 I welcome everyone to the fourth meeting of the Public Petitions Committee in 2019. The first petition is petition 1.600, lodged by John Chapman in February 2016 on speed awareness courses. At our most recent consideration of this petition in September 2018, we recognised and acknowledged the petition's frustration with the time being taken to have a sense of any progress being made in this issue. We agreed that it would be helpful to take coral evidence from the Transport Minister, Oris officials and Police Scotland. In advance of agreeing a date for that evidence session, we have received an update from the Crown Office and Pro-Creator Fiscal Service. That update is included in our meeting papers and confirms that the Lord Advocate has agreed, in principle, to use of speed awareness courses as an alternative to prosecution in appropriate cases. It adds that a multi-agency working group will work together to devise the necessary infrastructure and guidance to support the introduction of speed awareness courses. Members may be aware that this development has been widely reported in the media this week. The petitioner welcomes the update, but wants to understand whether the multi-agency working group will be working to an agreed timescale. I wonder if members have any comments or suggestions for action. Rachel? I think that it is very welcome that this has been considered. I think that Mr Chapman will be very pleased that the Lord Advocate has agreed, in principle, in which case that multi-agency group, which includes quite a number of bodies, might want to come and provide evidence to this committee. I agree with Rachel Hamilton. It would certainly be good to know what timescale the multi-agency working group is going to take. I can understand the petitioner's frustration at the length of time that this is taking. If the multi-agency working group is going to take even longer time, it is certainly unfortunate to say the least, so we need to get an answer on that specific question. The best way to do that is to get them in front of us here at committee. Any other comments? I did strike me that something is about speed awareness moves exceptionally slowly. If I recall from the last discussion, it was just how difficult is it? If it is so difficult to do something as small as this, you do rather wonder about other bits of policy that we might be involved in. You just wonder what the normal timescales with those kinds of things would be. With Rachel's suggestion that we have the group in front of us and that kind of conversation, I think that it would lend a bit of understanding what are the complexities of this. It takes something that seems like the Lord Advocate has agreed to it. How long can it possibly be before it could be implemented? We have all agreed that we recognise the merits of the petition, and it would be worthwhile trying to establish a timescale. Again, the petition makes a point—an end point. Not just that it would roughly take x amount of time, but can it identify a time that it will then work back from, I think, would be useful? I will also convene it, I think. Previously, they have had courses for drunk drivers and other issues. I do not think that it is exactly reinventing the wheel to get this up and running, so sooner the better, basically. Okay, before we run out of puns, I thought about the idea. Okay, so we are agreeing to invite representatives of the multi-agency working group to provide oral evidence in advance of the summer recess. I think that one of the things that we would be looking for would be some kind of sense of timescale in that regard. Okay, thank you very much for that. The next petition is petition 1687, lodged by Jane Erskine in March 2018 on the regulation of firework displays in Scotland. The petition is set particularly in the context of rural locations and from an animal welfare perspective. We last considered this petition in October 2018. In response to correspondence issued following that meeting, the Scottish Government advised that it was due to launch a consultation on the use and regulation of fireworks early this year. The clerk's note confirms that the consultation was launched on 3 February and closes on 13 May. It notes also that the consultation includes a section on animal welfare and asks, for example, of local practice. I wonder if members have any comments or suggestions for action. I think that we should defer the petition until the results come in from the consultation that is published by the Scottish Government and we will have a better idea of where the petition is going. Okay. Any other options? I think that it is a great petition, but I think that the Scottish Government is already looking at it. I am not sure if I agree with David that perhaps we are in the position to close the petition. It is weighing up the benefits of whether the Scottish Government will take the consultation forward as Jane Erskine would be happy with. I think that we probably have two options. We can either defer, hold on to the petition but recognise that there is going to be a consultation and look at the responses to that. Or we can encourage the petitioner to engage with the consultation and recognise that, if at the end of that process, the Scottish Government does not respond in the way that she would hope and expect particularly around the experience of animals and welfare issue in rural areas, she would be free then to submit a further petition, focusing very specifically on that question. She would then focus on the bit that the Scottish Government has failed to address. There is a much broader question about fireworks, not just in rural areas but in urban areas, too. I think that that is the choice that we have. We have clearly had both of these options identified already. I do not know