Chamber and committees

Redress Scotland works for you. Redress Scotland works for the Government.

To be honest, I am appalled by that answer. I understand why the report was commissioned, but I do not think that it is consistent with what the then Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills said as the bill went through Parliament. I was on and off the Education and Skills Committee throughout that time. He acknowledged that it was unlikely that documentary evidence would be available in every circumstance. He did not talk about certainty; he talked about the balance of probabilities. He offered repeated reassurances that people would be believed and that the principle would be that, where survivors came forward and offered testimony, it would be taken as fact, not that it would be questioned.

The second thing that I find pretty hard to swallow, given that it was discussed during the passage of the bill, is the relationship between parents and the local authority that has been presented. It is not true; it was not factually correct then and it is still not correct to this day. Local authorities, through social work and education, wield a huge amount of authority over families. When they suggest things and direct things, vulnerable families feel under pressure to accept them. It is not a relationship of equals and it is wrong to categorise it in that way. Given what we hear from survivors, I had hoped that we would be looking to find a way to say yes rather than finding reasons to say no.

I am interested in what the Deputy First Minister has to say on the commitments that were given through the bill and on the relationship between parents and local authorities that she has set out. Even now in 2024, that is not my experience of what it is like for many families in my constituency.

I should say that I know David’s family well and it is lovely to see them in the public gallery. I have the utmost admiration for Sharon, his mother, who in very difficult circumstances has sought to see what she can do to help other families.

I have seen the SPICe briefing but, for me, it comes back to a point that Mr Ewing made on a previous petition: what if Sharon Duncan, the wider Hill family and some of the organisations that they are working with are right, and the National Screening Committee is wrong? Certainly, if it were my child, I would want to know that that question had been exhausted.

I would be keen for the committee to write to organisations with a relevant interest—Cardiac Risk in the Young, Save a Life for Scotland, the British Heart Foundation, St John Scotland and Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland—to seek their views and expertise on what is called for in the petition, and to find out about any work that they may be undertaking on conditions affecting sudden cardiac death.

I would also be keen for the committee to write to the UK National Screening Committee to ask when it expects to review the evidence for screening for sudden cardiac death, and to write to the network for inherited cardiac conditions seeking further details and an update on its sudden cardiac death project.

In addition, I would be keen to go back to the Scottish Government. It has provided quite a helpful response on the petition, but I would be keen to interrogate further its role in informing the National Screening Committee’s work. It is one thing to ask questions and make representations, but I do not know how much more it can do.

Certainly, David Hill’s family and Sharon Duncan, his mother, are not in a unique position. There are families like them in every part of Scotland, as we have seen through activities that have been undertaken in Parliament since David’s death. The least that those people deserve is for us to try to understand how the process works and be absolutely sure that all the evidence has been taken into consideration.

Then we go back to what the previous Deputy First Minister said, which was that people would be believed and that that was going to be the core of this whole process. Now we are hearing that that is not the case, and that cannot be right. I cannot sign up to that—I am sorry.

With due respect, at the point at which this matter was being considered, the second most senior person in the Scottish Government believed that these people would be eligible to apply. Also, the more they found out about the situation, the less credible they found the outcome of the report that you are now pushing as providing closure.

John Swinney—his words are there, and I am sure that he will correct them if he has changed his mind since—did not accept the argument that parents had chosen to take their children there as if it were a holiday camp.

The guidance can change.

How can I have confidence in the scheme, though, if the people that those who introduced the scheme thought would not face a barrier to accessing it cannot access it? Confidence works both ways. It is a challenge that the records do not exist, but to say that, on the balance of probabilities, there is insufficient evidence that people were somewhere they say they were—when lots of other people say they were there and seem to understand that as being how those things worked at the time—is also a challenge.

I would not dare disagree with it.

Members indicated agreement.

If you block people from even getting past “Go”, they do not get to the case-by-case decision. That is what is happening at the moment. The guidance and the things that you are saying are stopping people from getting to the case-by-case decision.

I do not think that people have any expectations—