Meeting of the Parliament 25 June 2015
I welcome many of the changes that the bill will bring about, although I think that there will, in due course, need to be a more fundamental revision of the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982.
On airguns, I accept—as Alex Fergusson said—that the bill is not going to eliminate the problem totally. However, I believe that, as with firearms legislation, it will make a significant difference. It is right that it parallels firearms legislation, because the reality is that airguns cause a great deal of harm to people, pets and wild animals. It is therefore absolutely right to have a fit-and-proper-person test. People should have a reasonable and proper use for such weapons.
The issue of alcohol comes up frequently at community councils, and the bill makes some good progress. The fit-and-proper-person test for licensed premises and personal licence applications is a good measure, as is the renewed and reinforced focus on overprovision, which relates the measure to the whole licensing board area. In speaking to his amendment 14, Richard Simpson made the important point that communities must have all the information in order to be able to object to overprovision meaningfully and realistically. That is why he wanted a national register. He withdrew amendment 14 because some defect in it was pointed out, but he referred to subsection (6) of the new section that will be introduced by amendment 12, which is the amendment on the annual functions reports that was agreed to. I think that it is possible, through that subsection, to provide the information that Richard Simpson was seeking. I think that the cabinet secretary accepted that, and I hope that he will keep Parliament informed on that.
Everybody welcomes the provisions on scrap metal. We know that there is a problem with metal theft, so anything that makes it more difficult to dispose of stolen metal has to be a good thing.
Last, but by no means least, is the issue of sexual entertainment venues. The provisions in the bill about empowering local authorities and enabling them to say no are correct and widely welcomed. We should pay tribute to Cara Hilton and Zero Tolerance for the way in which they have developed the policy, in partnership with the minister to a large extent, over the past few weeks. That has resulted in the agreement today to an amendment on a statement of policy by local authorities, and the requirement for that statement to take into account the wider policy context. That is welcome progress.
Also welcome is the requirement for local bodies to be notified. Again, that includes community councils, violence against women partnerships and others, following the statutory guidance that was announced by the cabinet secretary today.
The main problem in this area today was the debate around amendment 19 and amendment 22. We all had strong briefings on the issue from Barnardo’s and the children’s commissioner, and we had previous influential briefings from Zero Tolerance that emphasised the position that sexual entertainment is an example of the objectification and sexual exploitation of women and is, therefore, intrinsically undesirable. People will therefore understand why we supported Cara Hilton’s amendment on the issue of people under 18. We had a problem when the cabinet secretary introduced a whole lot of new arguments that had not been presented at stage 2.