 I am doing that very thing, can I remind members of the Covid-related measures that are in place and that face coverings should be worn when moving around the chamber and across the Hollywood campus. The next item of business is a debate on motion 3270, in the name of Neil Gray, on nationality and borders bill UK legislation. I would invite those members who wish to speak in the debate to please press the request to speak buttons. I call on Neil Gray Minister to speak to and move the motion up to eight minutes please. My first debate as a minister is about a bill that I find repugnant and regressive. I should have preferred to be talking about how Scotland is striving to live up to our global responsibilities as a place of welcome and sanctuary. Instead I am talking about the UK Government's nationality and borders bill, which the UNHCR have said is fundamentally at odds with the UK's international obligations under the refugee convention. The bill sets out significant changes to UK asylum and immigration law but it misdiagnoses the problems with the UK immigration and asylum policy. It will not achieve the aims that Home Secretary claims because it does not address the problem of incompetent management and ideologically misdirected policy by the Home Office and the UK Government. The bill will negatively impact people, communities and the provision of services. That Government condemns the bill and the UK Government's inhumane hostile environment. The Scottish Government developed our pioneering new Scots approach in a partnership with COSLA and the Scottish Refugee Council. Our public services, third sector and communities work together to support our vision for a welcoming Scotland where refugees and asylum seeker integration is supported from day one. We are ambitious about embedding human rights and trauma-informed practice to improve how we support vulnerable people, including victims of human trafficking, domestic abuse survivors and children. We recognise that we need an inward flow of people to support our economy and the growth of our businesses, to develop services and to support strong diverse communities. We have long advocated for a flexible human approach to migration based on the principles of dignity and respect. All of that is in jeopardy as a result of this UK Government bill. The bill is a long and complex piece of legislation introduced last July and roundly criticised since. The pace at which the sweeping and regressive piece of legislation has been pursued is purportedly due to an urgent need to give the Home Secretary more powers to fix the UK's broken asylum system. However, let me be clear. The provisions in this bill will not fix the problems with the UK asylum and immigration systems. Instead, they will create barriers that will damage our communities, pushing already vulnerable people to the margins of society. They will add unnecessary complexity to the already challenging asylum system, restricting rights for refugees, based not on their need for protection but on how they arrived in the UK. Vulnerable people seeking protection will be criminalised and push-back provisions will increase risk to life at sea. The door will be opened to offshore that accommodation of people seeking asylum and there will be an increased risk of destitution as no recourse to public funds restrictions will apply to more people. Just a second. The Home Secretary will also have the power to revoke British citizenship from people without notice, which is quite astonishing. Alex Cole-Hamilton. I am very grateful to the Minister for Giving Way. I welcome him to his place. Does he agree with me that age assessment for the purposes of child protection is a devolved matter that probably sits with social workers in an ethical framework here in Scotland and with the Home Office in an immigration context? Does he also accept that quasi-scientific assessments to determine the age of children or a young person can be invasive and risk of causing further trauma? If he is incorrect, can he have the devastating consequence of having that young person return to the place from which he came? I thank Alex Cole-Hamilton for that intervention. As it pre-empts some of what I am going to say almost word for word, and I fully agree with his intervention. I look forward to supporting at this motion tonight. The bill provisions will increase the time people spend in Limbo, waiting for a decision from the Home Office and unable to fully rebuild their lives. We already know that that puts pressure on people. It is detrimental to mental health, prevents people seeking asylum, using their skills in the workplace and restricts access to financial support unless people are destitute. That shifts costs to our local authorities, public services, the third sector and communities. The provisions in the bill will punish people who need preventive protection and do nothing to tackle the underlying inhumane issues with the asylum and immigration system that the UK Government has created. If all that weren't bad enough, as organisations such as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in the British Drive Cross have pointed out, possibly worst of all, the bill risks creating the perfect conditions for criminals to exploit vulnerable adults and children. It doesn't just misdiagnose the problem, Presiding Officer, it is mating the symptoms worse. The Scottish Government's questions to the Home Office about key issues in the consideration of legislative consent were met with delays and a refusal to accept the need to grant legislative consent. However, Scottish ministers are clear that the bill will impact heavily on Scotland's devolved competencies in a myriad of