Meeting of the Parliament 15 January 2015
In this relatively consensual debate, I regret that I must take Hugh Henry to task for the Labour amendment, which asks the Parliament to agree
“that the Justice Committee and the Health and Sport Committee should lead”
in relation to inquiries into the resilience of the emergency services.
Quite apart from the fact that, given his new portfolio, Hugh Henry should know that the Justice Committee’s forward work programme is crammed and has little space for anything else, there is a more basic objection to the amendment. During Hugh Henry’s unsuccessful bid—and mine, too—to be Presiding Officer, I recall Mr Henry regularly and quite rightly banging on about the independence of the Parliament’s committees and how they should be masters of their own agendas.
I cannot agree that a committee should take direction from the Parliament or anyone else about what it puts on its agenda. For that reason alone, no one should support the Labour amendment. It interferes with the independence of committees to decide their own agendas. I think that that was an oversight on the part of Mr Henry, but it is wrong.
On the substantive issues, I want to tell members a couple of stories that illustrate the practical and unseen co-operation between our emergency services. A few years back I was out on police patrol in the Borders—I am thankful that this was before health and safety interfered and sanitised any meaningful participation by members of the Scottish Parliament. We went to several potential and very diverse crime scenes.
One incident that night stands out, because it opened my eyes to the value of our services. A woman had jumped from Lawson bridge in Hawick, into the Teviot. The river was low and she had fallen on to the rocks. With the blue light going—I am no longer permitted to travel that way unless I am under arrest—we arrived to meet police cordoning off the road. The fire brigade was already there and firefighters were roped up and climbing over the rocks into the water. The ambulance was also already there and paramedics were wading in the shallows with an emergency silver foil blanket.
What struck me was that no one needed to explain what they were doing. They did not need to say much. They knew their roles and acted seamlessly to ensure that the poor woman was rescued and taken to hospital as soon as possible.
My second story, which comes from my previous life as a solicitor, relates to a woman who fell from a platform into the path of an oncoming train. I will keep it fairly anonymous. The woman was trapped beneath the train, so fire and rescue workers and paramedics crawled under it, with hot oil dripping on them. When the train began to move, because the driver was still in shock, they somehow managed to get him to hold it still, not because they were lying underneath it but because the wheels were acting as a tourniquet on the woman’s legs and were stopping her bleeding to death. She survived.
The two stories brought home to me—in flesh and blood—the reality of what the emergency services do every day. The cabinet secretary talked about that. I could not do their jobs. I would not be able to sleep at night. Some politicians do not sleep at night, but that is for different reasons. I would not be able to take those day-to-day images home with me.
That is especially true in relation to firefighters, who are in the news with dreadful events. The public tend to forget that a lot of the work of firefighters concerns road traffic accidents, where they cut free the dead or the injured. The same is true of the police, the ambulance workers and attendants and the medics, who administer life-saving interventions on the spot, crammed into wrecked vehicles. Again, they all work together in a cohesive and mutually respectful society. There are no silos there. There are no professional policies that have to be put in place. They know what to do and they make way for each other when that is needed.
On the Borders roads, in particular, that is important, because, like many rural roads, they have a bad record for traffic accidents, particularly motorcycle accidents. Those accidents account for a huge amount—23 per cent—of all deaths and injuries on Borders roads in the past five years, which is well above the national average. In recent years, 10 motorcyclists have lost their lives, most of whom were aged 35 or over. Imagine how often police, ambulance and fire and rescue services are called to those scenes. They all deserve recognition. Only some incidents hit the headlines, but, regrettably, they happen daily across Scotland.
We must also recognise that the emergency services are not called only in relation to horrific circumstances. I am thinking of the various ridings and agricultural shows that take place across the Borders, where we see the police wandering about or people from the Red Cross with their van. They will have been involved at the very beginning of the planning of the event and they are there at the time to ensure that if anything untoward happens—if there is a horse-riding accident or somebody faints—they are on the spot. They are there, busily doing their job.
We have a lot to be grateful to emergency services workers for, but I will finish with a less serious story. Once, many years ago, I had the fire brigade turn up at my cottage when my lum went up on boxing day. It was a lovely, snowy day; my floors were polished and the house was lovely. All the firefighters knew me. They were local men. I am afraid that they were laughing as they came in, saying, “Ah, hen, you’ve set fire to your lum.” They had to put a hole in the wall to make sure the fire was not going up the chimney. My house was soaking wet. I was bursting into tears. The children thought that it was wonderful and were all dancing in front of the fire engine and shouting, “Are you coming out to get your picture taken with the fire engine?” Members will understand why I just sat in the house, crying, but I was grateful that they turned up anyway.
15:22