Hansard

I start by thanking the current convener, the previous one, Frank McAveety, and all members of the committee for providing a positive and constructive forum for my constituents who have petitioned them in recent years. I also thank them for their willingness to let my constituents and me raise important issues with them in person, face to face and sometimes at some length, and for the patience that they show as a committee with an extremely big workload before them each Tuesday afternoon.

I have been involved in various petitions with my constituents, from parents objecting to the school closures consultation in Glasgow and the restrictions placed on volunteer coaches by national governing body coaching certificates, to others pushing for a change in fatal accident legislation to lift the legal barrier that prevents fatal accident inquiries from being held into the deaths of Scots overseas. It is a varied casework indeed.

I will devote the bulk of my speech to the fatal accident inquiry petition. I never knew my constituent Colin Love, who died on 29 January 2009. I wish that I had known him, because by all accounts he was a fine person. However, I now know his mother well, as Julie Love petitioned the committee following his death. He drowned in the waters by a beach on Margarita Island in Venezuela—Playa El Agua, a notorious drowning spot. He was not the first to drown there and, by all accounts, he certainly was not the last. There were no warning signs or lifeguards. People have continued to drown there following Colin’s death.

Had Colin died in the waters at a Scottish beach, in all likelihood there would have been a fatal accident inquiry. Had he died in the waters off the English coast, there would have been a coroner’s inquiry. If a person normally resident in England had died off the coast of Margarita Island, there would have been a coroner’s inquiry. The difference in the case of Colin Love’s tragic death is that, because he was from Scotland, a fatal accident inquiry was not legally allowed. Not only is that crazy; it is wrong.

Julie Love, co-petitioner Dr Kenneth Faulds and I have all given evidence to the committee on the issue. The committee gave Julie Love the voice and platform that she rightly deserved and provided me as her MSP with a focus for my efforts to push for reform to the law. I thank the committee for that.

I worked with Julie Love to make a submission to the Cullen inquiry on fatal accident inquiries, calling for the lifting of a legal barrier that prevents FAIs into overseas deaths. Cullen agreed, and a response from the Scottish Government to the report is now pending. The committee has continued Julie Law’s petition until the Scottish Government responds—I understand that that happened just yesterday.

If I am privileged enough to be re-elected in May, I pledge to bring forward a member’s bill to reform fatal accident inquiries and to lift the restrictions that prevent investigations in Scotland into overseas deaths. I pledge to do that unless whoever forms the Scottish Government in May 2011 acts otherwise and lifts that bar. That is the position that we are in—, Julie and I, and the workers in my office, who have done much work on the issue.

Julie Love has a powerful motive for pushing for fatal accident inquiries. FAIs give recommendations, such as that travel companies should not send travellers to an island where people die, that there should be lifeguards or that the British Foreign Office should do things better in handling overseas deaths. They are powerful recommendations and drivers for change. Julie Love is fighting not just for Colin Love but for all the people who are resident in Scotland but who die abroad in future. I thank the Public Petitions Committee for working with me to help to achieve our aim.

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