Meeting of the Parliament 16 January 2025
I thank members who signed my motion and allowed this important debate to take place. I also pay tribute to the Scottish Human Rights Commission for its spotlight report, “Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Highlands and Islands”.
In the past decade or so, our human rights have been eroded: we need food banks, there is a housing crisis and our national health service is at breaking point. Nowhere has that been felt more keenly than in the Highlands and Islands. Centralisation of services has led to poorer outcomes, even fewer houses being built and greater difficulty in accessing health services. All of that leads to depopulation. Citizens know that, so the Scottish Human Rights Commission findings were not a surprise. However, to be consulted and have their concerns validated is a significant step forward for my constituents. It was also striking to see all those findings in one report.
Across all the rights that the report examined,
“there is not a single human right that meets all the conditions of adequacy under international law. This means that there are significant failures in how policies and services are being designed and ... delivered.”
Too often, service design focuses on urban areas and fails to address the unique needs of rural communities. However, when services are designed to meet the needs of rural areas, they work effectively in all settings, regardless of whether they are in an urban area or a rural area.
The commission recommends that the Government should use a human rights-based budgeting approach to ensure that all citizens are provided with services that meet their needs, regardless of where they live. The report references cases in Argyll and Bute in which women who have been sexually assaulted need to travel long distances to access forensic examinations. They need to do that in the same clothes that they wore when they were assaulted. That is a common situation throughout the Highlands and Islands. The reason given for that inhumane treatment was that it would cost more to bring services to those women. A human rights-based approach would have come to a different conclusion, resulting in a process based on upholding the rights of the person who had been attacked.
Our human rights are just that: they are our rights. However, in Scots law, there is no redress if someone does not have access to their human rights. The proposed Scottish human rights bill was anticipated to address that but, unfortunately, it has been shelved. As a result, I still hope to pursue a right to food bill to enshrine the human right to food in Scots law. Everyone has the right to food so that they can feed themselves and their families. Emergency food should be required only in dire circumstances such as war and famine, but the report highlighted that access to food is a significant problem in the Highlands and Islands. It pointed out that, in some areas, food supplies could be at risk due to ferry failures and blocked roads disrupting supplies.
Food also costs much more in sparsely populated rural areas. Independent shops cannot make economies of scale, which means that the food that they sell is more expensive. There are also barriers to accessing emergency food in rural areas, because of issues around privacy and confidentiality. It is hard enough to access a food bank in an urban area because of stigma, so imagine doing that when the whole community will know. I know that food banks go to extraordinary lengths to disguise their interventions, but confidentiality is still a concern that stops many people accessing that support.
The report talks about choices being made between heating and eating. In rural areas, people also need to factor in the cost of running a car, because public transport is inadequate or non-existent. Therefore, they require fuel not only for heat but in order to access work, education, food and healthcare.