 I welcome everybody to the sixth meeting of the Education and Culture Committee in 2015. I remind everybody that all electronic devices should be switched off. Apologies have been received from Siobhan McMahon this morning. Our first item is for us to decide whether to take item 3, which is consideration of a work programme in private. Are members agreed? Our next item is to complete our evidence taking on the British Sign Language Scotland bill. That will be our final meeting for evidence taking, after which we will consider our stage 1 report. We have received a large amount of information on the bill, as members will be aware, including around 150 submissions, many of which were in BSL. We have also received hundreds of comments and views of our BSL Facebook group, which now has, I am reliably informed, over 2,000 members. It has been a quite successful exercise. I thank everyone who took the time to give us their views and their comments on the bill. I have to say that your comments are invaluable for the committee in determining our ability to scrutinise the legislation. I thank everybody who provided comments to us during our evidence gathering sessions. This morning, I welcome Alasdair Allan, Minister for Science, Learning and Scotland's languages, and Hilary Third from the Equality Policy Unit in the Scottish Government to welcome to you both. Before I invite questions from the members, I believe that you have some opening remarks to make. I thank you for the invitation to speak to you this morning. I am happy to talk through the Scottish Government's position on Mark Griffin's bill, which, as you know, the Government supports in principle. I also welcome the opportunity to talk through some of the changes that I think will improve them. First, I hope that you will allow me to say a few words about the fact that the Scottish Government recognises deafness as a culture and British sign language very much as a language. We formalised that in a statement of recognition in 2011. If you will permit me to digress a little bit, I am fascinated by the long cultural roots of sign language in Scotland. I was fascinated to learn that Joan, the daughter of King James I of Scotland, not King James I of Britain, who died in 1493, was deaf. She used some form of sign language at court, which was recognised officially and was provided with interpreters. The reason that I mention is just to say that I recognise very much that we are talking about a culture with a long pedigree here. I hope that we can have a positive discussion today about the benefits of supporting British sign language. Too often we talk about BSL users only as recipients of public services, and I want to pay tribute to the resilience and creativity of the deaf community in Scotland. I share the view expressed by some of the deaf witnesses who have given evidence to the committee that, as a country, we will benefit from their contribution and if we protect, promote and support and value their language and their culture. The committee has heard first hand from BSL users in Scotland who's personal experience is often far from positive. As I understand witnesses have rightly pointed out, profoundly deaf people are covered by equality legislation and human rights conventions which define their disability. The evidence suggests that, despite those legal protections, their needs are still not being met. People who are profoundly deaf are often marginalised and excluded because they do not have linguistic access to information, services or to the opportunities and benefits that many of the rest of us take for granted. I appreciate that the current picture is mixed. The committee, I understand, has also seen and heard evidence of some truly excellent work that is going on to promote and support the use of BSL, and I applaud all of that. I fear that those might be the exceptions rather than the norm, and I do recognise that there is a lot more that we can and must do across Scotland. As I have already said by way of conclusion, the Scottish Government supports the principles of the bill. As members will know, we have suggested some changes in the Government memorandum, and I am delighted that Mark Griffin in his earlier evidence session indicated that he is supportive of those. We have been working with him to develop more detailed proposals. I believe that those changes will simplify and streamline the requirements of the bill, which will have the effect of reducing any bureaucratic burden on public bodies, while at the same time making the legislation more action-orientated and outcome-focused. I look forward to sharing more of the detail on our thinking on all of that, and I look forward to hearing the committee's views. Thank you very much minister. I am just going to go straight to questions, if you do not mind. I am going to begin with George Adam. I would like to talk about promoting BSL and a number of organisations and BSL users. I have said that the bill has two distinct reasons that people are not disabled, so disability legislation is not appropriate to meet their needs. They need to help and preserve BSL as a language in a culture now. One of the things that we are talking about promoting when I look at it is that I have been able to look at the practices within my constituency office. How do I get training for my staff to ensure that a constituent comes in? The promotion, from that point of view, has made me look at how I deal with my business practices, because I have staff going to go into training. One of the things that I would like to ask minister is whether the bill is sufficiently clear on what is intended by the idea of promotion, specifically who would be promoting BSL and how would we be doing that? Those are all very reasonable questions. The important thing about the bill that Mr Griffin has provided and that we are seeking to amend is that it leaves to some extent the answers to those questions in the hands of the deaf community themselves, in that the advisory group that will be set up will very much determine the content of the national plan and I hope that we will have some influence on bodies around the country as to what their priorities are. The priorities should not be set by politicians. However, there are examples of things that I can think of that we could do better that I am sure will feature in the national plan. There will be wider public awareness of the existence of BSL, what it is, awareness of the fact that it is a language, and it is not merely some means of signifying the English language. It provides an opportunity for local authorities and others to think about what they can do to provide better services. It also allows us to think more generally about education. We have a great opportunity in the 1 plus 2 programme that the Government is promoting for modern languages in schools that allow local authorities and others to think about where BSL fits into that. You said that BSL is a language that recognises such things. Are there any lessons that we could possibly learn from the Gallic Language Scotland Act? Are there any examples? I know that Mr Griffin has looked at the 2005 Gallic Language Act and informed some of his thinking on the bill. As the minister with responsibility for day-to-day running of the 2005 act for Gallic, I can see the many benefits that there have been for the language in terms of a much more co-ordinated national approach to providing support to bodies that support the Gallic Language. I think that perhaps the Government amendments that are going to be forthcoming learn also from the experience that supporting a language is very importantly about plans, but it cannot just be about plans. As I say, we are designed to try to ensure that we streamline the process as much as we can while keeping it effective. Can I push you a bit further on the promotion now? I absolutely accept what you are saying about the deaf community taking the lead on many of those issues and the advisory group that is planned to be set up. In the bill at 11A, the very first thing that it says is that the Scottish ministers are to promote the use and understanding of the sign language known as British Sign Language. Clearly, there is a role for the Scottish ministers to promote not just to facilitate promotion of by others. I am wondering what you said that you have some thoughts. Could you maybe expand on that and give us what your thoughts are in terms of the Scottish ministers role in terms of your promotion of DSL? I agree. Clearly, central government has a role and that is why the national plan will be informed by the deaf community, but the advisory group will advise ministers and ministers will have to have a policy that they implement, and not only that they implement for the Scottish Government, but that will also apply to the many bodies listed who are government bodies. For instance, that can involve promotion work to explain, as I mentioned to the public, the importance of BSL. It can involve a symbolic level, but an important symbolic level is a recognition of the fact that BSL is a language. It can also involve ensuring that our government bodies and our government keep constant track of what we are doing by way of promotion. It ensures that there is a mechanism by which we have to report back on action. As I have mentioned one or two examples, there is much more that we could be doing and are doing in education in schools. There is much more that we can do and are doing to challenge all of our public bodies around the provision of services. I hope that national ministers will be involved in all of that. A brief follow-up. Obviously, the evidence that we have taken has drawn a distinction at times between the deaf community and the deafblind community. Is there any observations that you could make about whether or not the specific needs of the deafblind community would need to be taken apart from that of the deaf community? How would that be reflected in any promotional work on behalf of the Scottish Government or more widely among other public authorities? You are quite right to say that the needs of the deafblind community are distinctive for very obvious reasons. Although the numbers of people involved may be smaller, the needs that they have are acute and specific and require one-to-one design. What I would say about where that fits with the bill is that I am determined that the deafblind community will be represented directly on the advisory group. I accept that however the bill is implemented, it must take account of the views of that community. It is an important point. BSL, as the committee will appreciate, is a visual language. Deaf people who lose their sight will need a particular form of communication support so that they can continue to access the language. As the minister said, any approach needs to be proportionate. The numbers are very small and the needs can be different from one person to the next. We would be committed to working with deafblind Scotland and others going forward to ensure that their needs are represented on the national advisory group and in the national plan. To suggest what will be referenced in the national plan is likely to be very overarching. In a sense, that would almost reflect the fact that it would need to be individually specific in its nature. I would definitely see the national plan making explicit reference to the deafblind community and the deafblind community would definitely be represented on the group. Given that you have just said that, minister, does the bill itself need to reference in particular the deafblind community? As I said, I am giving an undertaking here. As I have just indicated, my undertaking is that the deafblind community will be represented on the group and as far as I am concerned, it would be very remiss of anyone not to have explicit plans around the deafblind community mentioned in the group. Whether that needs to be on the face of the bill, I am not so sure that we can put everything on the face of the bill, but I am giving that commitment today. I want to ask a question about the working group that was established about BSL and linguistic access working group. What has it achieved to date? My view is that it has achieved a great deal since 2000, when it was established. It was established by the then Scottish Executive, and I would certainly want to pay tribute to the work that it has done. I do not think that we would have reached the point where we are at today, where we are talking about legislation giving status and rights to the British Sign Language community. Had it not been for the work that they had done to raise awareness, had it not been for the work that they did in 2009 around a road map that facilitated much