Malcolm Chisholm: Will the cabinet secretary give way?
Malcolm Chisholm: I see that only four minutes are left. Does that mean that I should take two minutes and the minister will take two, or can I overrun?
Malcolm Chisholm: That sounds very generous. There is guidance about administering medication and meeting the other healthcare needs of children in schools, but the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland said in a report two or three years ago that it was extensively ignored, and there is no reason to believe that the forthcoming guidance that is being worked on will be any different. That leads...
Malcolm Chisholm: I thank the cabinet secretary for her kind offer of a meeting. I would never turn down a meeting with her, so I shall take her up on that. However, I disagree with what she said. She said that the amendments would cause confusion, but the substance of her speech indicated that there already is confusion. We have health legislation and we have the additional support for learning legislation,...
Malcolm Chisholm: I congratulate Cameron Buchanan on bringing forward this important debate, while apologising to him, the cabinet secretary and the Presiding Officer because I have to leave as soon as I have finished speaking. I should not really be speaking in the debate because I am due to be at a meeting in my constituency, but, when I saw the motion, I could not not speak because of the reference to the...
Malcolm Chisholm: I welcome the bill. I will take each of its six main proposals in turn. I support the introduction of a domestic abuse aggravator, which will allow the relevant offence to be placed in the context of domestic abuse and will ensure that that is taken into account in sentencing. Of course, that should not be a substitute for a new specific offence of domestic abuse. Neither the aggravator nor...
Malcolm Chisholm: Time is running out. There is a great deal in the bill about the civil orders, and a little bit less about sexual offences committed elsewhere in the UK, but I do not think that the provisions on either of those will prove to be controversial.
Malcolm Chisholm: 8. To ask the Scottish Government how many students attended Edinburgh College in November 2015 and how this compares with November 2012. (S4O-05481)
Malcolm Chisholm: Is the cabinet secretary concerned that what was the largest college in Scotland at the time of merger has had declining numbers ever since? It is a decline that seems to be being managed by the college, as it has handed back £3 million to the Scottish funding council this year because it did not get the anticipated number of students. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the...
Malcolm Chisholm: I thank Claire Baker for lodging the motion. I also thank the Smith Institute for laying bare a situation that I think the majority of people may not be aware of. It is important for us to debate it today. The particular Scottish context is the massive referendum turnout that was based on a very high level of registration. It would be a tragedy if all that good work were to be undone because...
Malcolm Chisholm: Does the cabinet secretary know how much NHS Lothian proposes to contribute to the integration joint board with the City of Edinburgh Council? The same question applies to other health boards across Scotland. If she does not know that, how does she know that Edinburgh’s share of the £250 million will be additional rather than simply netted off what NHS Lothian is planning to give the...
Malcolm Chisholm: The bill’s two primary objectives are to rebalance the relationship between landlord and tenant by ending the no-fault ground for repossession and to take some action on excessive rents, which I certainly know all about here in Edinburgh. On the former, there are different views. Landlords are saying that it goes too far, whereas Shelter, whose views I have often followed over the years,...
Malcolm Chisholm: First of all, Presiding Officer, I must apologise to you and the minister, because I am due at a meeting of the cross-party group on violence against women at 5.30. However, I wanted to speak in this debate, and I congratulate Dave Stewart on lodging the motion and giving us an opportunity to raise important issues on behalf of firefighters, who, as we all know, put their lives on the line...
Malcolm Chisholm: Does the cabinet secretary not think that it is time to embrace progressive universalism, rather than crude universalism? For example, within the universal provision of healthcare, more resources should be targeted to general practitioners in deprived areas, and within the universal service of education, more resources should be targeted at schools and nurseries where there are significant...
Malcolm Chisholm: There is nothing more important in politics than action to tackle poverty and inequality, and there are two mindsets that we in this Parliament should avoid. The first is the idea that because we cannot do everything, we cannot do anything significant. There have always been significant things that we can do in relation to health, education, housing, skills and many other areas, and there...
Malcolm Chisholm: I have a section on tax, because we need to talk about tax. We have a costed proposal on taxing the very highest earners, which I was going to refer to later. That proposal is about targeting resources at individual schools and individual nursery schools to do something about the attainment gap; that is what is crucial about Labour’s proposal. We need to target resources at nurseries, too,...
Malcolm Chisholm: I apologise for not being familiar with the budgetary details of Dumfries and Galloway Council, but if that is the case, it is clearly not acceptable. We need to have a more equal society not just for the obvious social justice reasons, but because it is good for the economy. It is an economic policy as well as a social justice policy. That is obvious not just in relation to people not...
Malcolm Chisholm: I have to close. My final comment is that, relatively speaking, we have too much rhetorical commitment to tackling poverty and inequality and not enough practical action. Let us make tackling poverty and inequality the number 1 objective of the next parliamentary session—and I apologise that I will not be here.
Malcolm Chisholm: I congratulate Alex Rowley on introducing the debate, on shining a spotlight on the gross failures of Serco and on giving us an opportunity to express solidarity with the employees and, indeed, the travelling public, given that some of the defects on board the trains are potentially dangerous for the public as well as for the staff. As we have heard, the franchise was awarded in 2014, with a...
Malcolm Chisholm: I accept John Mason’s point that social isolation is objective and loneliness is subjective, but we all realise that there is a big overlap between the two and that those who actually seek social isolation, whom Stewart Stevenson referred to, are surely a very small minority. Social isolation is a problem and, if we look at the numbers, we can see that it is a very big problem. I was struck...
