 Good morning and welcome to the thirdyw fairness meeting of the education children and young people committee in 2022. We have received apologies from Stephen K Ker MSP. The first item on our agenda today is to take evidence from the Minister for Children amendment Scotland regulations 2022 and the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, Exclusions and Exceptions Scotland amendment number 2, order 2022. I would like to welcome the minister to the committee again, along with her officials, Alison Martin, Solister for the Scottish Government and Kevin Lee, head of policy from Disclosure Scotland. Good morning. Ms Holly, can I invite you to speak to the draft instruments, please? Good morning, convener and committee, and thank you for inviting me to give evidence to the committee on two draft Scottish statutory instruments. The Police Act 1997, Offences and Schedules A, B, A8A and A8B, amendments Scotland regulations 2022 and the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, Exclusions and Exemptions Scotland amendment number 2, order 2022. I hope that the following is of help to committee members. Those instruments make amendments to the offence list in the legislation covering disclosure. Those lists contain the offences that must be included when disclosure checks are carried out on individuals. The package of SSIs are required in order to ensure that there is consistency between state and self disclosure. Most of the amendments to the offences list made by those instruments are in order to bring them in line with the equivalent lists passed by the Scottish Parliament in the Disclosure Scotland Act 2020. The changes made by those instruments will remain in place until that act is fully commenced. If an offence is not included in the list, a conviction for that offence cannot be disclosed on any level of disclosure once spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. Higher level disclosures are used for roles involving a high degree of sensitivity or where there is an expectation of integrity or for the purposes of public protection. The offence lists therefore serve an important safeguarding purpose by ensuring information about serious and relevant spent convictions can continue to be disclosed once they are spent. The legislation contains two lists of offences known as A and B. Offences in list B are for convictions that must be disclosed in accordance with rules and include those such as fraud or theft. An individual can apply to have spent convictions in this list removed from their disclosure, and to do that they must apply to the sheriff court. There are some offences that must be disclosed regardless of how long has passed since the conviction. Those are the offences in list A and include serious offences such as rape and other sexual offences and certain terrorism and firearms offences. An individual can only apply to have those removed once a certain amount of time has passed, depending on the age of a time of conviction and an application must be made to the sheriff court. When the offences lists were reviewed for the disclosure act, several offences were removed from list A and B, some were removed entirely from list B, and new statutory offences, which have been created since the offence lists were established in 2015, were added to both lists. For example, the offence under section 1 of the Domestic Abuse Scotland Act 2018, which is abusive behaviour towards a partner or ex-partner, is specified in list A of the disclosure act but is not specified in the offences lists in the existing legislation. That means that currently a spent conviction for such an offence cannot be disclosed on a form of higher-level disclosure. I have brought forward those instruments in advance of the disclosure act to remedy that and to reduce any safeguarding risks that might arise in the interim period. In addition to the changes made to align the existing legislation with the disclosure act, some further amendments to the offence lists are being made to take us through this interim period. Those relate to amendments that could not be made during the bill process as it was impacted by the onset of the pandemic, new offences created since the disclosure act completed parliamentary passage and a general review of the offence lists. The same factors that informed the creation of the offence list and the review of the disclosure act were revisited in order to classify offences as either serious list A or less serious list B. Full details of the amendments are set out in the policy notes that I believe the committee has. Corresponding amendments necessary to update the disclosure act offences lists will be made as part of the implementation of those provisions in 2024. My officials and I are happy to take questions on the draft regulations and the order. There are no comments, so we can now move to agenda item 2. The next item of business is to invite the minister to move motion S6M-06431 that the Education, Children and Young People Committee recommends that the police act 1997 offences in schedules 8A and 8B, amendment Scotland regulations 2022, be approved. I would like to invite the minister to speak to and move the motion. Do members have any comments? The question is that the motion S6M-06431, in the name of Clare Holly Beer, approved. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The committee must now produce its report on this draft instrument. Is the committee content to delegate responsibility to the deputy convener and I to agree this report on behalf of the committee? The motion is therefore agreed. The committee must now produce its report on this draft instrument. The next item of business is to invite the minister to move motion S6M-06432 that the Education, Children and Young People Committee recommends that the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, Exclusions and Exceptions Scotland amendment number 2, order 2022, be approved. I would like to ask the minister to speak to and move the motion. Do members have any comments? The question is that the motion S6M-06432, in the name of Clare Holly Beer, approved. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The committee must now produce its report on the draft instrument. Is the committee content to delegate responsibility to the deputy convener and I to agree this report on behalf of the committee? I would like to thank the minister and her officials for their attendance today and thank you all for your time today. The public part of today's meeting is now at an end.