whether Brian Orr is angus of a hue. The petition has had a positive effect in that we have now got the Scottish Government looking into that particular issue. I think that her petition is quite broad. My feeling is that it was going to achieve in the outset and that it gives her the opportunity to come back at a future date should the outcome of that Government investigation not be to her satisfaction. As you say, I am much more targeted. My feeling would be that we could close the petition just now with a view of the potential for another one coming down the line. I think that we have an opportunity to close the petition. Given that the petitioner can come back in future, if there is still an issue that the Government has not addressed, and given that the petitioner has to wait a year, it could well be, as we have seen in the past, with consultations that the Government could take in an ordinate length of time to release the results and take further action. We will obviously have to wait and see. In the meantime, close the petition and advise the petitioner that she can always come back. I think that there is a recognition that whatever way we are going to do it is to recognise the importance of the petition, to recognise that it has secured some movement. We would hope that the petitioner, as I said, would both engage with the consultation herself and would encourage other people even through this being publicised to engage with that. I would hope that the Scottish Government has a consequence of interest in it. It would ensure that the consultation did not just drift, but that it recognised that there was something quite important here. However, there is an opportunity for the petitioner if she feels that that consultation does not lead to the action that she is looking for to come back to the committee on that basis. We agreed that we would close the petition, recognise what has been achieved with it and we would want to thank the petitioner very much for both presenting the petition and engaging with the committee in relation to it. If we can now move on to agenda item 2, the consideration of continued petitions. The second item in agenda is the inquiry into mental health support for young people in Scotland. As you know, the inquiry was launched in connection with petition 1627, consent for mental health treatment for people under 18 years of age, raised by Annette Mackenzie. A call for evidence was issued on 7 November 2018 and ran until 14 December 2018. In response to that, the committee received 49 written responses and, using the digital consultation tool dialogue, received views from 72 contributors, as well as many more commenters. In addition to those responses, two outreach events were held in Edinburgh at Muirhouse Millennium Centre and Tyne Castle High School. I suggest that we use the paper to provide the basis of a discussion and the feedback that we have received so far. In addition to that, members of the committee have received hard copies of all the written submissions for their consideration. They were very substantial. I want to thank everyone who contributed in whatever way that they did, whether it was through dialogue or through individual response or through some of those very substantial comments that we got. I wonder if members have any comments on the themes that were highlighted in the paper or any observations from the written submissions. We all recognise the evidence that we took from Annette Mackenzie. I was brave, but it was quite hearty here, to be quite honest. It has been under consideration for the committee since then. Probably one of the ones that is affected is the most. There is a bigger piece of work to be done here. I think that this discussion is quite timely because of the health and sport committee on Tuesday. There was another mental health petition that was closed. During that discussion, I said that the committee had received several petitions on mental health, and that there is a bigger work to do. I think that there is almost a cross-committee work here, obviously on health and sport. We have got it here. I think that education is sitting with that. Even the rural economy, talking about the mental health of farmers, etc. I just get the sense that there is a much bigger piece of work to be done. At the moment, it has been done across different committees, it has been done across different cross-party groups. If we really want to tackle this, and it has been talked a lot about in this Parliament, I think that we actually start to need to pull resource together. I do not know how we do that, convener, because there are a few things that come out for me, where young people can go, or can feel comfortable to go when they are falling into poor mental health. I have said this before, and it is uncomfortable with the idea that young people who are presenting with mental health issues have their capability to self-reminister medication. All the connotations and different things that come out around that. For me, there is a big piece of work to be done here. I do not know how you sit in the education committee as well, convener. I do not know what the feeling is there. You sit in the education committee as well, convener. I do not know what the sense of feeling is across those committees as well, but we are looking to health and sport and what we are going to do today to see where they go with it. I feel that everybody is just a gate of perhaps doing something really positive about this particular issue. We should look at a way to grasp that. I am looking at you, convener, because I do not know how we do that across all those committees. It seems to me that this is something that is a growing issue that we need to grasp the nettle here. Some of it is simply about understanding it. What has come out