Hansard

I, too, thank everyone who was involved in the bill's production, including the witnesses who spoke to the Education, Culture and Sport Committee, our clerks and the bill team, which was headed by the minister. I also thank the minister for the way in which engagement between the committee and the Executive was handled. The other day, I attended as a substitute member a Health and Community Care Committee meeting at which the complicated Mental Health (Scotland) Bill was being dealt with. I am impressed by the way in which committees work together with ministers to improve bills at stage 2. That is to the Parliament's credit.

At stage 1, I said that the bill spoke of a loss of innocence. I accepted that the bill's central provisions were necessary and, although I did not like the idea, I accepted with regret the argument that provisional listing was probably a necessary evil. I expressed reservations about the looseness of the definitions of harm and of putting children at risk of harm. I highlighted the gravity of labelling, without absolute proof, someone as being unfit to work with children, because such a label would impose on that individual an indelible stigma that would probably deprive them of their career and lead to their becoming a pariah.

Even now, all those reservations remain to a degree, but I have been considerably reassured by the minister's comments to the committee and during today's debate, by her letter to the committee and by the stage 2 and stage 3 amendments to safeguard against malicious or ill-founded accusations leading to permanent or even provisional listing.

I speak of my hesitation, but since the stage 1 debate, we have read in the papers of, and seen on television, incidents that show the need for care and protection of children and the dilemmas that we face in deciding who is fit for, and capable of, looking after children. We have read of abductions, desperate cruelty and malicious and reckless mistreatment of children. I fear that much of that has been inflicted by close family members and other relatives, who are not the subject of the bill. However, we have also read about the workings of internet networks involving chatrooms and pornographic materials.

In normal life, we would expect a parent to sacrifice a great deal to protect his or her children. In our society, we too must be prepared to sacrifice something to protect the children who are, as Cathy Jamieson said, everyone's responsibility. When a child's human rights are threatened, and there is a conflict of interest between the rights of a child and those of an adult, it is right that we should move in favour of the rights of the more vulnerable child who cannot so readily defend him or herself. However, we must also do what we can to preserve the rights of the adult and ensure that injustice is avoided by enabling individuals to get a fair hearing and a right of appeal against potential injustice. I am satisfied that we have tried to do that and that we have managed to do it reasonably effectively in the bill.

If we are to stand back a little from the detailed provisions of the bill, we will see that we have to guard against the pervasive tendency to engender fear in the way in which we regard the safety and protection of children. I do not wish to see a society in which, out of fear, we reduce the kind of life experiences and opportunities that we offer our children and, indeed, that we offer ourselves as parents and carers of children.

I do not want a society in which parents feel unable to photograph their children at school events that are held in public. When a child is hurt before one's very eyes, I do not wish to be constrained by fear of misinterpretation from putting my arm around the child who is hurt to offer comfort. I do not want a society in which teachers and voluntary workers do not feel confident enough to take youngsters on school trips and outdoor activities because they fear blame and prosecution if things go wrong in some form of accident or incident over which they could not reasonably be expected to have total control, any more than a parent could be expected to do so.

In earlier discussions, I spoke about the position of social workers who face serious dilemmas and have to make difficult moral judgments day in and day out. Although it might be possible with 20:20 hindsight to say that their judgments are wrong, I believe that social workers deserve our protection in the situations that they face.

The Liberal Democrats support the bill. It contains substantial and important safeguards. Let us protect our children from danger wherever we can, but let us not live our lives, or expect them to live theirs, in an unnecessarily overprotected and cosseted manner that limits their life experiences in a negative way.