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Yes.

I am grateful to be able to speak to the petitions. I have been involved with the campaign to improve the Stromeferry bypass for many years—probably for much of the time since I was elected—and I am really pleased that Mr Noble has brought the petitions to the Parliament.

As you said, convener, parts of those roads, which link the current trunk roads on the route to Skye, are single track. However, the big issue is the Stromeferry bypass, which is subject to landslides. At that part of the road, the road and the rail line run side by side, so the landslides impact on both, and there is a risk to life. Children use that road daily to get to Plockton high school, which is also the National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music, and ferry traffic for Uist and Harris uses the route that goes up to Uig on Skye.

When there is a landslide, the road can be closed for months, and it impacts badly on the community and commuters. I am concerned that the road is not recognised as a trunk road because it links the Highland Council mainland to the Western Isles via Skye.

The road is also essential for secondary education and medical cover. The local hospital that serves the whole area is in Broadford in Skye, but it can become cut off from the community, creating stress and disruption to care. You can imagine what it must be like for families who cannot get to a loved one who is in hospital. Closing the road also cuts children off from their high school, which is unacceptable. The only alternative route involves a 130-mile diversion, which is impossible to take on a daily basis.

The cost of improving the road is beyond the financial reach of Highland Council, which already has the greatest mileage of road to cover. Going by the mail from constituents, it would seem that most of it is falling into disrepair. It is pretty grim in places, and finding that amount of money for repairs is impossible.

I am disappointed by Transport Scotland’s response. It says that one of the ways in which it gauges whether a route should become a trunk road is that it must

“Provide the users with a coherent and continuous system of routes, which serve destinations of importance to industry, commerce, agriculture and tourism”.

The route is part of the north coast 500, which is an internationally recognised tourist route. Indeed, there has been a lot of concern about how busy that route is. It is the main route between the Highlands and the southern Hebrides and Western Isles. It is the main route to the National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music and it is critical to industry, farming, crofting and aquaculture, and also to the renewables and decommissioning industry because of the yard at Kishorn, which I hope is set to grow and provide a much-needed economic boost in that area.

I therefore believe that the route fulfils Transport Scotland’s criterion. I ask the committee to raise that directly with the Scottish Government to persuade ministers of the merits of the route becoming a trunk road. It would serve well an area of Scotland that has largely been ignored in the past. We really need to create jobs and repopulate the area, which is under a lot of pressure from tourism and holiday homes. We need get people back to the area to make sure that it grows.

Yes. I am a wee bit disappointed with that response from the Government, because it means that there will not really be any change in policy until much later this year, or possibly next year, to be more realistic. In the meantime, I think that Caithness Health Action Team should be recognised as a community organisation under the 2015 act, because it spends a lot of time representing its community.

I understand that NHS Highland is now working with CHAT in a much more positive fashion. The committee could consider writing to NHS Highland to ask whether it will now be willing to recognise CHAT and to give it the input and status that it would have had if it had been recognised under the 2015 act.

CHAT is coming to me with issues from its community more and more often. The organisation is well recognised and people turn to it for guidance and representation on health issues. It could only help NHS Highland and indeed the wider community if CHAT was round the table. I ask the committee to consider keeping the petition open until we get some form of resolution, because the work that the Scottish Government is doing will not resolve the issue in the near future.

Yes. I am heartened that this work is on-going, but I am disappointed that it has taken this long. CHAT fulfils the expectations of what constitutes a community body, so it should be involved in decision making and have that request agreed.

We probably have to wait and see what happens. I ask that you write to the Scottish Government and see what timeline it would be proposing to take action to put in place an appeal process. That is the problem. We know that CHAT should be accepted, but the trouble is that there is no appeals process when it is not accepted. Could you ask the Scottish Government when it hopes to be in a position to instigate an appeals process? Also, could you ask it to issue guidance or something in the interim so that we could get CHAT to where it should be? It has done a huge amount of work locally. It is trusted by its community and it would be helpful if it was around the table with NHS Highland. You have heard petitioners from the north here on other issues, and CHAT would be well able to represent their views with NHS Highland. If that happened, we might not be in the position where people feel that they can only petition this Parliament to try to get some action. It might cut through some of the concerns that people have.