of the inquiry so far is the question of what is the first point of contact. In that first point of contact is the person who is speaking to it aware that there are options other than just going to the doctor. Anyone of us who might have been circumstances where somebody would say, I do not know what to do, I need a bit of help, is genuinely the idea that you would think about mental health first aid training that people would know perhaps to be empathetic or to make those kind of suggestions. I think that there is quite interesting commentary in our submissions around who is trusted and how young people might, what we might think might be a reasonable suggestion, or just go and ask your teacher when actually that is not the person who has the right relationship with in the school, maybe somebody else. I think that that is a question. I think that the other thing comes out quite clearly in something that we would want to explore further that the professionals that young people might come up against are themselves dealing with quite significant pressures in their own time. A GP has only got 10 minutes. What kind of assessment can you make in 10 minutes? How do you support GPs who are only at 10 minutes to understand some information that I have had before about how GPs themselves could be supported equally the pressure on teachers? How do they ensure that somebody is directed in the right ways? I think that there are quite interesting, again, from our evidence, maybe some of the things that we think are quite straightforward pathways aren't as straightforward if you're a young person. I think that there's one mother talks about the challenges of this for her own kids. It's not just simply, we'll get your referral and you will go. Even if you get a referral, you fail the appointment when I was still teaching the young people. Even if you got them, there was an education psychologist or a group worker who was going to work with them. There are quite often fine ways of just not going because you hadn't built the confidence that it was something that they could get something from. There's a lot of trust issues in there as well, Rachel. I like the idea of doing this in a thematic approach because I feel that it was quite a difficult paper to get through with 49 submissions of evidence, which was fantastic. There were themes running through it from education to the referral process to weathercams that were only suitable for adults and not for young people. I found the evidence really fascinating. Although there are themes running through it, a lot of people gave different ideas. Some of the things that I've highlighted, and I'm sorry if it looks like a scattergun approach, but I'm hoping that the clerks can bring that together in this thematic approach. A number of the evidence-based submissions actually said that children and young people's mental health should be treated differently. I liked the idea of creating a task force that involved young people, in particular the evidence that was given from young Edinburgh action was very focused and they'd used a focused approach, and so the Institute for Mental Health had looked at a workshop, which is the University of Birmingham, with eight students, to explore those pathways. I thought that the submissions from the Girl Guides was really powerful because it was involving young people and children. Sometimes adults have a preconceived idea about how the referral or the pathways are. When I've spoken to GPs, they say things like, you know, the perception is that CAMHS is the right way to go, but sometimes it isn't. There are many suggestions. Another aspect that I think is really important is the budgets. Do they belong to the NHS or the council? Where is it best to place a service? It's different across Scotland throughout the evidence. I also noticed that one evidence had given that the services that are provided are equitable, are they based on SI-MD indices and also looked at the referral pathways of engagement with support for all mental health services for young people in relation to that. I think that I'm already sounding as if I'm mixing too many things together here. I wondered whether we could look at all comments on the education process, the stakeholders that are involved, the pathways, and go through it in that way, if it's possible. We don't want to be overwhelmed by this massive, because it's so massive that we can't do anything. We want to bear down on particular issues, but I think that all of the things that you've highlighted are really important. One of the things that you talk about in some of the youth organisations that I've commented on was the number of young people who are offering support to friends, which makes perfect sense. Not to overmedicly something, so I can't help you as a friend because this is a mental health issue, when in fact that is what you need. You need a bit of reassurance, a bit of support. We're all going through this together. I'm quite interested in having that. I'm looking at that when we don't turn it into a thing that professionals deal with for you, because you've got this thing, when in fact there are some of this around about life experience and what's happening to you. Youth organisations are very good at it. If they're working with young people, they will know. Sometimes when young people are under pressure in their lives with its exams or family circumstances or whatever and will know how to offer that kind of support, how we draw on that a bit, so that professional services are not overly, you know, that they end up with loads of people going there when that's not really what they require, but that if they do need to go there, they do need that route to them, you know, I suppose, through CAMHS or whatever, that they are able to access that as