Meeting of the Parliament 17 September 2025
The whole of my speech addresses the point that Rona Mackay is making.
There are many proposals in the bill that we agree with. Indeed, many of them do not actually require legislation. For example, with regard to part 1, we strongly support the proposals for trauma-informed practice, but that should be happening already, and the Government needs to be driving that policy. We strongly support that approach, but we do not need the bill for that. What we need today is not warm words but the kind of real action that will improve the experiences of victims and witnesses in the system. Our view is that giving them access to information and to independent legal advice and representation and enabling their voices to be heard in the system are probably the most powerful steps that could be taken.
We welcome the very narrow provisions on independent legal representation in relation to access to medical records, but we believe that far more needs to be done. The bill was far too large. The committee attempted to give equal scrutiny to the different parts of the bill, but, inevitably, much of the scrutiny focused on proposals that have now been removed from the bill, and too many parts of the bill received little or no scrutiny or were added late. Therefore, unfortunately, on this occasion, we are unable to support the Government.
16:13