Seòmar agus comataidhean

I will go back to Professor de Londras to explore further the issue, which we touched on earlier, of the use of the made affirmative procedure. You covered that in detail in your written evidence and you are clearly critical of the overuse of the made affirmative procedure. From a practical point of view, how would you amend the bill that is in front of us in order to reduce the reliance on the made affirmative procedure, which is clearly an objective that you want to achieve?

Thank you. Professor McKenzie Skene, can we have your view on that?

Good morning. I want to raise a slightly different issue—that of electronic notification of bankruptcy documents. I note that the bill proposes to make permanent the temporary provisions in the coronavirus legislation that allow electronic notification rather than service in hard copy. Do the witnesses have any concerns about that being made permanent? Are there any practical implications to it?

Speaking from personal experience, like many of my MSP colleagues, I probably receive hundreds of electronic communications every day and people not infrequently say to me that they sent me an email that I did not receive because it went into the spam folder, was quarantined or, as sometimes happens, disappeared into the ether. How reliable is the system of electronic notification? Are there enough safeguards in the bill to protect people?

Good morning to our witnesses. I suppose the key issue that the committee has to consider in relation to the bill is whether the measures that are before us are necessary and proportionate, or whether they represent ministerial overreach.

We have been presented with a lot of evidence from interested parties and from members of the public. A strong theme has come through regarding the issue of civil liberties, which I want to ask you about. The bill will allow the Scottish ministers to impose quite substantial restrictions on people’s activities, as we have seen over the past two years but on a permanent basis. There will be particular impacts in the area of health, where individuals can be required to

“submit to medical examination ... be detained in a hospital or other suitable establishment”,

or be forced to

“be kept in quarantine”.

What is your view on that? Does the bill strike an appropriate balance between the protection of public health and respect for civil liberties? How will the question of proportionality work through in practice?

Perhaps Professor de Londras can start.

Thank you. That is very helpful.

I might come back to you on the issue of process, but I ask the other witnesses on the panel for a view.

Thank you, Dr Thomson, that was a helpful response. There are a couple of things in what you said that I want to follow up on.

Clearly, we have had a big problem over the past two years with intensive care unit beds being taken up by Covid patients. It seems that that is now on a downward trend, which is very positive. What have you picked up over the past few weeks about future trends? Do you expect the issue with delayed admission to start to work itself through, or is it with us for the longer term?

I have a second question, which I will ask now, to save time. There is clearly a workforce issue—that was mentioned in an earlier discussion in response to a question from the convener. You make the point in your submission that, even before Covid, emergency departments were “understaffed and under-resourced”. How do we solve that in the short term? Recruitment takes time; Dr Shackle said that it takes 10 years to train a general practitioner. I imagine that it takes a similar length of time to train staff in emergency medicine. Even if we started ramping up recruitment now, it would take a long time to work through the system. We probably cannot recruit from other countries, because they face exactly the same challenges that we are facing—quite apart from there being ethical issues in bringing to Scotland medical staff who have been trained in poorer countries. What more can be done to address the staffing issue and help us, without our having to wait 10 years for more medical staff to be trained here?

Thank you, Dr Thomson. I have one more question—I am happy to open it up to other witnesses to get their perspectives. You have talked about the importance of retaining staff. Anecdotally, we hear that there is a huge issue across the NHS with burnout among staff who have had to live through the past two years of Covid. That has probably accelerated the trend of people seeking to take early retirement. Is that your perspective? If so, what practical steps could the Scottish Government and the NHS take to encourage people to stay on?

I think that Professor Elder was hoping to come in.

Thank you for that response. We have seen from the discussion around the rules on self-isolation this week that the Scottish public have complied very well with the public health guidance. When the Prime Minister announced that the self-isolation rules for England would be dropped, a lot of criticism was made of him in some quarters, and some people seemed oblivious of the fact that, in Scotland, there has never been a legal requirement to self-isolate following a positive test, except in the very limited circumstances of international travellers. I think that we are in a good place in terms of the public.

The reason why I ask the question, as you can imagine, is that we have an instrument to consider shortly on extending the extraordinary powers that the Scottish Government currently has for a further six months. Given that we know that the Scottish public responds very well to public health advice, why can we not just trust people to follow the advice because we know that they will do so, rather than having those legal powers continue?