Meeting of the Parliament 11 February 2026 [Draft]
It fell to me, on behalf of the Scottish Conservatives, to welcome Jeane Freeman to her ministerial responsibilities in this place in 2016—a happy duty at the time. I note that I reflected then that she brought considerable lifetime experience to Government, but I also noted a comment from her mother, who said that Jeane had a voice that could sell coal. She may not have had to sell coal in here, but she commanded the respect of the Parliament through the detailed and conscientious way in which she approached her responsibilities, and never more so than in the way in which she brought her attention to focus on the women who had suffered from mesh.
It might have been Humza Yousaf who took through a bill on the issue at the start of this session, but it was Jeane Freeman who accepted the case that there was an argument to allow women to be sent to the United States, to Dr Veronikis, to have mesh removed that they had been told by the health service in this country was no longer even present in their system. That is a debt of gratitude that I will not forget, and it is a debt of gratitude that the women and their families will carry for the rest of their lives. I hope that Susan knows that Jeane made a difference—because she made a difference. [Applause.]
I want to speak about the oversight group, which was a suggestion from the cabinet secretary in response to a defeat on a Labour Party motion in the previous week. That is not something that the Government volunteered to do; it is something that the Government decided to do in response. I sometimes worry about how that sort of thing comes about. I wonder whether the cabinet secretary went back to his office and said, “What the heck do I do now?” and some civil servant said, “Well, minister, you could set up an oversight group. That would be quite a nice way to deal with things. It shows you as a man of action, and it also allows you, in the future, whenever any inquiries are made about the subject, to say, ‘Well, we now have an oversight group and we need to let it duly respond.’”
Why am I slightly cynical about that? I return to the mesh. As a result of the mesh scandal, we set up a patient safety review group. What was the outcome of that? Eventually, there was a commissioned report by Professor Alison Britton, which made 46 recommendations on how such groups should be structured and conducted in the future—because that oversight group on mesh led to the resignation of the very woman who had been invited to participate in it, because she had the experience of the issue to do so.
I ask the cabinet secretary whether, in fact, every one of Professor Alison Britton’s recommendations on how such groups should operate has been embedded in the operational criteria that are being used to establish the working practices of that group. I should say that we have written to Professor Sir Lewis Ritchie to draw his attention to Alison Britton’s recommendations—which were fully accepted by the Government at the time, and which we were told every future group would incorporate into its working practices—and to ask him to ensure that they absolutely are embedded.
This is one of the great scandals of our time and the biggest scandal of this Parliament. If there is going to be a patient oversight group, it has to be able to operate with the full confidence of everybody who is employed in it. We must know that it will not be some sort of chimera of obfuscation, but that it will actually be able to ensure that this does not happen again and that people know why it did happen.