of that, and they have brought us to the point where it is now possible to have legislation, so I would pay credit for that. Why would we need to establish a national advisory board? Does it complement the work? Does it replace the work? What is the difference between the work that you just announced and the achievements that the working group has delivered? Why would we create a national advisory board? One simple answer to that question would be that I would like to see a body that is much more substantially composed of deaf people and not taken away from anything that I have just said about the importance of the work of the previous group. I think that it is important that anybody that is at the heart of this new legislation should have a substantial proportion of its members who are actual day-to-day BSL users who are deaf people, as I mentioned, specifically having some kind of representation on behalf of deaf, blind people. That will have a very different function. It will be there to produce a national plan. What that says about the previous group is for another day to discuss what the future perhaps of the previous group is, but that group has a specific function and, crucially, it should be composed in a specific way. Again, with the convener's permission, I do not know whether Hillary third wants to add anything to that. If I could maybe pick that up. As the minister said, the group was set up by the equality unit in 2000, so it has been running for 15 years. I think that, like any group, it will have had its achievements, but there will be from time to time the need to review its function, its purpose and its work going forward. I think that the national advisory group that we have proposed is developed to support the implementation of the bill will have very specific roles, which are quite different from the BSL and linguistic access working group. It is important that the right people are around the table. As the minister said, strong representation from deaf BSL users, but also some of the public bodies who will be subject to the bill. For example, COSLA does not sit on the group at the moment, and I think that it will be important that it is on the group that helps to inform the national plan. I think that we feel that it is important to create a group that absolutely fits the purpose for the implementation of the bill. It will be then for the BSL and linguistic access working group to consider what role it might have going forward, given that we will be in a very different context. Thank you. You talked about the national plan. It is instructive that we have friends here today in the audience. Will you have someone with technical expertise to sit on the national plan? It seems to me that for those who are not deaf, we have the use of call centres, for example, and we had at previous sessions discussions around the inability of deaf people to go into a surgery or go into local authorities. The communication link is difficult, and it would seem that there is absolutely no reason that we set up the technology properly so that we cannot guarantee communication at that level between various particular public bodies. Will you ensure that there are some technology expertise? I think that that is a very relevant point again, because I am sure that others like me have experienced from their constituencies of truly atrocious situations in terms of historically a lack of public services being available to the deaf community of people who have been unable, essentially, to visit their doctors with any sense of privacy, people who have been unable to access, as you mentioned, anything that involves a call centre, as increasingly a lot of public services and private companies do involve, people who have been left quite isolated, particularly if they are in rural communities, where the community of BSL unit users is scattered. There are technical solutions that have been made available. Indeed, the Government has put quite a lot of money into, I am going to get the name wrong here, video streaming, Contact Scotland, which provides a number of these services online. As the Minister for Languages, I noted how delfectly you skipped round the issue of the membership of the advisory group. You will be aware that some of the witnesses we have heard from are quite adamant that they see it as important that a majority of those on the advisory group are drawn from the deaf community. Is that something that you would be happy to consider, would support? Obviously, there are a range of different bodies who will need to be represented on that group, and it cannot be unmanagably large. Nevertheless, it would seem to be an important principle to establish that the majority of the group is drawn from the deaf community. I certainly was not intending to be delfic or oracular or anything else. I think that, as I gave an indication of, I am open to all ideas as to what the composition of the group should be, but I certainly think that the composition of the group should be much more substantially composed of the deaf community than the previous group that we referred to earlier on. I am perfectly open to the idea of a majority, but the points that you make are also relevant, which is that we need to have a range of bodies represented, we need to have local authorities represented, we need to have service users represented. However, it should be in substantial part, as all I can say at this stage, composed of deaf people. Can I, minister, push you a little bit on the previous group, the linguistic or not previous current group, the linguistic access working group? One of its roles was to improve linguistic access for deaf people in Scotland and to raise awareness of deaf issues. At the very least, there is an overlap between that group and the group that you are suggesting, the national advisory group. There may well be an overlap, and as we have talked about, it sits for that group and for the Government to consider in future whether that overlap would be sustainable or not. I do not take the view that that group could be used to administer, as is probably the wrong word, but to deal with a piece of legislation like that, I certainly do not think that we would design a group that did not have the numbers of deaf people and BSL users on it, but it should do. Nor could we use a group that did not include local authorities who implement many of the services and would be dealing with many of the plans involved. You want to come in, if that is okay? If I could just make a further point, the BSL and linguistic access working group, when it was set up, was looking at wider forms of deafness, not just at profoundly deaf people who use sign language, so it covered sensory impairment and hearing loss as well. Really, it was set up in a different time and for a different purpose, and as the minister says, it does not have the representation of public bodies who would be subject to the bill. It would be more difficult to redesign an existing group than to set up a new one with a good process in place to ensure that we have strong representation from deaf BSL users and not only those who occupy professional roles, but community members as well. I would accept that, but the counterargument in a sense is not necessarily about effectively using the existing group to do the national advisory group's job, but does not the new group that you are about to design affect the national advisory group, or is it not the group that effectively does not only the role that you envisage in relation to the bill but also the work that is currently undertaken by the existing group? Why do you need two groups? As I think that we are both trying to indicate here, the access group is there. None of these groups exist forever, none of them are in statute. Those are things that we would have to review, but it does not get away from the reality that we do need a more formal group to deal with the status of the responsibilities that the bill would create. However, the Government constantly reviews the need for the number of groups that it has. That would be one of the things that we would have to review. If I may, it would be okay for me. Just one further point of clarification. The BSL and linguistic access working group is not a Government group. It is not chaired or owned by the Government. It would not be fast to say that it should not exist once we establish our own group. It was set up by the Government Equality Unit back in 2000, but we handed over the chairing to the Scottish Council on Deafness in 2011. It would not really be our place to say that that group should no longer exist once we establish the BSL national advisory group. The Government set it up. Do you fund it? We do not fund it. We fund some of the organisations that are represented on it. In terms of promotion, it seems to me—I understand the rationale behind the creation of the working group—that we all agree that that has to be done. Is there not a great danger of the dilution of that promotion by having certainly two fairly significant bodies? Wouldn't it be better to push this through one particular body that represents what we have? I do not want to go over old ground here too much other than to say that this is a bill with very specific requirements on Government. There needs to be a body set up to deal with the very specific requirements of this piece of legislation. As has been mentioned, the access group is not chaired by the Government. That is a matter for another day. It is a matter that we can certainly discuss. To some extent, it is not a matter for the Government to dictate on, but I am very firmly of the view that the group that we need has to be a group that is set up in a way that includes deaf people much more substantially than the other group that you refer to. One final question before we move on, minister, on this area. You just said that we need this group to be established effectively to advise on the bill or worse to that effect. If this group needs to be established in relation to the work of the bill, should it be on the face of the bill, should the national advisory group be on the bill? My view is that the Government is able to give undertakings about this. The committee can offer a view if it feels that it needs to be on the face of the bill. My view is that it is not required. We have set out our thinking about the role of the group as a Government. It is in the Government's memorandum. We do not feel that it is necessary for it to be on the face of the bill for those reasons. I have heard what you have said to other members of the committee about the national advisory group on the road map, but I am not asking you to repeat what has already been said. I am struggling to understand what powers ministers already have to promote BSL. I would like to understand what those powers have already achieved in the past eight years since the Government has been in power, and what powers the bill would bring forward that are not currently available? I am just not seeing that clearly at the moment. Probably some of the questions that you have are probably ones that you may want to address to the mover of the bill in some ways. I am happy to answer as many of them as I can but, obviously, the Government's role here, as we see it, is to improve a bill that has come from elsewhere. On your point about what the Government has done so far without legislation or without specific legislation, the Government has been working very hard to support BSL on a number of fronts. We have closely worked with, as has been mentioned, the BSL on linguistic access group. There has also been funding in a number of areas to support the infrastructure for teaching and learning of BSL and to improve the engagement with the deaf community more widely. We have been, as I mentioned, enabling and encouraging schools to think about BSL as a subject alongside other modern languages. There has been funding to develop a pilot online interpreting pilot for BSL users, particularly as I alluded to for people who want to access public services by phone. Again, at a symbolic level in a ministerial statement in 2011, BSL was recognised as a language. There are many things that we have been doing without the bill but I would still take the view that the bill is helpful and, for that reason, the Government is able to support its principles. The question that you did not answer is what would the bill provide in terms of specific powers that you do not already have? In other words, what could you do when this bill is passed that you are unable to do now? One of the things that the bill allows that does not happen just now is that it ensures that all public bodies, both national and local, have to think about