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That is an excellent line to end on.

I apologise for being late to the meeting. I had an urgent task that I thought would be simple but turned out not to be so. I have been watching the live feed and think that I caught most of the meeting before I got here. I certainly caught Mr Briggs grassing up Mr Mason’s transport options.

I will follow on from Miles Briggs’s line of questioning about centre capacity. You will be aware of the Blairvadach centre in my region. The centre, which is run by Glasgow City Council, is an interesting example because it is fully booked all year round at the moment, with a mix of council bookings for its own schools and commercial bookings that subsidise that school work. How would you respond to the suggestion that increasing the obligation to provide space for schools could displace the commercial work and might actually push some centres into a more precarious financial situation? To put it bluntly, they can charge more for commercial bookings than they typically can for school bookings.

I will move on to a totally different area of questioning, but you will be familiar with it because we covered some of the ground at the Finance and Public Administration Committee when it looked at the financial memorandum. The response from trade unions has been interesting, in that there is a significant well of support from teachers for giving more pupils access to residential outdoor education, but there is also an understandable concern from them that that would essentially formalise what at the moment is an informal system that is reliant on voluntary contributions and significant goodwill from teachers. How do you respond in particular to the suggestion that, if outdoor education was put on a statutory footing, the issue would have to go to the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers to be considered as a renegotiation of teachers’ terms and conditions?

As someone who is keen to support the bill, that is probably my chief area of concern, particularly as it relates to the financial memorandum and the wider costs. The system at the moment relies significantly on teachers’ good will and volunteering their time, and it is reasonable to expect teachers to still be broadly willing to do that. However, there is a question of fairness. I struggle to think of many other areas of employment in which we would move something on to a statutory footing—essentially, we are obliging schools to provide it and, de facto, obliging teachers to provide it as part of their employment—but not pay for it.

I absolutely agree with that.

This is my final question on this area. I am interested to hear your thoughts on the suggestion that, if centres had their own centrally employed teachers and appropriately qualified youth workers, perhaps not as many classroom teachers would be required to accompany pupils on trips as has historically been the case. The typical experience is that two primary 7 classes go and both of the primary 7 teachers go too, but there is a suggestion that perhaps only one of them would be required if the centres had an appropriate number of their own appropriately qualified staff.

Thank you very much. That was very useful.

I am grateful for that.

I accept that there will be other significant differences in their legislative provisions and in the wider context, but you said that other jurisdictions that do not have such a timescale with regard to the diagnosis have seen a gradual increase in numbers, too. Are there any particular examples that you would cite in that respect, recognising that there will be other important contextual differences?

I totally understand why, if the bill were to be passed, there would need to be a transition period and a debate about how long that would be. I understand why the CMO, for example, would want it to be longer. However, that line of argument suggests that, at least initially, the system will not be able to meet demand, which would inevitably result in a significant amount of political pressure to increase funding to increase capacity.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of this particular proposal—I am genuinely undecided on the bill at this point—if the Parliament were to pass a law to give people the option of ending their own life, people would have an entirely reasonable expectation that they would be able to choose that option. If they were then to find that they could not choose it simply because the system lacked capacity for them to do so, that would quite understandably result in political pressure to increase funding to increase capacity. That leads me back to the core question on the financial memorandum, which is that costs might increase quicker than is projected, because there will be pressure to meet demand quicker.

Good morning—sorry, good afternoon. We have been here a while.

I will return to the timescale in the definition of terminal illness, because I did not quite follow your argument earlier, Liam. You project that the number of people who would choose an assisted death would start off small and then increase. That is based on the experience in Oregon and Victoria, but those jurisdictions have a definition of terminal illness that includes a timescale of six months or 12 months. At any given time, there is only a certain number of people with a terminal diagnosis that would see them likely to die within 12 months. Your proposal does not have that timescale.

My assumption would have been the opposite. If the bill were to pass, in the first year of people being able to access assisted dying, I assume that you would start off with a much larger number, being, for example, people with a prognosis that indicated that they might pass away in the next three to four years but who wanted to access assisted dying in case there came a point when they were no longer able to pass the capacity test. The number would therefore start off larger and might then decline for a couple of years before increasing again.

Will you talk us through why the projections are based on jurisdictions that have a definition that includes a timescale of six months, 12 months or, in another case, 18 months?

I have one other question on that. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that, in response to the convener’s initial line of questioning, you suggested that, in part, the ceiling on the number of people accessing assisted dying would be the capacity of and constraints on the system and the number of clinicians who are qualified, trained and willing to do it. Given that that is the case across a range of public services and entitlements that people have already, I found it somewhat strange that you were, in essence, arguing that the FM was based in part on an assumption that the system would not be able to meet demand. Will you elaborate on that a little? Is it that it might not be able to meet demand at least in the first few years?