Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 10 June 2020
I thank colleagues who have already covered many of the points that I wanted to make about the Disclosure (Scotland) Bill. I am very thankful to our clerks and to all those who took part in the bill process at stage 1.
I remember an evening event at Parliament, in Queensberry house, that went on quite late. People had travelled from far and wide to take part in a focus group. That would almost be unheard of now, but it happened just before we went into lockdown. It would no doubt happen via Zoom, nowadays.
The current crisis has delayed proceedings a little, and it seems to be a long time since we last discussed the bill in the chamber, but—as many members have said—it is now in a good place.
The work that has been done by stakeholders, the bill team and the Government is evident from the ease with which the bill has gone through stage 3 this afternoon, and from the consensus on it that has been expressed by members from across the chamber.
I would like to highlight one aspect that came to light in the evidence that was heard by the focus groups. The bill’s progressive nature can be seen from its approach to the impact on young people of disclosure of convictions that they accrued when they were younger. We heard emotional evidence from those who took part in the focus groups. Robert Dorrian asked us to recognise adolescence as
“a unique phase of life by ending the automatic disclosure of convictions accrued while aged between 12 and 17 years and introducing an assessment by Disclosure Scotland acting on behalf of Ministers as to whether convictions ought to be disclosed”.
One of the people who attended from Who Cares? Scotland informed the committee that although people who have been in care make up only an estimated 0.5 per cent of Scotland’s population, they make up 33 per cent of our youth-offender population and 31 per cent of the Scottish adult prison population. Those figures should make us all stop and think about what we are doing systemically in the care system that leads to such a situation. As Ross Greer rightly said, it is important that those young people had the opportunity to take part in the process of consultation on the bill.
Of course, we are now in the Covid era. If anything, the bill is now more important than it was before, because we want to harness the energy and willingness to volunteer that people have shown recently. We are in a good place to ensure that that can be done effectively in the future, through the bill.
I again thank everyone who has contributed to the process.