I have not spoken to Mr Sinclair in detail, but I spoke to him after the committee meeting last week. He pointed out that his petition is half about health and half about local government. I think that he is a wee bit concerned that the local government aspect of his petition might be lost. The committee might want to look at that further; I just wanted to make that point.

I do not want to repeat what you have said, convener, but I will echo it. From the start of training for staff all the way through the system, there seems to be a systemic fault, which is that the system is totally geared towards urban areas and does not focus on rural areas. It is clear that, if we base the structure on a rural area, that works in an urban area. During the Covid-19 pandemic, health boards throughout Scotland started using the NHS Near Me system, which was devised especially to save people in Caithness from travelling long distances.

We need systems to be put in place; there is talk of a commissioner or the like. Someone needs to advocate to ensure that the whole system considers rural areas and that we look after their needs initially, which would translate to urban areas. A root and branch approach is needed.

I wonder whether the committee has had any discussions with the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee about whether it will look at the subject. I know that the Health and Sport Committee in the previous session of Parliament looked at some issues to do with rural healthcare. In a way, the problem extends from the very start of the process, with the training of clinicians, right through to how we support them in different areas. They are now all trained to work in huge teams, but when people work in rural general hospitals, they are not in a big team.

In addition, the standards of care, which are written for urban areas, are not transferable to rural areas. One of the lessons that I have learned from my time in Parliament is that policies that are written for rural areas work in urban areas, but that is not the case the other way round. We should be turning this on its head so that we make sure that people have access to the services that they need.

I wonder whether the committee has discussed the matter with the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, because a light needs to be shone on it and some detailed work is required to make sure that we get the changes that we need. We certainly need to have people advocating for our rural areas, because that is just not happening.

My final point is that, in the Highlands and Islands, we get assistance with travel and accommodation, but it is absolutely inadequate when people get £40 a night to stay in Inverness and they cannot find a room for less than £400 a night. That is impossible, and it is creating a barrier to healthcare.

I echo some of the things that the petitioner said about the Sumburgh radar project in his written response. I share his concerns, and I believe that he has highlighted areas that we need to look at.

When the ATMS project came to light, everyone agreed that something had to change and that safety improvements had to be made, but it was felt that HIAL was going in the wrong direction.

Radar is really important, but my understanding is that there are concerns about the training that is being delivered to the new operators of radar who will be transferred across. In his submission, the petitioner says that training has ceased, so all the work that has gone on has now stopped. The training manual is being rewritten and will need to be approved by the Civil Aviation Authority, which will build in quite a time lag.

It would be good to find out how many people need to receive the training and how many people who were in training will go into the new programme once it is signed off. I also understand that the whole thing might not have been signed off by Transport Scotland. We need to ask Transport Scotland whether that is the case. It might be worth asking NATS, which runs the Sumburgh radar at the moment, what it thinks is happening—it must have a date in mind, because it has a contract and will know when it is supposed to be handing over the radar to HIAL.

Quite a few concerns have been raised with me about the situation, and I wonder whether the committee has given any thought to the suggestion that Audit Scotland should consider the issue. If it does so, perhaps it should also consider the issue of the transfer of radar.

The petitioners have made it very clear what the issues are. There is a huge distance to travel to access healthcare, and they are not being heard.

Let me give the example of maternity services in Caithness. I have been asking the health board for a risk assessment of the journey between Caithness and Inverness for someone who goes into labour early, for example. I know that there are people who are more likely to be induced or to have an elective caesarean, but there are people who go into labour and need to drive down that road. The road is horrendous in winter and can often be blocked.

As we were discussing before the meeting, expecting someone to drive down there with a partner who is in labour is unacceptable. It is an offence for someone to use a phone while driving a car. Imagine what it is like for a driver to have someone in active labour beside them while they are trying to concentrate on a really difficult, dangerous road. No one will risk assess that journey. I have asked the same question in relation to routes in Moray. I hope that the committee would at least request that a risk assessment is done on transporting people in emergency situations where there is no local healthcare.

When this situation started in Caithness, there was not enough ambulance cover. Quite often, if one person was being transported by that means, the area was left without an ambulance. That problem has been resolved to an extent, but the situation is still not ideal.

I support the petitioners’ argument that the healthcare service that they have received is not equitable.

I thank the committee for the huge amount of work that it has done on the issue and for all the evidence that it has taken. In some ways, you are responsible for our being in a much better position than we were when the petition was first lodged.