ways. Therefore, on 1 February, the Scottish Government lodged a legislative consent memorandum in the social justice secretary's name, setting out two specific clauses that trigger the requirement for legislative consent. The UK Government has formed when it comes to ignoring the wishes of this Parliament, and I feel that they will not fear that they will not pay heed to the memorandum, just as they have ignored our concerns, the concerns of the Welsh Senate and the concerns of many charities and support organisations. However, it is important that the Scottish Government is clear on our position and that we raise our opposition to provisions that will impact on devolved areas, as well as our overall opposition to the damage that will be caused by the bill. Let me turn now to the two clauses raised in the memorandum. To be clear, the assertion in the Conservative amendment that the provisions do not fall with legislative competence of this Parliament is entirely false. Clause 49 legislates in the devolved area of provision of care and support under children's legislation. The bill creates a national age assessment board empowered and resourced to scrutinise age assessment determinations. That includes those made by social workers in Scotland for devolved purposes if local authorities refer an age assessment to the board. The outcome of the board's assessment will be binding on them for devolved functions. That reach into devolved services clearly goes way beyond reserved matters of asylum and immigration. The bill also enables the board to use scientific techniques as part of age assessment. That is something that the Scottish Government guidance has consistently advised against on child welfare and unreliability grounds. That is a position shared by medical experts such as the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health and the Royal College of Nursing. It is a position that the United Nations Human Rights Committee described as invasive, potentially harmful and likely to result in children being wrongly assessed as adults, concerns echoed by the Children's Commissioners for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Those proposals are a retrograde step, which will not protect the welfare of those highly vulnerable children and in fact could cause harm. The second clause in the LCM Clause 58 would constrain Scottish ministers in terms of how any future Scottish competent authority could make decisions about who is a victim of human trafficking. It will require late provision of information to support of a modern slavery or trafficking claim to be considered as a damaging to a person's credibility. What I reflect on when I consider the nationality and borders bill is its basic lack of humanity, how regressive it is. The UK was a founding signatory of the 1951 UN convention. It played a key role in developing the principles of the convention and, as recently as 2018, reaffirmed those principles in the global compact on refugees. However, those obligations are meaningless under the bill. Not just my views, but the views of the UNHCR and the opinion of legal experts who have considered the bill on behalf of the Scottish Refugee Council. That is deeply worrying, particularly as the bill sets out an interpretation of the 1951 convention that effectively seeks to establish the current Government's definitions as the basis for consideration by UK courts. There is one area where I agree with the Home Secretary. The UK's asylum and immigration system is broken, but the nationality and borders bill will not fix it. The bill could have been an opportunity for the UK Government to create a humane, fair immigration and asylum system. That opportunity has been missed. The bill will jeopardise the rights of thousands of people long into the future and have a profound impact on our society. It is anti-refugee, anti-human rights and anti-democratic, so I urge the Parliament to make clear its opposition to the bill and I move the motion in my name. Thank you Minister. I now call on Donald Cameron to speak to and move amendment 3270.1. Up to eight minutes please, Mr Cameron. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I propose that amendment in my name. I also take the opportunity to welcome Mr Gray as a Minister to the front bench. Notwithstanding the fire and thunder that we have just heard from him, the real issue before the chamber today is a very narrow one, not that you would know that. But let us first set out what this debate is not about. It is not about whatever aspect of the nationality and borders bill the SNP Government finds objectionable and simply wants to criticise. It is not about the general immigration policy of the UK Government. There was ample time for Mr Gray's colleagues to take his seat with all of that, as indeed they did in Westminster. They opposed the bill, and if Mr Gray was still an MP I am sure he would have taken that opportunity too. But today's debate is about none of that. It is about whether legislative consent from this Parliament is required. We are debating a legislative consent memorandum, and it took Mr Gray over half his speech to mention the words legislative consent, because it is a legal question, not a political one. Any opportunity for the SNP to give the UK Government a kicking must be taken, especially on immigration and asylum, and so here we are. But let me try and focus on the actual issues at hand. It is intrinsic to the devolution settlement that immigration and asylum policy are reserved matters. Notwithstanding that, the Government takes issue with two clauses, which it believes infringe the legislative competence of the Parliament and the competence of ministers. Alex Cole-Hamilton, I