My Lords, this is a very difficult issue to get your head around. In a previous incarnation, I was a non-executive director of the Scottish Prison Service. I saw the terrible vulnerability of women in prison, many of whom had been abused since being babies. They wanted to be in prison because they felt safe there.

In this morning’s Scottish edition of the Times was the very distressing case of a 22 year-old woman, a sex offender held in Cornton Vale women’s prison, who was up on a charge when she was male for attacking somebody in the male division of Polmont young offender institution. The sexual offences she committed were on a 10 year-old and a 12 year-old in supermarkets in Fife. If we look at this legislation as it stands, there is nothing that can give the kind of protection that is needed for those women. She had male genitalia and there was no third-party verification, as there is not in this new Bill.

Let me be political. I have a very real concern that we have been caught in a trap. Nobody in Scotland is talking about the fiasco over the ferries, the fact that the Scottish education system has gone from being one of the best in the world to one of the worst, or the chaos in our National Health Service, despite the fact that the National Health Service in Scotland gets more money than elsewhere because of the Barnett formula. What will the Minister do about it? This is attacking the devolution settlement. I find it quite odd that the First Minister wants to support devolution; she is against devolution—she wants independence. The irony is that she can now say that big, bad Westminster is interfering in good Scottish Parliament decisions. How will the Minister get out of that one?