BSL. They have to think about the existence of BSL and services in BSL. They have to make plans or produce statements about them as organisations. Those organisations that have not thought about the issue before will have to think about it now. That is a power that the bill creates that was not there before and one that I think is helpful. Again, with the convener's permission, I do not know if Hillary wants to come in on that as well. I think that the most important point is the one that the minister has made about requiring other public bodies to set out what they will do to improve access to BSL across their services. Government has a very good record on promoting and supporting BSL. There are a number of very significant programmes of work that we have undertaken over the past few years. We have a good record there, but the significant step is spreading that across the public sector, which will have a greater impact on deaf people across the country. Well, the main policy objective in the bill in the policy memorandum is to require BSL plans to be prepared and published by Scottish ministers and listed public authorities. Now you have said that you are working hard with BSL groups, you are engaging, enabling, funding, etc. I want to do whatever is best to make BSL and access to BSL a success, but I am struggling to require a plan to be prepared and talking to public bodies. Can you not just say to them just now, can you prepare a plan once a year and let's see what you are doing? Do you need the bill to ask them to prepare and publish a plan? Perhaps bodies around the country are more likely to listen to such a request if it is backed by legislation, but I think that the point that you make around plans—I can answer that in perhaps two ways. First, as has been mentioned, the 2005 Gallic Act, although it deals with other areas such as the implementation of policy, the encouragement of public bodies to produce BSL plans has changed the behaviour of a number of public bodies in terms of provision around the Gallic language. The other thing that I would say in response to your question about plans and is what is required is to say that we have worked with Mr Griffin and with COSLA and others to try to ensure that what we do on the plans front is proportionate. I think that it would be fair to say that we have all, I hope, together reached the same conclusion, which is that some of that should be streamlined. I do not know if that is where your question comes from, but we do need to ensure that that is not just about plans. That is why, for instance, the number of plans within our amendments is greatly streamlined. There is a national plan. Indeed, other organisations may make statements about their activities, but we are not going down the route of having dozens upon dozens of individual plans for Government bodies. Again, with your permission, I do not know if you want to say more about that. This is actually thinking that it has developed since the Government memorandum was published, so it is useful to be able to spell it out for the committee. What we are suggesting is that, rather than requiring all national listed authorities to produce their own plans, we produce a single national plan that covers all national public bodies that are answerable to Scottish ministers. We think that that would allow us to take a much more strategic and co-ordinated approach in terms of the actions that need to happen at the national level. It also reduces the number of plans that need to be produced and consulted on, therefore reducing the burden across the public sector. We feel that that would be a better approach both in terms of the quality or the outcome, but also the bureaucracy involved in producing such a plan. That is quite an important change that we are proposing. I have sat here and passed quite a lot of legislation over since 1999. It is not the plans or the legislation, but it is the implementation that really concerns me, so I will just wind up my questions together. Let us say that one of your listed public authorities, after five years, did not take any actions or did not do anything. So what happens then? What if people just give you nice, warm, cosy words in your national plan we intend to make progress, which could be minimal or huge? Basically, what if they do nothing? What kind of sanctions have you got? How do you make sure that this moves things forward? Given that you are also Minister for Gallic, and I am a Highlands and Islands MSP, I applaud the huge advances in Gallic and the access to Gallic. It is absolutely incredible. Mark Griffin is on the record as saying that he wants BSL on an equal footing with Gallic, so could I maybe just ask for a piece of advice from you? What more needs to be done, because this bill does not put BSL on an equal footing with Gallic? In your opinion, what more needs to be done to get BSL on an equal footing with Gallic? Only two questions. The first one is what if people ignore your national plan? What do you do then? Secondly, equality with Gallic? On the first point, we are starting in terms of legislative status from a low base for BSL to all of our shames. The emphasis on the bill as presented and as our proposed amendments take it is very much on carrots rather than sticks. It is relevant to say that bodies have to provide some kind of statement regularly as to how they are progressing with measuring up, living up to the national plan. There will be the opportunity, and I am sure that the community will take it, to offer an opinion if bodies are not living up to that. In terms of the point about the status of Gallic, well, of course… So if they say that they are going to do something and one, two or five years later they have not done anything, you will offer an opinion? They will have to provide statements as to whether or not they are living up to the principles of the national plan and that, while I absolutely accept, is not legislative sanctions perhaps of the kind that the member is talking about, it is none the less progress on where we are just now, where there is no requirement upon public bodies in any formal sense even to think about the language issues around BSL at all. On the second question around language status and comparisons with Gallic, of course at the moment English does not have official status in Scotland, Scots has no defined status, Gallic has some legal status through the 2005 act, but the official status of Scotland's Indigenous languages is largely unresolved, I should say. The sympathies that I have are very much about ensuring that all language communities make progress. I believe that this bill, although it does not come from the Government, ensures that progress is made with the status of BSL. Okay, thank you. Just one point on the duties that Scottish ministers may have. Can I ask about the—there was a proposal effectively that a minister would have direct responsibility for BSL. The Government is committed to doing this and I believe that Mark Griffin has suggested at least that that provision could be deleted from the bill. I think that that is my understanding of where the discussions went to. However, if that provision on ministerial responsibility for BSL was to be deleted, how would the link between BSL and a specific ministerial portfolio be guaranteed in the future? At the moment, Minister for Languages, I have the responsibility. In any circumstances, a minister would take the lead responsibility on BSL. My understanding is that there is certainly consensus on that point. The reason behind that is because the Government, as you will appreciate, operates on a basis of collective responsibility. We simply do not have on the whole legislation, which, on the face of legislation, identifies the Government's responsibility as sitting with a particular minister in the legislative formal sense. We have collective Government responsibility, but that does not take away from the fact that, as Minister for Languages, I will be the person leading on this, and that will be the case in future Governments, I am sure of that. Liam McArthur I want to come on to the issue of the financial memorandum and some of the implications that flow from that. However, I was interested in the comment that was made by Mr Dair about trying to streamline the process. There has been concerns about the amount of resources that are expended on the drawing of plans and statements, as opposed to the front-line delivery of services. However, earlier in your comments, you were saying in response to Mary Scanlon that, where that takes us from where we are at the moment, it places a requirement on public authorities to produce a plan or a statement. However, if I understood correctly from what was said, in streamlining the process in the sense that they all come under an umbrella of a single plan, the ownership of that statement or that plan, if you like, would it at the best be diluted? In some sense, you could see authority saying, well, that is a national plan and really it does not have as much to do with us as a statement of intent which would be very much drafted-owned, consulted on by the public authority or the relevant authority. Let me be clear when I am talking about public bodies in that context that would come under the national plan. These would be national government bodies, so there is a connection there in the first place anyway. I think that there is a reasoning behind streamlining the bill in that way. Let me give you some examples. If we did have dozens upon dozens of consultation processes for dozens and dozens of Government bodies around individual plans around BSL, I think that we could very quickly get ourselves into a state of gridlock given the pressures on relatively small deaf communities given the lack of BSL interpreters. Obviously, we want all those Government bodies to be involved, but I personally do not think that it makes sense for us to have, for some of the reasons, I think, possibly without putting words in our mouth, Mary Scanlon was alluding to. I do not think that we need to replicate the process endlessly. I think that that is fair, but it is also highly likely that the specific issues that the deaf community may have with different agencies of government are going to be different, whether in a new-owned sense or in a substantive sense. Therefore, a national plan that is able to reflect that so that whatever the organisation is has ownership of it and, indeed, probably the priority of where the action points set are slightly different for each of those organisations that need to be reflected. Otherwise, it becomes a kind of homogenous plan that people can duck out of helping to deliver or play their part in delivering. Those are reasonable observations and, for that reason, the statements that will be provided by those Government bodies or those public bodies will be flexible enough to take account of the fact that the plan may have to be interpreted in an entirely different way, or, to some extent, a different way, within Creative Scotland to within Skills Scotland to pick two examples of bodies that are not currently listed, which we would like to see listed. I do not know if you are able to say any more about that. I think that the other point is that our suggestion is that one of the first tasks for the BSL national advisory group would be to develop agreed national priorities, and, to an extent, they would determine what some of the actions would be for different national bodies, and that would be reflected as part of the plan. Minister, I would like to carry on with the question of the plans, because it is a core feature of the bill that the requirement that the Scottish ministers and the various listed authorities produce plans and consult on the drafts with BSL users and others. How will public authorities meet the costs that would be contained within any recommendations that came up within those plans? Would they be expected to meet that out of their own resources? It should be said that some of the costings in circulation, for instance the figure of six million over the four-year period for the implementation of the bill, some of those costings refer to the bill—in fact, all of those costings refer to the bill that was presented rather than the bill in the form that I would prefer to see it amended. I think that some of what we can do along the lines that I have just mentioned about streamlining the number of plans does take us some way towards reducing some of the bureaucratic costs. That is one of the areas that COSLA has been a very positive conversation that we have had with COSLA around some of that. However, I think that the issue of whether additional resources are required to implement the bill is to