am grateful to Donald Cameron for giving way. Does he recognise that there are some parts of the devolution settlement that interface with immigration policy, not least age determination on grounds of child protection? What is his answer to that? Thank you, Mr Cole-Hamilton. I do not agree with that in terms of this bill, and I will deal with that in due course. But let me deal with it forensically. Age assessment, the Scottish Government's memorandum, argues that clause 49, which relates to the age assessment of age-disputed persons, will directly affect the exercise of functions exercised by Scottish local authorities and health boards under devolved legislation. It goes on to reference to legal judgments determined in English courts—not applicable here, obviously—to justify its belief that any new Home Office policy would impact on the functions of local authorities here. It argues that provisions within the bill would allow the Home Office to choose to deploy the national age assessment board in a more interventionist manner, which would significantly alter age assessment processes in Scotland. We do not accept those arguments for one minute. The Scottish Government is making hypothetical arguments about how the bill may be applied in respect of the functions of local authorities. That is the realm of possibility—a world of if and maybe, rather than definitive fact. To reinforce that point, the Home Office has noted that the national age assessment board will be a centralised team within the Home Office that local authorities can use if they do not want to conduct their own age assessments. It can use, not forced on local authorities but optional. That is not directly affecting the exercise of functions of Scottish devolved bodies to use the Scottish Government's own phrase, quite the reverse. The Government also criticised scientific techniques as part of the age assessment process, despite the fact that the use of those techniques is a norm in many European countries. However, no mention here of how that impacts on a devolved area of law or how it is a matter of legislative competence, that is nowhere to be found. However, let me address the substance of that criticism. Across Europe, countries use such assessments. Finland, Norway, France and Greece all use a range of different age assessments to try to define the age of an individual. I would submit that those proposals of the UK Government are entirely in line with those international comparisons. I am sorry, I do not have time. I will in a moment if I have time. There is a reason for them. They stop abuse of the system and help those in genuine need. Adults seeking asylum should not claim to be children nor should children seeking asylum claim to be adults. Those are uncontentious statements, not least because there are very serious safeguarding issues applying in either scenario. The UK Government has also said that it intends to create a scientific advisory committee chaired by Dame Sue Black, current president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, to oversee its work. I would say that the measures on age assessment proposed by the UK Government will be robust, fair and aged by the views of credible experts. The evidence provided by the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health and the Royal College of Nursing directly contradicts the points made by Mr Cameron around the accuracy of those assessments that children will be misdiagnosed as being adults. Why will he not reflect on those points from our own royal colleges? I am happy to reflect on them, but the statements that I have made that adults seeking asylum should not claim to be children and children seeking asylum should not claim to be adults is uncontentious. Does he not recognise the safeguarding issues that apply? Let me turn to modern slavery, the second area at which the Government takes issue with. The specific objection is that it would constrain any future Scottish competent authority. That is an extremely tenuous argument, not least because it is predicated on a future event that is unlikely, namely the coming into existence of a future Scottish competent authority. However, as the Government's own memorandum itself knows, decisions around who is considered to be a victim of human trafficking or modern slavery are made by one or two Home Office competent authorities under the national referral mechanism. The Scottish Government then tries to argue that if, again, it sets up its own competent authority, closed for 58, it would constrain ministers. Given that no such competent authority exists or is likely to exist and that the Scottish Government chooses to use Home Office competent authorities yet again these are hypothetical arguments used to try and reject the bill. Another point made by the Government is that it says that it is about victims, thus it is devolved. It is about victims of human trafficking and modern slavery coming into the country. If anything, that is about an international definition of victims. It is nothing whatsoever to do with victims in a devolved context, be that in terms of crime or otherwise. Just to demonstrate how far the Scottish Government has strayed from issues of competence in paragraph 34 of the memorandum, it says this. The Scottish Government does not agree that potential victims of human trafficking should have the outcome of their claim influenced by the provision of information about after an arbitrary deadline and as such consent should be withheld. Leading aside the merits of that objection, what has that got to do with legislative competence? Nothing in that paragraph about how it infringes on the devolved powers of the Scottish Parliament