Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2024
I was coming to that very point. Although I think that a threshold that includes all those who are undergoing mental health treatment would be far too low, and too broad an approach—it would, for example, include me, as someone who is undergoing on-going mental health treatment—my concern is not so much that people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism spectrum disorder might not need the moratorium; it is that many people who find themselves in situations in which their conditions lead them into dire financial situations quite simply cannot access the resource and the clinicians, as Mr Whittle alluded to, who might be able to provide them with the diagnosis and the help that they need.
We need to look at the criteria, and those need to be tightly drawn up. However, we also need to look at access to those people who might well end up as gatekeepers. I commend the committee for its work; its suggestions about other criteria are well made—for example, those that are used in England and Wales for the breathing space scheme.
I take on board the convener’s comments about the stigmatising nature of the terminology. However, the “severely mentally impaired” category in the council tax legislation is clearly a workable one, so I ask why we are not using it.
We must also ask ourselves how the proposed moratorium will work in practice. We need to understand what form the protections and provisions will take. Will they include the pausing of enforcement actions? Will they pause contact from creditors? Will they freeze interest and charges on debts? Questions about payments such as those for car loans, which are the forms of debt that many people will have entered into prior to their mental health crises, are the ones that need to be answered. Quite simply, we do not yet have those answers.
As Stephen Kerr alluded to, there is a risk that we might legislate for protection levels that are lower than those that have been available in Scotland temporarily or those currently available in England and Wales.
Moreover, I have severe concerns about the nature of the bill. As I was reading the bill in preparation for the debate, I was struck by its lack of specificity. It does not contain any of the points about mechanisms, thresholds or protections that I have set out here, even in principle. However, when I read section 1(3) of the bill, on the scope of regulations that ministers can introduce, I was really quite concerned. It states:
“Regulations under this section may— (a) make different provision for different purposes, (b) modify any enactment, (c) include incidental, supplementary, consequential, transitional, transitory or saving provision.”
That provides extraordinary scope. Subsection (3) essentially enables ministers to make changes to any act of this Parliament, albeit that they might have a tenuous link to the bill, and to do so for various purposes. Not to have the guide rails of principles or criteria to determine how such provisions might be made is quite concerning. We need to guard against the making of such legislation, which this Government seems to be introducing more and more frequently.
Although I accept the Government’s point about needing to get the bill right, I argue that it is important to get those details right before a bill is published and put to Parliament, because that is what this place is for. As Fergus Ewing pointed out in his intervention, there can be unintended consequences. Thresholds on mental health criteria and issues such as debt often have impacts that cannot be foreseen. It is for precisely those reasons that the Parliament exists to test and amend them. We know that secondary legislation does not afford us the same benefits in interrogating and amending provisions, let alone taking evidence, that primary legislation does. Would it not have been better to have had such matters published and properly scrutinised by the committee in its stage 1 report, rather than waiting until after the event?
Scottish Labour commends both the intent of the bill and its broad purposes. However, I have huge concerns about its proposals for future legislation, which would leave the door wide open for Governments that might not have the benign intent that the current one claims to have.