Seòmar agus comataidhean

I will follow up on Liz Smith’s line of questioning around the public health levy. The Scottish Retail Consortium made the point that, from its perspective, the levy targets a particular sector of retail, and that sector is supermarkets that sell alcohol and tobacco. As you have explained, it is a public health levy, and alcohol and tobacco have significant public health impact.

You might not have the figure to hand, but do you have a rough, ballpark idea of how much the negative health effects of alcohol and tobacco cost our public services? How much do they cost the NHS every year?

Is it not the case that, with there being no public health supplement, the difference from the minimum unit price is being pocketed directly by the retailer? There is no current mechanism for that amount to be reinvested in public services to create an additional public health benefit. However, if we decided to introduce a public health levy, that would ensure that what is now just excess profit going straight into the retailer’s pocket is reinvested in the services that are used to support people who are suffering the consequences of alcohol and tobacco use.

Switching back to another area, I was quite concerned by what you said in your opening statement about the cut to financial transactions in the supplementary estimates. Bearing in mind that that cut is on top of what was already a very bleak picture on FTs, have you had any engagement from the UK Government on why that is its current direction of travel on FTs?

In a somewhat similar area, there have been reports over the past couple of days—I think that a question on the subject has been selected for this afternoon, and a question on it might be put to the First Minister later in the week—on the decision to freeze additional capital spend in the health portfolio for the remainder of the current financial year. Will that have a knock-on impact on the capital allocations in the draft budget for next year? Will you say a little more about the context and why that decision has been taken for the remaining few months of the current financial year?

My final question is on something that was touched on earlier by, I think, the convener—that is, the decisions on funding for the enterprise agencies. I completely understand the need, ultimately, for the budget to balance, which makes it challenging to take the most strategic decisions in each portfolio area. However, I am particularly interested in the funding for the enterprise agencies. I have been frustrated for a long time that Scottish Enterprise, in particular, spends money on the film and television sector even though the public sector expertise with regard to support for that sector sits not with that agency but with Screen Scotland, which is part of Creative Scotland.

In this year’s budget, Creative Scotland has an uplift, and Screen Scotland, as part of that agency, will benefit from that. On the other hand, Scottish Enterprise funding has gone down. We could argue that there is a level of strategic reallocation, given that we will get better value for money from the amount being deployed by Screen Scotland—where the expertise is—than from its being deployed by Scottish Enterprise. However, I do not get the impression that there was a strategic decision as such; it was more that somebody needed to be at the sharp end for the budget to balance overall.

Was there any discussion about that money? That is one example, but there are loads of other examples of public bodies with overlapping responsibilities for various sectors. Do cross-portfolio discussions take place to identify where we will get the best value from money that is transferred from the public sector to the third and private sectors?

My expectation is that the provision would cover all providers of secure transport for young people. That is a long-winded way of saying yes—I believe that it would apply, regardless of the settings that a young person is being moved between. Therefore, the provision is not just about young people who are in the care of a local authority; it places a duty on Scottish ministers when a young person is in their care, which might be in the justice system.

Proposed new section 90C would establish the reporting requirements. As I said, we currently do not really know what is going on in secure transport—we just have lots of anecdotes. The provision would require reports from local authorities and a consolidated report from ministers. I think that that would surface issues locally and nationally, and it would allow them to be addressed in a systematic manner.

There is a balance for us to strike between the need for reporting and the burden that we place on councils, in particular. Members will all be familiar with the regular concern of councils that reporting requirements are already taking resources away from service delivery, so the provision allows flexibility in the format of the reports. For example, in some cases, councils will already be producing wider reports and the reporting requirement under the provision could simply mean their making a new section in their current report rather than forcing them to create something brand new.

Miles Briggs’s amendments 162 and 163 seek a similar outcome to mine, but in a slightly different way. They seek to set requirements in the bill rather than through regulations. I will allow the member to speak to his reasoning for that.

As I said, my preference is to develop standards through secondary legislation, because that would give us, as Parliament, another opportunity to directly scrutinise them. We need to provide a bit of flexibility in reporting as well, particularly given the small number of young people that we are talking about. It would be quite hard, if not impossible in some instances, to maintain their privacy while producing disaggregated reporting based on characteristics.