or ministers. It is just a point of substance that the SNP disagrees with. Those objections on competency are spurious in principle even before we return to the salient point that those are explicitly reserved matters. I have to confess some disappointment that yet again the Scottish Government has chosen to use this debate on the technicalities of a memorandum to make partisan political points about an issue such as this. That is a practice that we are seeing in this chamber more regularly, where the Government makes flimsy claims about legislative consent or claims that it has devolved competency over matters that are clearly reserved so that it can manufacture a new agreement. There is a wider question for you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and the Bureau about the purpose, timing, duration and nature of these debates on legislative consent memorandums. I hope that, in conclusion, the UK nationality and borders bill I would submit aims to strengthen existing asylum immigration immigration by delivering a fairer and effective system for the most vulnerable people. I hope that Parliament supports my amendment today. I now call on Eleanor Whitham to speak on behalf of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. Ms Whitham is joining us remotely and up to five minutes, please. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. The committee has been holding standalone sessions to explore the breadth of its remit and to establish priorities for its work programme over the parliamentary session. Most recently, those sessions have focused on refugee and asylum seekers. They were very much broader than the LCM, focusing on no recourse to public funds, the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, as well as the nationality and borders bill more generally. Once it became apparent that the LCM was on the nationality and borders bill and the likelihood that it would be referred to the committee, the committee preemptively used its sessions on 3 February 10 to explore the LCM with those witnesses. Our report, which was published yesterday, sets out this evidence in more detail, but let me cover the main points that the witnesses raised with us about the bill and its impact. Starting with clause 49 on age assessment, Glasgow Health and Social Care partnership explained that decisions about age are made by the local authority and the professional who knows the young person best. Decisions are made on the balance of probability with a trauma-informed approach to assessment. They were concerned that the new national age assessment board could remove the decision-making from the local authority with no right of appeal or dissent. Just Right Scotland, which provides information to help people to understand their legal rights, considered that the age assessment provisions in the bill would reach into Scottish child protection systems, as age assessments are usually conducted by Scottish local authorities to determine eligibility for child services under the Children's Scotland Act 1995. Andy Sarrow from Just Right Scotland said, and I quote, Scottish local authorities will be compelled by the Home Office to conduct age assessments on children and young people or pass that on to a new national age assessment board. Its decisions will be binding on Scottish local authorities. The Scottish Refugee Council was clear that it wanted consent to be withheld on the Home Office age assessment arrangement. Glasgow Health and Social Care partnership raised concerns around information sharing. They argued that the new national age assessment board could instruct a local authority to share information that it may have gathered for other reasons. They considered that the Home Office should provide additional funding directly to local authority to deliver age assessments. That would take account of the demands to be placed on already stretched local authorities. Moving on to clause 58 on human trafficking, Glasgow Health and Social Care partnership explained to us that currently, Glasgow is the only site for the Home Office's devolved decision-making pilot that seeks to identify children and young people at risk of child sexual exploitation and trafficking. In their experience to closures, disclosures are often only made within an established relationship of trust, sense of safety and may come later once a place of physical safety and stability is established. They were concerned that the bill posed a real risk of further victimising and retraumatising trafficking and exploitation victims by excluding access to support. Furthermore, they considered from a trauma informed perspective that clause 58 is wholly unacceptable as it requires the competent authority-making decisions about whether someone is a victim of human trafficking to take account of late provision of information as damaging to a person's credibility unless there are good reasons why the information was late. A further issue that they raised with the committee is that the bill might be discriminatory in its approach as the greater percentage of women experience human trafficking and sexual exploitation. In addition, there were concerns that the bill would reduce the number of people prosecuted for human trafficking and the number of victims who would receive support. Maggie Lennon from the Bridges programme, which supports refugee and asylum seekers, said that it would make it very difficult for Scottish courts to identify victims of trafficking and to work out how best to support them because it is based on an immigration approach. She also argued that it is against human rights. In summary, some of our witnesses had not taken an organisational view on the LCM and