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Okay. I will leave it there.

That was a very short answer, Elliot. You tried to wriggle out of that one.

Good morning to the witnesses. It has been incredibly refreshing to read two reports from the commission that were written in plain English and that say what is wrong and what should be done. We are not used to seeing such reports from bodies such as yours. That is a note of praise.

I want to ask you about transport, as transport is mentioned in your reports from 2020 and this year. In “Making the Future: Initial Report of the 2nd Just Transition Commission”, which was produced this year, a “broken transport system” is mentioned. The language is quite tough. The report says:

“Scotland’s public transport network requires vast improvement and must be made more affordable”

and that it requires

“significant investment from government and re-prioritisation of funds”.

Will you expand on that?

I will ask you some more questions about what you have said.

I will come to Helen Martin in a moment, but I just want to jump in here. You are right—you have produced reports, including a recent one on the construction industry, which I have just flicked through. It is very interesting, and it raises issues that many of us have heard many times before, but my concern is that although this might well be fascinating stuff, what is going to come of it? You have sat down with people in the construction industry and have produced a report, but how are we going to monitor change? Will the report lead to anything, and are you going to be the driver of change? If not, what is the point of it all?

It seems to me that it is a collaborative thing, and there is probably a role for the committee. You are here today, and we can work closely together in monitoring this stuff.

My next question is my final one, because I know that others want to come in. I think that it was Mary Alexander who mentioned that you receive some Government funding. How much is that?

Patricia Findlay, if you answer this, could you keep your answer a bit shorter, if that is okay? The question is for whoever wants to answer it.

I have been looking at the convention’s website, because I wanted a definition of what we mean by “fair work” which can mean different things to different people. The definition on your website is 76 pages long. That is quite a lot. How on earth are employers meant to take all that in?

Regardless of what Patricia Findlay just said, what has the fair work convention achieved so far? Have there been any tangible outcomes?

I do not know who wants to respond—maybe Mary Alexander or Helen Martin wants to come in.

I will not be as brief as Pam Duncan-Glancy, but I will try to be as brief as possible.

I have a couple of amendments in the group, which are, in my view, quite straightforward.

The bill proposes that it will be a criminal offence to make a false statutory declaration or a false application. A person who commits such an offence is liable to imprisonment for up to two years and/or a fine. However, what would constitute making a false declaration and what prosecutors would have to prove should a person be accused of doing so are not clear.

It might be said, “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” If I were to say that I had been living as a woman for three months and I had not, I would not be telling the truth. Of course, it is not clear at all from the bill what living as a woman or a man means legally. We will come to that in discussing later amendments.

If I took something belonging to you, convener, that would constitute theft, and I could be prosecuted. If I had broken the speed limit to get over to Edinburgh, I could face penalty points. If I tried to pin the blame on someone else for that offence, that would be a lie, and I could be done for that. However, if I said that I had been living as a woman, how would anyone prove that I was lying? Given that we do not know what living as a woman means in the bill, it would be pretty difficult to establish whether I was telling the truth.

The bill creates a serious offence, which is punishable by imprisonment. It is surely incumbent on ministers to set out what would constitute making a false declaration. Amendment 22 would compel them to do that, and it would also compel them to set out what evidence would have to be provided to show that someone had lied. If ministers cannot do any of that, it is difficult to see how an offence could be prosecuted, because we would simply not know what the offence was. If we do not know what constitutes an offence because we do not know how to prove or disprove it, there can be no offence.

I say to those who are in favour of the bill—I think that the majority of the committee are in favour of it—that it needs to be much tighter. If amendment 22 is rejected, there will be legal challenges galore coming along the tracks. If the committee is minded to accept it, amendment 28 would make any regulations that are made as a result subject to the affirmative procedure, which would give an extra layer of parliamentary scrutiny.

The meaning of the phrase “living in the acquired gender” is fundamental to the bill. I have searched high and low for an explanation of what has to happen if, for example, a man was to say that they were a woman; surely, the bill does not allow for a man simply to say, “I am a woman”, get a certificate to say so without providing evidence of anything, and then have that legally recognised through a change to their birth certificate—or am I missing something? I do not think so.

The bill says that I would have to live as a woman for three months. However, if we are to bring in a bill that is as fundamental to people’s lives as this one, we need to be clear on what is meant by it. The bill is woolly at best, and that is not good enough. If we are going to allow people to make declarations that they have changed gender, surely the law should say what is meant by that. The bill does not do that; indeed, it does not say anything about it, which is particularly concerning if we are moving towards a model of self-identification. Surely, something has to have changed in order for someone to say, “I was a man but now I am a woman” or vice versa.

Amendment 20 is another attempt by me to tighten up a bill that is full of holes. It does two things. It says that ministers must say in regulations, first, what they mean by the phrase “living in the acquired gender” and, secondly,

“what changes would be considered evidence that a new gender had been acquired.”

It is not for me to say what such changes should be—just that there should be some. Otherwise, we will be left with a situation in which it is easier for predatory men to prey on women by pretending to be women, because of having a certificate without any of the current safeguards that exist in law—a piece of paper that, as the bill is currently drafted, proves precisely nothing.

Amendment 27 makes those regulations subject to the affirmative procedure, and amendments 29 and 30 are technical and consequential.

I move amendment 20.

I always think that it is useful during stages 2 and 3 of a bill to listen to what is being said by people one might assume one disagrees with. I think that there is probably some common ground between me and the cabinet secretary. She may not realise that, but I think that there is. She can intervene on me at any point.

Amendment 20 simply seeks to get the Government to spell out what we mean by “acquired gender” because I have seen nothing about that until today. The cabinet secretary listed a few things. I would be happy to work with the cabinet secretary ahead of stage 3 to see if we can insert something into the bill, based on what she has said, that will help to clarify matters, if she is prepared to do that. I invite her to respond to that.

Cabinet secretary, I am interested in what you are saying. Can you spell out some of the “numerous” other examples?