turn that on its head. Obviously, there are additional costs at a personal level and at a societal level, but also for local authorities if we do not get this right. One of the consequences of public bodies and local authorities not having to think in a more formal sense about services for deaf people is that deaf people are left behind in a way that creates a cost to society through the cost to them personally in terms of educational opportunities, the attainment gap that they face, the employment problems that they face. Again, I do not know if you want to come in on some of that. As the minister says, some of our suggestions are designed to reduce the cost to the Scottish Government and its agencies and also to local authorities, but our costings are based on the bill as published and not on the bill and are suggested amendments. Maybe that some further work needs to be done on that. Given that the plans are crucial, do you have any specific items that you would expect or want to see included in the national plan or the local plan? As I have indicated, I do not want to speak for the deaf community. They will speak, I hope, within the advisory group very clearly, but the kind of things that I can imagine being priorities, which I certainly think are priorities, are some of the things that I have just mentioned at the symbolic level, the recognition of the role and the importance and the linguistic status of BSL and, at a practical level, what we all do as public authorities to ensure that the opportunities for deaf people improve, because I would certainly recognise that the opportunities for deaf people have not been what they should have been. There is an attainment gap in our education system. I regularly meet deaf people who talk about the fact that they do not feel that their needs were considered fully by all of us as public authorities when it comes to promoting careers, jobs and the opportunity to gain qualifications for deaf people. I feel that there is much more that could be done in the wider community to recognise the role that BSL could play among non-deaf people in promoting understanding. Those are all areas that I am sure will be discussed and are all areas that I am sure will be reflected in the advice that comes to me, but the advice is not a matter for me. Clearly, the national plan will highlight the overarching priorities and authorities that are participating in this will feed into that. Will there be sufficient flexibility if there is a need on a local basis to deviate from the national priorities, given the fact that local circumstances can be different from area to area? Will that capability to deviate be included in the bill? Yes. Some of the priorities that are set out in the national plan, will, as you say, be less relevant to some listed authorities rather than others. Yes, there should be scope for them to determine how to respond to that. It may be, for instance, that the national advisory group can offer advice to groups or bodies or authorities around the country, perhaps even almost templates as to how their own statements could be put together. However, as I have indicated, there has to be scope for those statements to reflect the actual function of those different bodies. They have to be flexible enough to do that and they have to be flexible enough to realise that deaf people will engage with those authorities in completely different ways. Should it be a requirement that the listed authorities are consulted on the national plan? My understanding is from the Government memorandum, and I will refer here to Hillary Thurd that there is reference to conversation between the Government and listed authorities around that. I do not know if you can add any more to that. Yes, I think that we would anticipate a very participatory process in developing the BSL national plan. It would need to involve, as we have said, a wide range of interests that would be around the table at the BSL national advisory group, but it would also need to reflect the views of the much wider community, both in terms of deaf people and a wider range of public bodies than can fit around that table. I anticipate that quite a lot of our work in the first period after the bill has passed once we have established the group will be on engaging and consulting around the national plan. Clearly, if it covers a whole range of national bodies and has implications for local authorities and health boards, we will need to ensure that they are content with and signed up with the agreed national priorities. That is an important point that COSLA has made. If it is going to be acceptable and meaningful for local authorities, they will need to be part of the process of agreeing the national priorities. I see a lot of engagement around the development of the plan, which is why we suggest a post-government memorandum that perhaps the Government needs to have longer to publish its first national plan than the year that is set out in the bill. The process of setting up the BSL national advisory group in the right way will take time. It is very important that the first national plan is right and involves a wide range of interests. That is something else that we would like to suggest. I listened to what you are saying, Minister, about the costing estimates being a reflection of what is in the original bill and not necessarily what would emerge on the basis of what appear to be very constructive discussions between the Government and Mark Griffin. I think that this is my first member's bill scrutiny process. I am interested to observe that, while financial memos that come before us with Government bills tend to be an exercise in trying to reassure us that the cost has been kept at an absolute minimum, in this instance it looks like the kitchen sink has been rather thrown at it. I note the cost to Scottish Government on estimated to be up to 140,000 a year in the first year and 100,000 thereafter. I wonder whether that falls into the same category as telling us that every parliamentary question costs however many hundreds of pounds, whereas those are answered by civil servants signed off by ministers and we do not add to the number of civil servants just because we ask more parliamentary questions. I appreciate those not necessarily the figures that will emerge in a finalised financial memorandum, but it would be helpful to get a better understanding of quite where those figures emerge from, not those because in response to the question from Mary Scanlon earlier on, from the Scottish Government perspective, the bill is not empowering me to do much beyond what you are already doing anyway, and it is more that the responsibility it places on other public authorities. I am not sure that supplementary on the plans, and Gordon MacDonald was going to lead off on the financial one. I thought that he was doing it on the financial one. This has all been prearranged. No, no, no, no. We do talk to each other, Minister, and you are not surprised to know. You remember being a committee member, surely? I don't know whether you want to come in at this stage or do you want to wait till they close? Well, the only follow-up I would ask, bearing in mind that most of the aspects of the financial implications that we have touched upon is, is there any estimate of the cost of implementing the actions set out in the plans? It is all talking about the preparation of the plans, but there is no, it does not seem to be any estimate of the cost of carrying out the actions set out in the plans. Is there an estimate? No, there is not. The figures that we are referring to here is that it is, as Mr MacArthur said, the Government's estimates of the cost associated with the original bill as tabled £6 million over four years. No, it does not take us into the areas that you are talking about. It is just the cost directly associated with the bill. For instance, my understanding is that the member hopes that the obligations under the bill will in practice lead to an increase to the services that are made available in terms of BSL by public authorities, but the financial memorandum does not attempt to quantify some of the things that you are talking about. If there was to be increased services to BSL users on the back of this bill, it will require additional resources. So are there any additional resources coming from Government in order to cover this? Well, one of the conversations that we have had with COSLA and that we have been very happy to have with COSLA is around some of the issues of the role of local government in all this, as well as the role of national bodies. I come back to my point, and it is not meant to be evasive, but it is an important point. I come back to my point, which is that although this is not the Government's bill, we are supportive of its principles. One of the reasons that we are supportive of its principles is because there is a false economy associated with not doing something for this group of people. That might sound like a general answer, but, as I say, to be clear, the bill does not deal with cost things and does not deal with implementation along the lines that you have mentioned. I think that we have gone beyond the submission on the costings. I was intrigued that the approach to the costings of the member's bill appeared to be a slightly different approach to the financial memorandum process for a Government bill. I do not know whether the Government plans to come forward at a later stage with estimated costs or whether the expectation would be that the proposer of the bill would be expected to do that, but it would certainly be interesting in a sense. I come back to the national plan and the flexibility that appears to be being encouraged at its interpretation at a local level. On the basis that I abhor the notion of targets, can you tell me what outcomes you expect the national advisory body to monitor and how will they determine a meaningful performance review of progress and improved outcomes? For instance, when we have statements produced by local authorities, I do not think that it would be appropriate for ministers to be in the business of monitoring, as it were. The advisory body, which, in these circumstances, would have to be fairly robust? Indeed, but what I am saying is that, for instance, when local authorities produce statements, it would not be appropriate, as I am saying, for the national advisory body or the Government to be monitoring, as it were, what local authorities do. When it comes to national bodies, there will be that connection with the Government, and we would be wanting to see that their statements were robust. We would be wanting to see that their statements showed that they wanted to live up to the national plan. I am sorry to interrupt, but I am now confused, because there is a national plan that we want to achieve nationally. I know that integral parts of that reside with the local authorities, but somewhere somebody has to make a review of a performance that ensures that we are improving outcomes. If Parliament or indeed the movers of the bill wanted to create a bill that gave power and gave it a mechanism for perhaps the kind of monitoring system or monitoring of progress system that the member has in mind, that would be an option for Parliament, but that is not what is in the bill. The bill is much more about encouragement, much more about carrots than about sticks. The original bill talks about performance review, but the Government's stance on that is that we would like to see that altered in some ways. Amendments will reflect that. I might defer to yourself, Hilary, about some of the changes that are being proposed to the bill in that area. As the minister said, the bill as published requires Scottish ministers to publish a performance review. That would include an account of the measures taken, outcomes attained and highlighted examples of best practice and poor performance. However, as the minister said, we are suggesting that we change that provision slightly. Rather than talking about reviewing performance, we instead have a progress report, which might sound like a change of language, but there is an important implication here. Firstly, it is very difficult to carry out a performance review in a situation where there is no baseline and there are no performance indicators in place to measure performance. Secondly, as the minister has already said, we have heard from COSLA, who are strongly of the view that it is inappropriate for Scottish ministers to assess their performance and that they are instead accountable to their local communities. For that reason, we have suggested that ministers should publish a progress report, which sets out the national picture and gives a flavour of some