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The next item is consideration of continued petitions. I highlight to those who are joining us this morning or watching online that we have a very considerable number of open petitions but not long remaining in which to consider them. We have only eight meetings of the committee remaining before the dissolution of the Parliament. Our focus for the rest of the parliamentary session, in the limited time that remains to us, is therefore on identifying areas in which we believe that we can make real progress in relation to petitions.

The first petition that we will consider again this morning is PE1953, lodged by Roisin Taylor-Young, which calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to review education support staff roles in order to consider urgently raising wages for ESS across the primary and secondary sectors to £26,000 per annum; increasing the working hours for ESS from 27.5 to 35 hours a week; allowing ESS to work on personal learning plans with teachers and take part in multi-agency meetings; requiring ESS to register with the Scottish Social Services Council; and paying ESS monthly.

When we previously considered the petition in March, we agreed to write to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills. Her response highlights the guidance on supporting children and young people with healthcare needs in schools, which states:

“NHS boards and education authorities should work collaboratively to ensure that all staff receive ... appropriate ... training”.

The cabinet secretary states that the Scottish Government has no formal role in setting the pay or terms and conditions of non-teaching school staff. The submission highlights the Scottish Government funding to support pupils with complex additional support needs, which includes an allocation for local and national programmes to support the recruitment and retention of the ASN workforce.

In view of the response that we have received from the cabinet secretary, do colleagues have any suggestions as to how we might proceed?

Maybe we will get a petition in the next parliamentary session for a nuanced debate on the topic of voting—we will see.

PE2073, which was lodged by Robert Macdonald, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to require the police and court services to check that address information is up to date when issuing court summons and to allow those who are being summoned the chance to receive a summons if their address has changed, rather than the current system of proceeding to issue a warrant for arrest. When we first considered the petition, we heard a detailed example of the impact of that practice.

We considered the petition in March, and the Lord Advocate has responded by echoing a previous submission from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service and highlighting the point that, if the person referred to in the background for the petition was an accused person, the responsibility to update the court on a change of address would rest with that person.

The response also confirms that the processes for obtaining a warrant for accused persons and witnesses, as set out in a past submission from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, still stand.

Additionally, the Lord Advocate points members to a statement that she made before Parliament last October, in which she referenced her specific instruction that pre-conviction warrants should normally be obtained by prosecutors and executed by the police only if there is no immediate alternative to securing the accused’s attendance, or when the accused represents an immediate risk to others.

Finally, the response highlights that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prosecution in Scotland and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland have initiated a joint inspection of processes for witness citation and of ways in which the processes could be modernised. The inspection is to be undertaken during the course of this year, 2025.

Do colleagues have any suggestions as to how we might proceed?

Item 4 is the consideration of new petitions. As I always say before consideration of the first petition, the Parliament seeks the preliminary thoughts of SPICe, the independent research body in the Parliament, so that it can give us a proper briefing on the issues raised. We also get an initial response from the Scottish Government. As I have explained before, the reason why we do so is that, historically, those were the first two actions that we agreed to take, so it curtails the delay in our proper consideration of the issues at hand.

However, as I have also said and as we now have to say to petitioners, we are up against it and have just a handful of meetings of the committee left. Even with new petitions, we have to be pretty certain that we can do something meaningful in the time that is available to us.

We thank the petitioner and hope that the consultation, which covers the routes through which council tax might be changed in the next session of Parliament, will be a mechanism to take forward the aims of the petition.

I do not want to disappoint Paul Sweeney if he has arrived to discuss the petition on the personhood of rivers but we have just come to the end of our proceedings, having already done so, I am sorry to say.

That brings us to the end of the public session.

The final new petition today is PE2177, which was lodged by Jordon Anderson. We considered another petition of his earlier. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to provide sustainable funding to organisations that provide mobility equipment. The petitioner says that mobility services are vital for access to shops, services and community life. His view is that, without secure financial support, such services face closure, putting equality, mobility and inclusion at risk.

The SPICe briefing explains that the funding of ShopMobility schemes varies by location, with funding coming from local authorities, health boards, charitable donations and grants. The briefing notes that there have been reports in recent years about ShopMobility centres having their funding cut or reduced by local authorities or health boards.

The Scottish Government’s response states that local authorities are independent corporate bodies with their own powers and responsibilities and they are entirely separate from the Scottish Government. It states that it is up to individual local authorities to manage their day-to-day decision making and allocate the total financial resources that are available to them based on local needs and priorities.

Do members have any comments or suggestions for action?

Kym, you touched on schools and the fact that the requirement to learn CPR is not an integral part of the curriculum. When evidence was submitted to us about that, some local authorities did not contribute, so we are not altogether clear what is happening. Can you talk further about what difference such a requirement would make? How could learning CPR be made slightly more compulsory, and in what age group would it be done? Is there a best practice model to articulate how it could become a more established compulsory requirement?

Could you and others expand on the standards and guidance in workplace settings? Is there a national standard for workplace training and understanding of the issues? Is there a best practice guide, or should more action be taken in relation to that as well?

Maurice Golden will explore those themes further shortly.

Thank you, Mr Mountain. Do colleagues have any suggestions for how we might proceed?