well. I think that the question around budgeting is actually very important in that regard, because if you've got a budget in your school for the mental wellbeing of your students, does that all get spent on a councillor or are broader supports that could also be funded before? In order that when a person needed a counciller, they would know how to get to that place. A quick input. Some people had said that in local authorities, the attainment challenge fund and the pupil equity funding were being used at those levels, and I think that that is also different throughout Scotland, so how that money is being used and is that money sustainable, will that money always be able to fund what is currently being funded? Well, there's a whole question about how, I think, the whole point of that money is that it can be used very flexibly. You might argue that there's an issue about sustainability because it's not wrong term and that, although one school may see that and need other schools may be blind to those needs and so it's going to be quite interesting how people make those kind of decisions. I suppose that at the heart of this, going back to the petition, is to think about a young person who feels they need help, how do they know where to go, how do we make sure that young people know where to go, how do we make sure that when they go for that help, that help is appropriate to how they're feeling and the people around about them are well enough informed to be able to support them, but at the same time, if somebody's gone into a crisis or whatever, that is also recognised. Angus? I think that you make some valid points convener with regard to peer-to-peer support and the first point of contact. From evidence that we've had in the past at this committee, clearly from SAMH, peer-to-peer support should certainly be encouraged, so that's something that we definitely need to look at. With regard to Brian Whittle's call for a larger piece of work, I think that we need to know how we've got here and what's the cause of the large increase in mental health cases. I recently read a piece in the new statement that highlighted or looked at the rise in mental health in Nordic countries. There was a direct correlation between the increased use of smartphones with the increase in mental health issues in young people. Brian Whittle has got a point that there needs to be more work on how we've got to this situation, but we don't have that in the remit of this inquiry. All we can do is deal with how to address the issues and where they can get that help, but I fully agree that there should be a wider piece of work somewhere in this parliament looking at the causal effect as well as how we deal with it. Would it be worthwhile to ask the clerks to bring forward something round what the themes are and how we're going to investigate those further, but in any report we produce that one of the recommendations might be about we actually have to look at this broader context and somebody, you know, might be the Scottish Government itself could be considering doing that kind of work. I mean, we are going to have the Minister for Mental Health in front of us at some point. It would be quite interesting to have that kind of conversation, I think. My sense is that we have both the challenge of the big picture, but also the very practical issues to make sure that young people are more informed about how they're feeling and what that means and how they can get help. When they do get help, it's the appropriate help and it's supported and people are comfortable. Not so much about breaking confidentiality, but ensuring that the young person understands that, for other people to know it's not a problem, it shouldn't be something that they're resisting, it's something that's actually going to support them. I'll go back to the conversation that we had when Maureen Watt was here as the Minister and saying to her, you know, if somebody had a diagnosis of cancer, your first instinct would be to make sure to encourage them to let the family know and to get all the family support round about them, but somehow this has seen differently in terms of your mental health, which I just don't get that somebody might want to have confidentiality and that should be respected, but we ought not to treat it in a different way because any condition that you've got is, I think, going to be better supported if you get folk round about you that are looking out for you. Brian? It's just on that theme and also following on from what Rex Hamilton was saying, we did some stuff around the suicide strategy in the health and support committee and we went out to interview a number of people and I and myself and Sandra White went to Cardinal College and ended up, we sat round a table with about a dozen students, all of whom had attempted suicide at some point or another, so they were obviously quite far down that spectrum and some of the things that came out of that, they actually knew what could help, they knew what could help, they knew if they got themselves out and ate better, they knew if they were out and joined a club and were physically active, it would help their condition, they knew if they sought out medical help, that would help as well and they did none of it, their condition was such that they just didn't do any of it. The one thing that was quite harrowing to listen to that, as you might imagine, but one thing that came out of it was they came up with a solution themselves, it's the first time they'd all sat round the table together, first they didn't know each other, but that collective understanding was just a peer-to-peer support, they actually came up with a solution themselves and it was at Cardinal College themselves that enabled that solution to take part. I've actually got it in my head to go back