so could not only comment in general terms, whilst others had no relevant experience to draw on. Those witnesses we heard from who did have experience of age assessments and working with trafficking victims agreed with withholding consent on those two provisions. It should be noted, however, that it was difficult for the committee to undertake any in-depth scrutiny on the LCM and the very limited time available. For example, the committee was not able to hear from the Scottish Government, nor the UK Government, or able to investigate the legal argument. As such, the committee agreed to draw the Parliament's attention to the evidence received from local authorities and relevant stakeholders, and note the Scottish Government's reason for not recommending consent to the bill. I now call on Sarah Boyack to speak on behalf of Scottish Labour up to six minutes, Ms Boyack. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and welcome also to Neil Gray in his new role. I want to start today by being clear. The Labour Party does not support the Borders and Nationalities Bill. My UK colleagues have opposed the bill, and we do too. This bill will not solve the problem of dangerous boat crossing that are put lives at risk. It proposes unworkable solutions that will cost the taxpayer approximately £2.7 billion, and it undermines international humanitarian conventions at a time when co-operation is needed more than ever. In their excellent briefing, Amistad International got straight to the point, stating that draconian measures in this bill will largely shut down the UK's asylum system as it fails to provide any safe and legal routes for those attempting to seek asylum in the UK. It also noted that the bill will have far-reaching consequences for those living in Scotland under immigration control. In the amendment today from the Scottish Tories, they washed their hands of responsibility for the bill and just say that it is out of competence. However, the Scottish Refugee Council and Just Right Scotland commissioned a legal opinion, highlighting that the bill reaches into devolved competence, particularly around differential treatment based on route of arrival, age assessment, human trafficking and exploitation, therefore requiring legislative consent. At the end of the day, LCMs are about respect, respect for devolution, respect for this Parliament and respect for our constituents, so avoiding scrutiny in a bill that will impact on Scotland's criminal justice system, our specific procedures relating to safeguarding by avoiding debate would be wrong. I was disappointed by the opening speech by David Cameron today, because he did not acknowledge the fundamental problems and inequalities of this bill, and he dodged around its impact and on devolved responsibilities and the need for cross-government work, whether it is the UK and the Scottish Government and the Scottish Local Government. Earlier today, the Scottish Refugee Council contacted me and urged me to ask the Conservatives if they have considered the real-life and imminent implications of what they are saying. Are they comfortable with Scottish police and prosecutors picking up an Afghan woman arriving irregularly freeing the Taliban? Or a Ukrainian family fleeing a Russian invasion arriving without papers? Both will be criminalised as a direct result of the legislation, inhumane in itself, and a grossed waste of public monies. That is what the Conservatives are supporting. They are also disagreeing with ex-Prime Minister John Major, who described rightly this specific unlawful arrival offence as punishment without compassion. The Tory Government is promising that the bill will stop boats arriving and return people travelling them, despite the number of boats arriving increasing tenfold in the past two years. Border force officials have privately said that a push-back policy for boat crossing is dangerous and unworkable and could put more lives at risk. France has refused to agree to see boats safely back, and so these push-backs cannot even happen in practice. Labour has said from the start that this is a dangerous and wrong approach. The UK Government should be doing everything it can to stop more lives being lost, not making those perilous journeys even more dangerous. The reality is that nothing in the bill will deliver safety. It shifts the cost of government incompetence on to those fleeing their homes for a safer life, and it undermines the international system that we have operated with for over 70 years. Article 31 of the Refugee Convention says that no-one should treat a person looking for safety as acting illegal, as a principle that understands that leaving your home and your life is not a decision that is taken lightly. If someone arises without authorisation, they should not be penalised, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. The Tories think that it is acceptable to give up on the foundational principle, but the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the continued situation in Syria and, of course, the advance of Russian troops into Ukraine is happening right now. So how can the UK Government and its party counterparts here keep a straight face in defending this bill? It was the Labour Party that signed up the UK to the Refugee Convention in 1951, and we are not abandoning it today. The UK Government claimed that the bill will stop trafficking gangs, but the modern slavery commissioner herself has come out and explicitly said that the bill will severely limit our ability to convict perpetrators and dismantle organised crime groups. It will remove key protections for victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, rowing back on the 2014 modern slavery