. This is the Government’s silver bullet; this is the only thing that it seems to be doing when it comes to alcohol. We simply need to see more treatment happening, because that has been proved to reduce people’s dependence on alcohol, to reduce deaths, and to improve and save lives.

We also need to look at the fact that a policy that increases the price of alcohol will affect dependent drinkers disproportionately. The whole point about being a dependent drinker is that you drink to the exclusion of other things—it is your primary focus and you are dependent on that substance. It is absolutely awful that the MUP policy has increased the price of alcohol, which the Government must have known would affect dependent drinkers, and that, over time, nothing has been done to help those dependent drinkers to ensure that they did not spend more money on alcohol and that they actually came away from it. We should have known—the Government and the 25 civil servants who worked on the policy should have known—that that would happen.

I want to speak about the outrageous profits that are being made by retailers because of MUP. It is simply unacceptable that a policy that is designed to help people is creating huge amounts of money, but that money is not being reinvested in alcohol programmes or in helping the people whom the policy was designed to help.

It was made clear in court that the policy is not supposed to be a population-level approach. That is not what the Government said in court. The minister told me, however, that that was the point. That does not make sense to me.

Turning to other evidence, a Taiwanese group wrote in The Lancet that the modelling that was done was simply not accurate, and that the policy is not doing what we think it is doing.

The fact is that the number of people who have died because of alcohol has increased by 25 per cent. That is the figure. Saying that we have saved 156 lives in modelling suggests that, had we not had MUP, we would have had the highest number of deaths ever.

We have heard from the minister that there are confounders, and that the biggest confounder is simply the cost of living. There has also been Covid. We must see, with a full evaluation, what happens in five years’ time, when, I hope, we will not have those confounders. That could give us a really good indication of what is going on.

The minister has said that we are looking to increase the amount that is spent on treatment of drug and alcohol problems. I welcome that, and I ask the minister to back the Conservatives’ proposed right to addiction recovery (Scotland) bill, which would give people the right to treatment, which would force our health and social care partnerships to invest at that level.

In summary, I say that the evaluation has not proved that MUP has done what we set out that it would do, which was that it would help the heaviest drinkers in our society. We need to ensure that, if MUP continues, we use the money that is generated to help those people. Otherwise, it is an absolute travesty.

Imagine that I am going to work in haematology and I find myself upset by an abortion protest outside the hospital. Would the bill cover my being upset by that, even if I was not influenced by it?

In your opening statement, you talked about protests. I want to separate out traditional protests, involving placards and shouting, because we have heard clear evidence that no one is in favour of that.

I want to come to the issue of silent prayer, which I directly asked the police about. They said that they would not ask someone why they were there if they were standing silently, and that they would certainly not ask what they were praying or thinking about. The police do not want to get into that. Given that the bill includes silent prayer, but that it does not seem as though the police would do anything about that, I am a bit confused as to how that would work in practice.

Finally, medicine moves on and things change. We now see women accessing abortion services in very different ways than they did only 10 years ago, for example. GPs and pharmacies provide services, along with other places. The bill allows scope for expansion into those areas, and we heard from the minister that that enables a flexible approach. However, if you were to expand the legislation to cover GP and pharmacy services at 200m, a lot of Scotland would be covered, which would be very different to your tightly drawn-up list of 30 sites. What reassurances do we have that such scenarios would not happen?

The bill talks about intentionally or recklessly influencing another person. Would the bill cover staff who go to work for a completely different reason but who are, as we have heard in evidence, affected by abortion protests?

Thank you for coming, minister. I declare an interest as a practising general practitioner in the national health service.

I have a few questions. My primary concern comes from evidence that I have heard about the right to protest for other reasons. When the police and a defence solicitor were here, I specifically asked about our right to go, for instance, to a hospital to protest against Eljamel to say that what he did was unacceptable. There was also some discussion about situations where an employer was trying to prevent some protest from happening because they did not like it.

The bill talks about intentionally or recklessly influencing someone’s decision. We have seen people outside Parliament protesting against Eljamel who have been wearing scrubs with blood on them, and I suppose that, from a distance, one could be concerned. That might be deemed to be “reckless” in relation to influencing people. What is your take on the fact that the police and the solicitor said that the bill would prevent other forms of protest?

I will read out a paragraph from a letter that Catriona McMillan wrote to the committee on behalf of the Law Society of Scotland. It states:

“If the committee remains concerned that the Bill may be used to, or set a precedent for, curbing other legitimate protests it may wish to consider the suggestion we have made in our written evidence that overarching principles be included on the face of the Bill to assist with the proper balancing exercises required for ECHR compliance—in this case, the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly (articles 10 and 11 ECHR)”.

Do you agree with the Law Society’s suggestion, which is to put the overarching principles on the face of the bill?

Thank you for coming to talk to us about the bill. I declare an interest as a practicing NHS GP.

My question is similar to the one that I asked the minister earlier. In your opening statement, you talked about how you would not support any curtailment of protests for other, very legitimate reasons. How do you square that with what the police and the solicitor who came before us said when I asked whether I would be able to, for example, go and protest about Mr Eljamel, which is a legitimate protest to engage in? They said that they felt that the bill would not allow me to do that.