there and find out how that is actually doing, but this idea of allowing the youngsters themselves to be part of the solution and find out part of the solution, take ownership, I think, is a huge way forward and, as I said, I think that that kind of evidence there is sitting within this Parliament and that's why I'm going to say, pulling all that together into one more cohesive document I think is something that I think can be really beneficial. In terms of themes, there's certainly an issue from the submissions around training so that people know how to respond across the system where young people are coming across, young people, the whole question of awareness raising, I don't recall really having a conversation with the school that my kids went to about my awareness or who would I refer them to and that's just a general thing. I remember way back in the day when I was still teaching the sense that the guidance staff had a responsibility and you could refer parents to them and so on, I suppose. How do you make that kind of consistent so that awareness raising for family and carers and others to know how to respond and is there an issue too about early intervention and prevention? This is something that is flagged up in the submissions and certainly the Scottish Children's Services Coalition, in their submission say, a national programme of mental health training for all staff in schools in Scotland is vital, delivering a whole school approach to mental wellbeing. Parents should also be able to easily access information to provide them with a greater understanding of mental health problems. Children and young people should also be made more aware of the mental health advice information support available to them, including the provision of an appropriately experienced counsellor in all secondary schools and that seems to me to be what is needed. We have to think about how then people access that and understand their own circumstances. The other thing that I think was flagged up was the question that there is an issue about the particular experience of mental health issues for some young people, perhaps those within the LGBT community, those with disabilities who may be coming up against us and other things in their lives that they may need support with. Rachel? One of the submissions stated that the counselling models in school might not reach the most vulnerable and whether that was appropriate and the training needed to be not only for teachers but for GPs and the voluntary sector as well. One of the submissions also said that a number of training programmes had been developed that were consistent. I think that the thing about how to reach young people, young people who are already disengaged from the system, and they are disengaged from the system because of what is happening around them and they are maybe stressed or whatever, are the very ones who are not, because they have fallen out of the system or they do not trust it, how do we reach out to these young people? Some of that is about school systems reaching out into families and supporting them as well. That is a whole big other question that the education committee is wrestling with, which is about what are the supports within a school that are not teaching and how fundamental that support staff is around additional support needs and support teachers to do their job in their learning environment. We agreed, we certainly know and we recognise and I think that Brian makes the point at the beginning of this conversation very importantly, that we have all been struck by and we are affected by Annette MacKenzie's petition. We have in our minds that the purpose of this inquiry is to ensure that a young person who is looking for help gets the help that is appropriate and the people around about them know how to respond and that there is a conversation around mental health, which is about everyone knowing how to respond, knowing how to support somebody and ensuring that there is not something that you have to keep to yourself but that there is something that we all need to discuss more and there has been loads and loads of references to what is in here. Brian's bigger point about across the system how important this is and what the causes of it could be reflected in a report. What we do want from the class is probably something that gets us to look at some of these themes in conjunction with some of the people who have perhaps given submissions, perhaps some people with—we talked earlier about peer-to-peer support and girl guides and so on who have worked through all of this, getting that sense of what that would look like. We know, sadly, from the petition what it looks like when the system fails. What does a system that doesn't fail look like and what can we do to maybe make recommendations around that? If that makes sense, I think that the big issue—I don't want what we're trying to do to be overwhelmed by—is also massive but we would want what we do to be contributing to that bigger picture. At the end of it, Brian, you can maybe think then, is there something along with the other committees that we want to have a further conversation about? One other thing that frustrates me—it has frustrated me ever since I came in here around mental health. We all understand, as you alluded to, the stigma that surrounds having poor mental health as opposed to having a cancer diagnosis. At the end of the day, we talk about mental health and parity with mental health with physical health. Do you know what? It's just health. It's just all health. Rather than talking about parity, it's how mental health becomes just part of health and is discussed the same as any other health. How we break down that stigma in there is a major part of the work that we should be doing in this Parliament. I certainly think that