act and not make the identification and protection of modern slavery victims more difficult—something that we have to be concerned about in Scotland. Under the bill, if the Home Office wants to remove someone's citizenship, it will no longer even need to warn them or tell them a massive worry for people across the country. Citizenship is the right to live in a country. Without it, people cannot vote and they might struggle to work, access education or healthcare or look after their children. The bill risks ethnic minorities and refugees being treated unfairly and risks them becoming second-class citizens. That is why Labour in Scotland, Labour in Wales and in England oppose this attack on refugees on ethnic minorities and on international law. I call on the Conservatives to think again, to look at the impact of the bill, to look at its impact on us in Scotland and our devolved competence and withdraw their amendment. I now call on Alex Cole-Hamilton to speak on behalf of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. I rise for my party to speak on this most important of topics. I welcome Minister Neil Gray to his place once again and thank him for bringing this forward. Can I say from the outset that Scottish Liberal Democrats cannot offer consent to this? The Iranian American novelist Dinah Nyari, who fled the threat of execution as a child, once said that it is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. This nationality and borders bill, which is close to being signed into UK law, does quite the opposite of that. It seeks to introduce various measures to crack down on those taking irregular routes to the United Kingdom, creating a two-tier asylum system, which makes it harder to claim asylum, while relegating many of those seeking help to a second class of your refugee with fewer rights if their claim is unsuccessful. It also allows asylum seekers to be sent abroad, perhaps even back to the place that they fled while their claims are processed offshore. The right to seek asylum is guaranteed under international human rights law. We simply cannot be a country that in any way criminalises asylum seekers. The bill does just that, and it exerts particular harm on children, women, surviving male violence and LGBT people fleeing persecution. All of this has prompted amnesty, as we have already heard in this debate, to describe the bill as draconian and a fundamental repudiation of the UK's asylum responsibilities under the refugee convention. It is exactly that. That is why my party agreed with the motion that was submitted in the name of Neil Gray that the bill would damage people living in communities across Scotland, and that Parliament should withhold its consent to the two provisions that trigger the requirement for legislative consent. The route of using small boats to reach the shores of this country is dangerous, and it is not something that anyone wants to see. However, we must ask ourselves how desperate would we have to be to get on board one of those dinghies to risk our lives and the lives of our nearest and dearest, the people we love, to reach sanctuary in these shores? As the poet and teacher of Arsinchire says, no-one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land. Indeed, perhaps the cruelest and most chilling aspect of this bill, as it was initially introduced, was that it would not only have criminalised those who make it to those shores, it was set to criminalise anyone who made an attempt to rescue those in danger of drowning, including even the RNLI. Thankfully, the Government amended the bill to protect rescuers from prosecution, but only after much shock and outrage from those with their basic humanity is still intact. This provides a deeply troubling insight into the character of those who have drafted this legislation, and indeed those who have been vocal supporters of it. Put plainly, the bill is a crushing weight on the rights to safety of vulnerable people, survivors of human trafficking and those who have nowhere that they can call home. It goes as far as giving the Government the power to render form of British citizens stateless without even the requirement to inform them beforehand. Government ministers have said that this draconian measure will only be used in the most extreme circumstances, but that is not what the numbers so far suggest. The laws around revoking citizenship were relaxed 15 years ago, and since then, at least 464 people have had their citizenship revoked, with a huge spike in the past few years. Perhaps we should be asking what circumstances merit the use of the word extreme and who gets to decide. I would like for a moment to address anyone who is watching this debate who may view the issue in a different light and look at the bill with a degree of apathy and think, well, it won't affect me. Some may think that there are already too many people arriving in this country via the channel and that something must be done, but those numbers are vanishingly small. However, even if you are looking at the bill from a place of pure self-preservation, you should be firmly against it. If you consider yourself in any way liberal or progressive, a believer in the rights of the individual to be protected from overreach by the state, you should reject it. If it is your view that those in need of asylum should not be abandoned, criminalised or left to drown in the English channel, you should reject it with every fibre of your being, as I am my party of pride to do today. Presiding Officer, there is no excuse for legislation that is immoral. There is no excuse for bad or dangerous law by way of comparison. Imagine for a moment that the death penalty still exists and that punishment could be meted out without the need for a trial, without the need to even inform the person whose life was to be ended but that we were not to worry, it would not affect us, or our loved ones, or our neighbours, or our colleagues. It would only be used in the most extreme circumstances. Would we feel safer? Would we feel that it was a legitimate or positive step forward? I think that we would not. Indeed, as Martin Luther King once said, injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Presiding Officer, the Liberal Democrats are proud to utterly reject the nationality and borders bill and the aggressive, dangerous and wholly illiberal politics that it represents. Thank you, Mr Cole-Hamilton. I now call on Isherna Robison, cabinet secretary, to wind up the debate for the Scottish Government up to four minutes, please. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. The Scottish Government is not alone in our position that this bill will cause damage, that it will have negative consequences on people's lives and that it will have an impact on devolved matters and services. Last April, over 75 charities, belief groups and community organisations in Scotland wrote to the Prime Minister to raise their significant concerns about the new plan for immigration. They highlighted the reach of the UK Government's proposals into areas of devolved competence, and this bill confirms those fears. An independent legal opinion, commissioned by the Scottish Refugee Council and Just Right Scotland, concluded that the bill reached into or impacted the law-making or executive powers of the Scottish Parliament and Government, and, frankly, I would rather believe and support those organisations than Donald Cameron's comments at the beginning. It wasn't interesting that Donald Cameron, only in his last sentence, mentioned support for the bill, so embarrassed they are by association. Sarah Boyack was absolutely right that Donald Cameron and the Tories have tried to dodge around the issue and use some very real examples, particularly in the context of the pending conflict potentially in the Ukraine, in that we could have people fleeing as refugees and end up being criminalised, and that brought into sharp focus the issues that we are dealing with in the here and now. As Neil Gray outlined in his opening speech, the Scottish Government recommends that consent be withheld on clauses that trigger the need for legislative consent from this Parliament in the areas of age assessment and modern slavery. Only last week, the Welsh Senate also voted to withhold consent on the bill's age assessment clauses. For the UK Government to simply state that asylum is a reserved matter parted today by its Scottish Tory colleagues, it ignores the complexity of the reforms that are proposed. It ignores the legitimate role of devolved actors in the functioning of the UK's refugee protection system and the implications for devolved services and our communities. I thank the Social Justice and Social Security Committee, who considered the legislative consent memorandum in a challenging timescale. Consideration of legislative consent was prolonged due to the complexity of the bill and significant amendments tabled as it progressed through the commons. I appreciate the committee made time to ask witnesses already providing evidence about the bill and legislative consent and welcome the report that they published. The UK's asylum and immigration systems are in desperate need of reform. We need effective and efficient systems that are fit for purpose. We need systems that protect and prioritise child welfare and do not subject those who are the most vulnerable to unreliable, invasive, unnecessary and potentially inaccurate age assessment techniques. We need systems that support the potential of new Scots and integration for the benefit of everyone in our communities. I thank the cabinet secretary for giving way to making very powerful speech and completely associating myself with the sentiments of the Government in this disgusting bill. Can the cabinet secretary agree that this Parliament can show a lead in welcoming those subject to immigration control to Scotland by taking practical steps within no-recurs-to-public funds restrictions, such as, for example, extending concessionary travel to all those under the asylum system? As Paul Swinney knows, we had a very constructive meeting about that and he knows that I want to go as far as we can in helping to support those who have no recourse to public funds as much as we can while keeping within the law, so I am happy to continue those discussions. The bill is blatantly breaking the United Kingdom's international obligations under the UN Convention on Refugees. Ultimately, that is about people. It is not hard to look around the world and find conflict, war, terror, persecution and violence, and it should not be hard to find compassion and empathy for those who are forced to flee. We will not seek to do the same to protect our lives and those of our families. That bill does not provide that. I urge this Parliament to reject the nationality and borders bill and support our motion today. Thank you. That concludes the debate on nationality and borders bill UK legislation. It is now time to move on to the next item of business. There are two questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first is that amendment 3270.1, in the name of Donald Cameron, which seeks to amend motion 3270, in the name of Neil Gray, on nationality and borders bill UK legislation, be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. Therefore, we will be moving to a vote, and there will be a short suspension to allow members to access the digital voting system.