of the activities that are taking place. However, it would be different from a performance review because we accept that it is not appropriate for Scottish ministers to judge the performance of local authorities. However, we are thinking that over time it would be possible to build in an assessment of national impact and that each progress report would set out recommendations both at a national and at a local level for further improvements. We do not have a baseline. That does not mean that we do not choose some time once in the bill or when we say that we will determine by local authority just exactly what the baseline is and then measure the performance improvement against that. However, at the end of the day, we have a responsibility to influence the change in this particular area. I am surprised that if one local authority does not follow a national plan, who then ensures that it does follow? The point there would be that local authorities, democratically and publicly, have to answer for their actions. However, they have to report on progress as do national bodies if they do not meet that. If they are clearly not living up to the principles of the national plan, if they are not able to report on substantial progress, then not only will they have to answer to that publicly, but they will certainly have to answer to the deaf community for it. I think that Chick Brody is just into my question of performance review, what I did to Gordon MacDonald's on financial memorandum. He who lives by the sword, so to speak. Following up that point in relation to the performance review, the evidence that we have had are that expectations against essentially imposed targets is not necessarily ours of questionable value and the democratic accountability point, the minister that you made, I think very fairly, would be one to adhere to. However, it appears to be at best a patchy, but some may say a complete absence of data about performance in this area. Is there anything through this bill or anything that the Government is committed to doing that gives confidence that the data around performance across the public realm can be monitored over a period, whatever the baseline is, so that the advisory group has something with which to presumably work? I think that there is a lack of a baseline. I would hope that in time this bill would contribute to the gathering of better information about services around the country and services provided by public authorities. I would hope that, over time, that that would lead to a culture of improvement. Is there anything from that experience and that process that would perhaps inform the way in which we try to chart the progress that is being made through this bill? The Gaelic Act 2005 is set up on a slightly different basis in that, for instance, implementation forms part of the legislation and that the legislation is set up at a formal body, board and Gaelic, which, as well as having an implementation role, was involved in the funding of bodies. It was a different kind of beast in that respect, so I am not sure that you could make direct comparisons now. If I could just add, we have started to map local provision and need through a project that we funded over the last two years through Scottish Council on Deafness, the Equality and Access for Deaf People project, which has three project offices that have been working with public bodies and with local deaf communities to start to build the picture. We will be building on that programme of work and supplementing that programme of work going forward so that we will, I believe, during the course of the first cycle, develop a much better picture of provision and need. It occurs to me as we are going through this in response to the earlier questions from Czech Brody that, all the way along, we have been conscious of the need to manage expectations about what this bill will do and what it will not do. Is there a risk in referring to performance review that the perception of what will be achieved through this is likely to be very different from what public authorities and the advisory group are likely to be able to achieve through it? To some extent, that is why changes are being proposed by the Government in this area, to make sure that there is not a mismatch between the language of the bill and the reality, but also to make sure that there is a culture developed of bodies reporting back on actual progress against what they have set themselves as their priorities and what the national plan has set as priorities for them. The aim of it is to become much more action focused. The aim is to ensure that bodies are setting themselves a to-do list of things that they can practically achieve and that those things will be visible and understandable and can be commented on readily by the community. Can you just ask the minister about the cycle for publishing BSL plans? Clearly, there is a process by which that is supposed to be done, contained within the bill, and the Government takes a different view on it. Could you maybe explain your reasoning for being opposed to the way that it is being proposed in the bill? Well, there are a couple of things. Firstly, when we are talking about the timescales, the initial bill is talking about five years. Again, that refers back, I suppose, of the inheritance that comes from the 2005 Gallic Act. I am not sure if I can use the analogy about the fourth rail leverage any more since it used stronger paint, but I think that it would be fair to say that, without taking away from the importance of Gallic plans that born of Gallic, where the whole body is set up partly to administer those plans, it finds that no sooner has it concluded and monitored a plan and that it is returning to the same body's plan over again. I am not 100 per cent convinced that five years is the right period. We suggested seven. I think that it may end up being six in the Government's eventual amendments. However, the other thing to be said, and I will ask Hillary to say more about this, is that the timescales in the original bill are all focused around the parliamentary cycle in quite a complex way, which I think needs to be simplified to be workable. The advice from our solicitors is that the way that it is set out in the bill as published is quite complex and that it would be more straightforward to set the timescale in terms of number of years. In fact, I think that the original proposal would have worked out even closer to four years, given that the experience of the Gallic Act is that five years was really quite tight. That was the reason for suggesting the seven years. I think that it is important to note that the expectation is that actions will be taken between the period of the plan being published and the performance review or the progress report taking place. I think that there has been some anxiety from some of the deaf witnesses that nothing happens between those periods, whereas our feeling is that that is where all the activity should happen. We want to focus as much of the resource as possible on the actions rather than the reporting process. However, as the minister said, we have heard what many deaf witnesses have said and concerns about the seven years being too long, and so, as the minister said, we are thinking perhaps that the amendment should be for a six-year cycle. However, within that, the Government is allowed two years to develop the first national plan for the reasons that I outlined earlier. I have one final question, which is on the list of bodies, which is scheduled to, I think, in the bill. I wonder on the Government's view, first of all, whether or not there should be a list contained within the bill, rather than separately. Secondly, if it was to be contained within the bill, at the moment, it says that it can be amended by an order on subsection 3, which is subject to the affirmative procedure. I wonder whether or not you thought that that was the appropriate level of procedure for any list containing the bill to alter it. As I said, my first question was on whether or not such a list should be contained in the face of the bill in the first place. I think that it is useful for a list of bodies to be there in the schedule, but it is useful for it to be something that is amendable by the process that you have just described rather than by the whole process of primary amendment or amendment to primary legislation by the long parliamentary route. However, it is an important signal to set out that there should be a list of bodies, but we have amended the list of bodies. We have changed the list of bodies from that originally supplied in Mr Griffin's bill, because, as I mentioned, there are important ones that are left out in our view. My second question was whether or not you agreed that the question should be by the affirmative procedure, or do you think that negative is sufficient? I think that the affirmative procedure is proportionate if we were in the future seeking to amend the list of bodies, if a new body came into being, if a body went out of being. I think that that is a proportionate way to try to amend it. Okay. Thank you very much, minister. Thank you for your attendance this morning. We appreciate your time. We will be moving on to hear from the member in charge of the bill, Mark Griffin, now, so I will suspend briefly. Thank you. I welcome to the committee this morning, Mark Griffin, who, although he is a member of the committee, is here, of course, as a member in charge of the bill. We also have your supporting officials from the Scottish Parliament, Joanna Hardie from the non-government bills unit and Neil Ross, principal legal officer. Welcome to both of you as well. Before we go to questions, again, I invite Mark Griffin to make an opening statement. Okay. Thank you, convener, for giving me another chance to come and give evidence to the committee. I've been following the evidence sessions and I think that the fantastic Facebook group that's been set up and seen the massive quantity of evidence that's been submitted, I think that's been really encouraging. I'll just briefly set out the reasons that I brought forward a British Sign Language Bill. Partly personal, I have two great grandparents who are deafblind, and I was brought up hearing stories of how they raised their children and how they accessed services with that dual sensory impairment. When I became an MSP and joined the cross-party group on deafness, I was disappointed to hear the experiences of people in the cross-party group on deafness. Almost three generations later experiencing the same difficulties, having the same difficulties in access to services, the same difficulties with appreciation of the language and the culture of BSL difficulties with accessing medical advice, the police service difficulties with educational attainment that, again, still existed three generations later than the stories I was hearing about how my great grandparents lived their life. That's really my motivation for bringing that bill in front of you today. I think that there is an appetite for legislation through the consultation. There was an overwhelming appetite for legislation to give British Sign Language, to put British Sign Language on an equal footing, not to say a legal footing, but certainly presentational in how Scotland treats its language that BSL has put on a similar footing to the Gallic Language Act, one of our other Indigenous languages. That has come over loud and clear in the evidence sessions from BSL users and the submissions through the Facebook page that legislation is required. At this stage, I am in discussions with the Government about their range of amendments, and I am open to all of those comforts, and I will take a more detailed look at them on their tables. I am happy to take all the member's questions today. Thank you very much for that, Mark. I am going to move straight to George Adam. One of the main parts of the bill, one of the biggest issues that has come up, and one that the deaf community is interested in, is the fact that the promotion of BSL within the bill, the fact that it will be regarded as a language in its own right. However, one of the main parts of the bill, and something that is always in my mind, is the fact that how I represent my own constituency. I have already spoken to some of my staff about trying to get them to learn some rudimentary sign language as well, so that we can represent our constituency. My question is, Mark, how do you see the bill taking that a step further? It has obviously affected me, because I have seen the evidence and what has happened when we have been going through this. How do we ensure that other public organisations and other bodies will promote the bill? How do you see that