I recognise that we are trying to achieve the same goal. Amendment 212 does not formally pre-empt Miles Briggs’s amendments 162 and 163, although I think that, if we were to end up in a situation in which all the amendments in this group were agreed to, there would be duplication that we would need to clear up at stage 3. As I said, we are absolutely trying to achieve the same outcome.

I have a lot of sympathy with those who wish restraint to be eliminated from the system completely. I think that we all want a system in which there are no situations in which restraint becomes inevitable or unavoidable. However, I can envisage a challenge based on a hypothetical situation. If an incident were to occur in a vehicle that was moving at speed, it might be necessary for the safety of everybody in the vehicle, including the child, to restrain the young person appropriately for the minimum amount of time and using the minimum amount of force.

That is deeply uncomfortable but, for people’s safety, it might be required. I want a set of standards that focus on making that situation unlikely in the first place and that set out clear expectations on the provider to minimise use of restraint if its use becomes unavoidable.

That said, I am not an expert on the matter and do not have lived experience, which is why I have added the requirements to consult and to come back to the Parliament with regulations.

My very brief final point cannot be covered in primary legislation but is related to it. It was surfaced by scrutiny of this part of the bill at stage 1 and is about service providers in Scotland. Clearly, there has been some kind of failure—of the market or of procurement processes—in that providers drive for nine hours from Portsmouth to Glasgow or Dundee in order to take a young person on a 15-minute journey.

There is a need for the Government and local authorities to identify why that is the case, why we do not have provision in Scotland, and whether it would be appropriate for that service to be provided in-house in the public sector or whether there are private providers who are willing to provide it but face some kind of regulatory or procurement barrier. We need to resolve that issue because, clearly, it is not good value for money for the public and it provides a much poorer quality of service for vulnerable young people than we would all like.

That just about covers it, convener, so I will finish there.

I move amendment 212.

I thank the “Hope instead of handcuffs” campaign, the minister and her officials for their help with amendment 212.

It was a bit of a revelation to all committee members when we realised that no standards are currently set for secure transportation in Scotland. There is a black hole in terms of data on what is going on. No one involved in the system, including accommodation providers and councils, is content with the current situation. Everybody believes that we need to develop standards.

We have no shortage of stories from young people about totally inappropriate use of restraint and deception to get them into vehicles, and about what I hope we would consider to be unacceptable behaviour by transport providers. However, they are all anecdotes—there is no systematic reporting of such incidents. Sometimes, accommodation providers are made aware of an incident and sometimes the council is made aware of it, but at other times, nobody is made aware of it.

Amendment 212 would create a new section that addresses standards and reporting requirements concerning secure transport. Proposed new section 90A of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 would place a duty on the Scottish ministers to create standards for service providers, and would require that those standards be developed in consultation with appropriate stakeholders.

The same approach is taken with care services, including with secure accommodation, so we will not be creating something new and unique; we will be filling a gap in the system.

Proposed new section 90A includes an initial minimum but non-exhaustive list of what to include in the standards. That is in order to give the greatest flexibility and to ensure that the process is, through consultation, led to the greatest extent possible by those whom it affects, rather than our being unduly restrictive through primary legislation at this point.

I highlight that proposed new section 90A(2)(a)(iv) requires that standards are set in relation to use of restraint. The provisions do not ban restraint—for the obvious reason that everyone in a car should, as a minimum, be restrained by their seat belt. Some restraint during transportation is not only reasonable; it is required by other legislation. Being in a moving vehicle creates obvious risks that might make further restraint necessary. However, committee members and the minister are all aware of evidence of totally unnecessary use of restraint. Therefore, clearly, standards should be set.

The approach of setting standards via secondary legislation also gives the opportunity for further direct parliamentary scrutiny of the standards once they have been developed and have come back to us.

Proposed new section 90B would create a corresponding duty on providers of a secure transportation service to meet the standards and on those who commission their services to ensure that the standards are being met.

I welcome the minister’s commitment to Miles Briggs to look more at data collection. Mr Briggs and the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland have surfaced some very important points, but apart from that we have covered the issue quite comprehensively, so I will press amendment 212.

Amendment 212 agreed to.

Section 22 agreed to.

Section 23—Secure accommodation services

Apologies, convener. My bus valiantly attempted to ford some flooded roads this morning, but it took longer than the driver expected it to take.