the move to talk about your mental health as part of wellbeing makes sense. To keep yourself mentally healthy, the things that you can do in the same way that you can keep yourself physically healthy has been an important development. It's a very successful campaign around the stigma of mental health. I know that within my area, it was very successful in the past, so maybe we could look at things like that and how successful they were in removing the stigma around mental health. I think that sometimes that's one of the big problems, especially young people and especially in the education system. You know how cruel it could be sometimes when you're targeted by certain sections, but there's right in the issue to be open about it and get support for it. To me it's on a spectrum and we've had this conversation before, but that's the sense when people want to know what's wrong with them. We're working with young people who are falling out of the system and not want to come to school. People say, what's wrong with them? Actually, there's lots of things happening around them that are not just something that's going to be sorted in a medical way. There are other things that you can do to understand why young people might respond in a particular way, which is also a bigger conversation about some of the experiences that young people have and perhaps that issue around equalities is reflected in that one as well. Is there anything else that people want to highlight from the submissions or any issues that they want to point, convener? It was suggested that Education Scotland become involved in sort of developing the personal and social education part of learning and looking at the appropriate stage to give the PSE. I would have said that it probably starts before secondary school, probably starts in a primary setting. I don't think that a lot of the time primaries get it better, so that thing about circle time and so on and primaries quite often, that's actually what they do. They don't call it, you know, this mental health, addressing mental health, it's simply about a wee-class community talking to each other about the things, how they feel about stuff and how you should treat each other with respect. I mean, there was an inquiry and of course there was a debate on personal and social education, which I think highlighted the importance of good mental health as being part of that. That to me feels again, you know, Education Scotland may have a role in it but I'm not sure if it's about modules. It's more about creating a space in a school for those conversations to take place at that age appropriate. On that theme, I think that Angus Robertson touched, I don't wish on him again. Angus, meet tomorrow. Highlight him. He answers to anything. I'm quite offended myself. Maybe I need some help. I mean, I've got a 10-year-old and I'm really struck by, and I also have a 33-year-old and I'm struck by, that's not funny. It's unusual. I'm a 24-year-old so I am a fairly unique position decades apart. I'm very struck by the impact of social media and the way that they in the school environment where there's maybe a bit of conflict in the school environment, its ability to spill into the rest of it. You can't get away from it. It spills into the rest of it. And, you know, as a parent, I find it quite difficult to manage that process when that happens, when, you know, the kids will gangle each other and all that kind of thing. I think that primary schools, where we have to tackle that is the best place to tackle that, that kind of early intervention. So, you know, I would agree with what's been said here around the need for earlier than the Secretary of State was going, because for me it's coming out very much in a primary setting. Okay. Anything else? Look at how public health campaigns can be a part of this. I have a mixed view as well about some of the technology comments that have been made. I do agree that there is a definite influence from social media. However, some of the evidence has also said that apps would be helpful to take forward the contacts that you can get for the services. And if that's what young people want, we should be looking at technology in a positive way as well. Okay. I think that that's quite a lot for you to be getting on with in terms of taking it forward. I think that all it does is it does highlight just by the responses that we've gotten on said or read, but I want to put in record our thanks to everyone who's responded in whatever way they have done to this, because I think it's been immensely helpful, but it indicates just how important an issue it is. But I think that in taking it forward, the risk of repeating myself, we want to continue to be focused on that question of a young person feeling the need for help. How do they get help safely and get the support that they need? And how do people round about them? How do we round about our own young people? How are we aware? Or the people that we become across of what we can do to help too? So there's that practical focus, but looking at the broader recommendations, I think that Brian is looking at. Unless there's anything else, I think that that's been a useful discussion on something that, as Brian said already, and a petition and an experience from net we can see that it's been very powerful. We would hope that what would come out of that would be recommendations, recognition that young people have identified the challenges and where they go to get help and help that they need when they most need it. I think that with that we have concluded our business. I want to, as I've said, thank everyone who's contributed to this, and there is a very sniffed piece of work to continue to be done on a very important petition. With that, can I close the meeting and thank you for your attendance?