happening? Obviously, the promotion partner is an obligation on the Scottish Minister, so that will be for the Government to decide as to how it will go about promotion of the language, but I reflect on what you are saying. That is exactly what I hope will happen in the minds of decision makers and public authorities across the country, that when they come to drafting their own statements or BSL plans, they will go down the same thought process as yourself. How are we supposed to provide a service to our constituents and the taxpayers that rely on our services? How are we going to provide the same level of service that anyone else around the table expects and has a right to? I think that, through those plans, that will start the decision makers setting the ball in motion and continuing from the actions that you have described that you are going to carry out in your own constituency office. We are looking at a cultural change and looking at a way to move things forward from that. We asked the minister—obviously, there is some mention of the Gaelic language bill, and you have used it as a template almost. How do you see that learning from what has happened with that can help to make sure that things actually work from the get-go? We heard from the minister exactly how the Gaelic language had benefited, how the use of awareness of Gaelic had benefited from an act in a national co-ordinated language plan. I hope that that would happen with BSL, and some of the lessons that have been learned from the Gaelic Language Act 2020. The minister and officials have been talking to me about how we go around amending the British Sign Language Bill to take into account the previous lessons that I learned on things such as the length of cycle and other issues that we can learn lessons from the Gaelic Language Act 2020. That was the model that I built on the BSL bill, so it makes sense that, for people who have experienced with the previous language act, I will learn lessons and amend accordingly. Mark, can you define what is intended by promotion? I have not defined what I mean as promotion. That has been left purely to the Scottish ministers and the Government of the day to decide what means, how much money they spend on promotion and how they do it. That has been left to ministers. I realise that you have not defined it, and that is why I am asking, because if the bill is passed as it stands, the Scottish ministers are to promote and they are to facilitate the promotion of the use and understanding of BSL. How would we recognise that? How would we know that they have actually undertaken their duties to a sufficient level if we are not got an equal understanding of what promotion is? I think that it will be up to the Government of the day exactly how much money, how much resources they put into promotion of the bill. I have set out what I think should be done as a standard in terms of producing a national plan with a national set of national indicators and national guidance as to what public bodies should do to comply with the plan to increase awareness and access to services in BSL, but it will be up to the Government of the day as to what exactly they do. I am going to push you again on that, because I think that that is important. If the Government of the day publishes its national plan, has that met their duty to promote the language? In terms of the bill, it will have met the first part of its duty in producing a national plan and promotion by identifying a minister with responsibility for British Sign Language. However, that is not the end of the actions. There is a performance review to make sure that the Government and public bodies have not just produced a plan and then let it gather dust on a shelf that they have actually in their plans, they have outcomes, timetables and a performance review that would pick those up at the end of the cycle to make sure that they have done what they said they would do. I am sorry, but is a performance review promotion? I would not have thought so. I would have thought that promotion was something different. Yes, promotion is one of the obligations that the minister will have to undertake. A performance review will come at the end to see whether they have met the standards that the Government and public bodies have set themselves on promotion. Good morning. I am confused. The intention of the bill for which your action should be commended is without question. We are just following on from the previous question. We have already had, since the last 14 years, a working group that has been working with the Scottish Government to improve linguistic access for deaf people. We will now talk about the Government's memorandum on the bill proposing a national advisory group. What promotion has there been? I have put this in a business sense, forgive me, but if I have a marketing director, his job is to promote what I am trying to sell and then have an operational director who has to make it happen. Can you tell me what drive has there been to promote, to market, to sell the BSL over the last 14 years, and how do you see the national advisory body complementing that or indeed replacing it? I mean, the Government officially recognised BSL in 2011 in terms of public announcement, public promotion of BSL in a big nationally co-ordinated way. I cannot see anything else that has happened to boost it on that front. Through the consultation that I carried out, members of the BSL community felt that legislation was the way to go. That was a big bold statement by the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government if they were to support that they valued the British Sign Language as a language, as a culture, and that that would go a way towards showing how valued and how supported it was and then going to further promote it. On the issue of the groups that we heard in the previous session, the BSL linguistic access working group was set up for a different purpose than this. It covered a whole spectrum of deafness rather than the primary focus being on British Sign Language. It does not have the public bodies who would be expected to implement some of these plans. In my initial thinking, I thought that that body could effectively be transplanted into an advisory group, and that would be a way of saving money in discussion and getting into the detail of how that national body would operate. I think that the Government are right to set up a new national advisory group. I think that it is needed and is right to get the public bodies on that board who would be tasked with implementing some of the objectives that are set out in the national plan for them to be properly involved and to have buy-in and a commitment to deliver on those objectives. I hear your point about saving money, but that, frankly, from a personal point of view at this moment in time, is not about that. It is about creating a much wider awareness of what you are trying to achieve. In the last 14 years, technology has moved on hugely, and yet we are looking for promotion of the wider cultural requirements. I have looked at how, when we talked about this with the minister this morning, we have call centres for those who are not deaf, and yet we have taken no steps in promotion of the deafness community in terms of making sure that technology is actually helping them, such as using Skype or remote validation of questions that they might have of the public services. What makes you think that it is going to be different in terms of using that to promote and sell the issue? It is two separate things here. There have been uses of technology by the Scottish Government. They have used an online video interpreter service for NHS 24. That has been in operation for a while now, and the Scottish Government is now rolling that out to other public services. That has been promoted within the BSL community, so that BSL users know that service exists. That is about promoting a particular service that is of use to BSL users and to people who use BSL. The bill is talking about as well as a wider promotion of BSL as a language and a culture, and that, rather than promoting the availability of services as well, we are promoting the value of BSL users as a culture to wider Scotland. The educational attainment issues, the unemployment issues that BSL users face, and the death people who make sure that we value that community on an economic basis, on a cultural basis, are different from promoting an individual service, which is focused purely on BSL. Promotion comes all spectrum. That is where my confusion is. It comes back to the business promotion and the bodies that promote it, and how we and somebody will come back on how you review the performance, all of those things. We can say that we have promoted it, but at the end of the day it is the outcomes that we are—improved outcomes that we are looking for. That comes through improved promotion if you are telling a health board or a public or a local authority that— So use the word tell. If you are telling them, I am not saying that you are telling them what to do. If you are telling them or informing them about the issues that are facing a particular BSL user issues related to education attainment, about access to jobs market, about mental health because of isolation. If you are informing a public body about those issues and the costs that are going to fall on those public bodies down the line in terms of increased benefit payments, increased access to medical services for mental health, that is a promotion of the issues around BSL and the actions that public bodies will need to undertake to make sure that they get service delivery right so that they are down the line that they are saving money and reducing some of that burden later on. I think that that is part of promotion as well. Just to clear up one tiny point in your earlier answer to Mr Brodie, you said that the bill says that the ministers have to promote BSL and the culture. I am not aware that anywhere in the face of the bill it says that they have to promote the culture. It is just BSL. Sorry, it was to promote the use and understanding of the sign language known as British Sign Language. I think that we are all aware that there is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and whatever we enact through this process, I think that the expectation will be that it is approached in good faith. Presumably, the intention is that, over time, promotion will mean very different things, whether through technological advances that allow us to do things in different ways or because the baseline of where we are at is different and therefore what is needed in terms of promoting and beyond that is different from what it was previously. Is that something that you see as reflecting the idea of not defining promotion too rigidly, but also a role for the National Advisory Committee in the sense to keep feet to the fire over successive years and as the need for promotion may change and the opportunities for doing so may change? Exactly. We have a low baseline and we are looking for continuous improvement, continuous promotion and that is why it has not been prescriptive in terms of promotion, it has not been prescriptive in terms of what would be included in national plans because, like you said, starting from a low baseline there is a set of actions that the Government might wish to take to take us on to the next level and then be a performance reviewer, reflection on what has worked and what has not worked and then another revision and revision as we go through the cycle of plans and reviews so exactly as you have set out, it is about giving that flexibility to review what exactly has gone on and reflect in the next cycle. Presumably you will be encouraged that even without that specific reference to promoting the culture of BSL in his opening remarks to the committee this morning, the minister made very specific proactive reference to the need to promote and recognise BSL both as its own language and with its own cultural identity as well. In a sense, the bill has already achieved some of that even before we have enacted it. I think that the language and the culture themselves go hand in hand and I did welcome the minister's comments. The Government clearly has a very good appreciation and understanding of the BSL community and the culture of deaf and particularly deaf BSL users, so I welcome that. Just finally on the issue again, I raised it with the minister this morning, do you see the need to specifically refer to the needs of deaf-blind community within the bill or is that something that maybe is better reflected in the national plan and more tailored arrangements for meeting their needs and their aspirations delivered through that route? In drafting, when I talk about BSL as a British Sign Language, that encompasses all users of British Sign Language, whether they are hearing, deaf and deaf-blind, that is intended to cover all of it, but I know that there are particular difficulties around people who are deaf and use British Sign Language and then go on to become blind as well. I am in discussions with deaf-blind Scotland as to whether there is a particular amendment that we can look at to bring that on to the face of the bill, but even if we do not manage to come up with an idea like that, I am still reassured by the minister in what he said about it, including making sure that deaf-blind people, in particular, were represented on the advisory body. I am sorry to pick this up again, but you have just said that what you mean by BSL includes those who are deaf-blind, but again, there is no definition of that. That was not my understanding necessarily. It may well be what grows out of this and what happens, and it may well be what public bodies do, but there is no definition of what BSL is in the bill. There is no definition. It is the common use of signing, whether that is hands-on signing for deaf-blind people or how other deaf BSL users would interpret that as common. Are you saying that those who are deaf-blind, what they are using is defined as BSL? It is a form of British Sign Language. First of all, I pay credit to your motivation behind this bill. I understand that family background and family experience is one of the best motivations that any of us have, so we are well done for getting to this stage. I do not know whether you heard the question to the minister, but can you just explain briefly what will this bill provide that is not currently available? Are you talking about services? Yes. What are we achieving with this bill that is not currently available? There is currently no national plan for British Sign Language, but public bodies apply to produce plans for how they deliver services to British Sign Language users. On the direct impact of the bill, that will be what is produced, but in the plans themselves, I would expect Government public bodies to set out exactly their priorities for how they would provide services, how they would promote British Sign Language within their own budgets in accordance to local needs. What we have heard today is that local public authorities will not all be producing a plan, it will be one national plan that will take into account what local authorities will do. I am just concerned that it does not become a tick box exercise and a bureaucratic exercise. I want to satisfy myself that this bill will bring forward progress in terms of support and services for deaf people. That really took me to the policy memorandum paragraph 10. In August 2009, we had the working group publish a report on a long and winding road, a road map to British Sign Language and linguistic access. We have a report or call it a plan, but there are, in paragraph 11, eight recommendations, which I will not read out. I am sure that you are familiar with them. Coincidentally, that was six years ago. We have a report six years ago, which will be the timeframe for your plan. I wonder if you can tell me how many of those eight recommendations do you feel that progress has been made? Has this previous report been a success in terms of implementation? The fact that I have a bill on putting things on a statutory footing is really my answer. While the body of work was excellent, the recommendations are excellent. If those recommendations had been implemented and improvement was made in terms of support for families with deaf children, deaf attainment and public services being deaf and deafblind aware, if those recommendations were met, I would be more than happy with the progress and would not see the need for that bill. Can I go back to the first point that you made when it was maybe the discussion in the previous session? The minister, I do not know whether it came across properly, but the minister was just talking about bodies that were under the direct control of government and with ministerial direction that they would assume into the national plan, but public authorities, health boards and local authorities would still produce their own plans even under the amended version proposed by the Government. I was hoping that you would say that. We have heard this report in all good faith. The recommendations are excellent. It seems to cover a wide range of issues. Now, six years later, if you are saying that the progress has been slow, if that is fair, how do we know that the plan that you are bringing forward six years later could be sitting here thinking in 2021 and saying, well, not much has happened there. I asked the minister what if people say, I will make progress here, here and here, I will do this, but they do nothing. We have another six years, if you like, wasted with no further progress. I am really trying to get an answer as to—I am not asking you to bring out sticks rather than carrots, but we have already had the carrot here and nothing has worked. What is it about your bill that will ensure the deaf community? I appreciate there are quite a few members in the audience today, and I am sure that they are looking for an assurance that this will be more meaningful in terms of services and support. However, I am not seeing how this can be guaranteed to make progress when what we have from six years ago has not made much progress. That has been a stand-alone piece of work that I am proposing here. The national plan where public bodies set out their priorities has been included on the face of the bill that on section 3 and 4, where it sets out exactly what public bodies are expected to include in their plan, the outcomes, time scales and then at the end of the sessions for those public bodies to provide a performance review on exactly where they are with the outcomes that they agreed on in their own plans. That is something that is in addition that the public themselves will have access to if that is a local authority to be able to hold their local authority to account. A minister will be able to hold a public body in that the Scottish Government has authority over as to why in their performance review they have not met the ambitions and names of their plan that they had drafted six years earlier. It is my final point, convener, but I do think that there is quite a good analogy here and that is the single outcome agreements in local authorities. I have been concerned about care of the elderly, home care, mental health and various other issues in the highlands. I have looked at the single outcome agreements. I think that it is about four to six inches deep and what you find is—I will give you an example—that we will make progress on reducing class sizes. Maybe one school in Trum, the Drochett, has one class with one less pupil. That is progress. What I am scared of and frightened of is that we may be raising expectations. I want to make sure that those expectations are achieved. I have seen too many recommendations that have not been fulfilled. There are no sanctions. They will be offered an opinion. I am sorry, but you have another six years to make it better. In the meantime, generations are losing out. Is there something that we could bring forward at stage 2 that would make the implementation of those plans more successful, more robust and more user-friendly and more supportive to the deaf community? There already is an amendment that the Government is proposing around consulting on public bodies plans and consulting and translating to BSL. I think that that is a strengthening. However, the main way of making sure that public bodies do what they say they will do in public and in their plans will be down to the deaf community scrutinising those plans, scrutinising the performance and an element of naming and shaming and reputational risk to a public body of not carrying out the services that they are functioning in a way that— The checks and balances are not with parliamentarians but for the deaf community to come forward and name and shame. There would be a performance review that authorities would review and feed that back in through a national performance review. The deaf community would be able to lobby the minister, lobby their own—whether it is a local authority, lobby their own councillor—if that is a national body lobby, their MSP. That particular public body would be named and shamed and I would hope that that would be enough of a damage—the prospect of a damage to their reputation to make sure that they carried out the actions that they agree themselves. At the core of the bill is the requirement for a national plan and also for listed authorities to produce a plan. Clearly, those plans must have some aspiration within them, so there must be some cost attached to that. Will public authorities be expected to meet those demands? I would not expect a public body to draft a plan with wildly ambitious promises to the deaf community that they could not deliver on. I would expect a public body to produce a plan that was costed and that they could meet within their own budget. So the responsibility would be on the local authority? Unless the Government may choose that a particular area that needs national attention, national focus and provide funding from central government on a particular area, but I would expect a public body to sensitively manage their finances to fully cost any plan that they produce? The content of any plan that is produced is going to be vitally important towards achieving the objectives of the bill. What specific things would you anticipate or expect to see in the plan? I have deliberately left that to the Government to be flexible, carrying on from the point that Liam McArthur made that progress will be on-going and priorities will change. I have deliberately left that to the Government to set out what it is willing to prioritise, what it is willing to fund and also the point that the minister made in the previous session was the one that I would rely on as well, that it is going to be up to the BSL community themselves to set out their own priorities for what should be on the national plan. Do you have any expectations that you would see at the front of your mind as being obvious content? One of the obvious things to me would be attainment for deaf pupils and access to services for the BSL community in general, but, as I say, they are my own interpretation and you can be sure when it comes to consultation on the national plan that I will make my own submission. I have one question in this area from myself, Mark, if you don't mind. I just wondered what your view was about the possibility of public authorities being allowed to deviate from the national plan. The specific wording in the bill is for public bodies to try to achieve consistency. That has been specifically worded to give public bodies the flexibility to adapt to their own local circumstances. You will have the national plan. Parts of that will apply to local authorities health boards, which will not apply to the police service or fire board. It is right that there is a degree of flexibility, so that it is clear that a local authority is drafting its own plan with the needs of its community in mind. Is the bill, as it is currently drafted, sufficiently clear to allow deviation by a public authority from the national plan, or do you think that further amendment is required? I think that the wording there to try to achieve consistency is clear that it is not an outright obligation to duplicate the findings. In particular, section 3, 4 and 2, there is a line on that that public bodies would have regarding drafting their plans for the potential for development and the use of British Sign Language in connection with the exercise of their own functions, which gives authorities to specifically tailor their plans to their own needs. We are all welcome the ability of public authorities because of the variation that you mentioned between bodies, their responsibilities and, of course, geography in different communities. I am wondering whether the flip side of that question is to believe that it is firm enough to try to achieve consistency, which is sufficiently strong to ensure that we get a base level of consistency across the country. If they come back and say that they did try, we failed. I think that there will be a set of recommendations in the national plan that will apply to all public bodies that they would be expected to meet as a minimum. As in one of the recommendations that was in the report that Mary Scanlon mentioned about staff being deaf and deafblind aware, particular recommendations that would apply to all public bodies while leaving that flexibility to tailor their plans around particular services. Following up on that, you have heard Mark Hiller on the exchange with the minister in relation to streamline the process of consultation and having a national plan that sits above a range of public authorities. It was interesting in the responses to the convener's questions where it would be tailored. Each public body would need to tailor a plan to reflect their circumstances and the need to the deaf community in relation to the way that they engage with that agency. From what the minister was suggesting, there is potentially a risk there that if you have an overarching umbrella, there may be some key principles and themes that emerge through that, but not necessarily the more nuanced or perhaps substantively different approach because each of the authorities will not necessarily have either its own plan or its own statement. Is that something that you have been in discussion with the minister about? Is it something that you are comfortable with the Government's suggested approach? I have been comfortable in principle with all of the Government's amendments than we have been in discussions just around the detail as to how we go about drafting those amendments and whether, when we get down to the fine detail, whether they are acceptable in principle, I am happy with the Government's amendments that have been proposed so far. In terms of the performance review that you touched on earlier on, from the outset, we have been conscious as a committee of the risk of expectations about what the bill will achieve, exceeding what it is ever likely to achieve. I think that what has been encouraging is that the engagement and the evidence that we have had from the deaf community suggests a high level of awareness and understanding of precisely what it is that the bill will do. In terms of the performance review, again, from the exchange of the minister, it is unlike perhaps the type of performance review that organisations would be expected to adhere to. We do not have a great level of baseline data. The process of data gathering is going to fall to each of the organisations in the sense of being collected and assessed by the national advisory group. How do you envisage that process taking place? Is it ever likely to give us the sort of detailed picture of where the strengths are, where the weaknesses are, or are we feeling our way here? What is your take? On your first point, I do not want to blow my own trumpet here, but it has been four years of careful expectation management with the BSL community, making sure that they knew that the bill was not simply waving a magic wand. That was the first step in getting a cycle of continuous improvement, and that has been taken on board and recognised. The fact that we have such poor baseline data is another motivation for me to bring this bill forward. We do not know how many BSL users there are in Scotland. It is a vague estimate based on census figures, and there is an issue with the census in that it is carried out in written English, which not all BSL users are able to complete in return. That baseline information not being there as one of the drivers for introducing the bill, what I hope will become the baseline is the first national plan and the first authority plan. That will then be the baseline. The objectives, the timescales that are in those first national and local plans then become the baseline to measure any performance review against. Do you see the importance of having essentially available statistics on how different authorities are performing, or is it more important that at a local or regional level what you have is a detailed picture of what is happening, what is not happening as well, or is it a combination of both? I think that both national and regional or local bodies need to have a picture of what their population is so that they can plan their budgets, plan their services accordingly, and that is part of the feeling out there that the needs of that particular community have not been fully identified or we would know exactly how many BSL users there were in Scotland. That challenge function, either from the deaf community itself or from the national advisory group, drilled down into a local situation. There will be eight areas of the country where the deaf community is well mobilised perhaps as a result of the process leading up to the bill. That is formed to a greater extent. In other parts of the country, that may not be the case. Therefore, the pressure, the challenge function on local authorities and public bodies in those areas is not necessarily as intense. As a result, the services that are available, the extent to which BSL is promoted and supported, is less as a consequence. Do you see a national role for ensuring that there is some level of consistency across the country? That is the issue where areas in the central belt, where there is that critical mass of BSL users who are able to challenge service providers in other more rural areas when there is not that density, some feel that they are not able to collectively challenge on the services that are being provided. That is why the national review is needed, so that ourselves as representatives, whether that is the BDA, the Scottish Council on Deafness and other national bodies, are able to do the job that their members expect them to do and scrutinise national performance and performance of other public bodies. That performance review is critical to making sure that that challenge is able to be made. We have heard several times today from the minister and from yourself that there is no baseline performance data on which to measure progress. The official with the minister said that it would take at least two years to set up the first national plan, because there is no baseline data. In 2009, the long and winding road map to British Sign Language and Linguistic Access in Scotland, eight recommendations were made. If we have not got any baseline data now, presumably we did not have any baseline data in 2009, I am right in saying that we have no idea whether any of those eight recommendations have been achieved, are being achieved or even if we are making any progress. Is that fair? You might be not the right one to ask, but I thought that your opinion might be helpful. I can give you an example of this. When I first started working on this bill, we tried to find out how many BSL users there were in Scotland. We got an estimate of around about 6,000. Those were the numbers that informed that previous document in. We had the latest census figures, which put it at about 12,000. You have quite a jump and just an indication of how difficult it has been to identify how many BSL users there are in the country. The knock-on difficulties for providing services and providing a baseline, as you say. My point is that we cannot measure any progress, it seems to me, in the 2009 recommendations, because there were no baseline figures. It would appear to me to be a fairly meaningless exercise. Or do you think that some progress, perhaps anecdotally, if nothing else, has been made? My concern is that, where we are going, we need to be much more robust going forward than where we have been in the past. Is this an example of a well-meaning report that has achieved nothing? The report gives strong recommendations. I think that it is up to the Government to answer. Whether those recommendations have been fully implemented on the knock-on. If you do not know the baseline, you do not know where you are going. That is one supplementary. I am going to move on, because we have other people who want to go in. Mark, I want to ask you about the financial memorandum. In the original financial memorandum, you estimated that the cost would be roughly 20,000 to 30,000 per authority. Cozzler's came back and said that it should be roughly 40,000, and that is just for implementing the plans. The Scottish Government has come in and said that, over the four-year period, as the bill currently stands, it would be about £6.1 million. Is it your intention, in light of the discussions that you have had with the Scottish Government, to update the financial memorandum? If, as a result of amendments that the customs associated with the bill substantially change, I think that it is in standing orders that I have to provide an updated financial memorandum, so if that is the case, then that will be provided. Do you have a better handle on what the cost would be if the amendment to have one national plan? There only ever would be one national plan. However, if it is done on a regional basis, with a lot of authority sign up to whether the regional element of that plan would be, if you get any estimate of what the cost would be? We have not done any work on any amendments. The financial memorandum provides a cost for the bill as it stands. We would need to go away and do further work if there was a revised financial memorandum required. The bill does not include the cost of implementing the action that is set out in the plans. Given that you obviously expect a level of promotion, even if it is just minimum, are you intending to estimate the potential cost of implementing the promotional activity within public authorities? That will be for public bodies. They will need to set their own priorities within their own budgets. The financial memorandum sets out exactly the cost impact of the bill itself. I am not in a position to put an estimate on what a local authority or what a health board would choose to do. You said in earlier answers that you expect a cycle of continuous improvement. Can you highlight what kinds of continuous improvement do not have cost implications? There is no doubt that, if a public body chooses to say that a local authority chooses to provide BSL classes to parents of a deaf child, just 90 per cent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, so if a local authority decided to provide classes then obviously there is going to be a cost associated with that. I have not done any work at all on the costings of a particular policy because that is just one example. There could be a whole suite of improvements that a particular authority could choose to make. I cannot go into estimations of whatever those policies would cost on the basis that they may or may not include them in their plans. My final question is that the bill that is published does not include any requirement for plans to be produced in the BSL format and the financial memorandum does not include the cost of publication in multiple formats. Should that ambition be rectified in the bill itself and should the financial memorandum be updated to reflect that? I think that this is basically because it is a private member's bill and in the knowledge that the lowest cost available is more likely to be supported and passed by the Government. With that in mind, it was omitted to keep costs as low as possible. The Government has suggested that all plans and consultations should be translated into BSL. That is fantastic. I am happy that it is willing to propose that amendment to improve the bill. I am a bit confused by that last answer. My understanding of financial memorandums is that it is not to keep the cost as low as possible so that the Parliament will pass it and it is successful to the Government. The purpose of financial memorandums is to estimate the proper costs to the public purse of a bill. Sorry for any misunderstanding. I was talking about the bill itself being designed in such a way as the cost would be kept low. I am not talking about artificially amending the financial memorandum to make that as the cost as low as possible. I am talking about the bill itself and the provisions within the bill being designed in such a way as to keep the cost as low as possible. That helps to clarify that a little bit. Just on the basis of what you have just said, the bill itself, your estimated costs, are two and a half somewhere around about there. The Government says that it is £6 million. That is based on your bill. It is not about exactly what is in the bill but it is about what will inevitably follow if the bill is passed. If the Government amendments are passed, then they are... No, I am not talking about the amendments. I am talking about, for example, the translation services, the cost of translation. It is inconceivable, even though it is not in the bill that they have to translate everything into BSL, it is inconceivable that they would not do so. Although it is not in the bill, surely it is an absolutely obvious and inevitable cost of passing the bill. If they were willing to do that, then you would expect them to do so. That is why someone puzzled a little bit about the financial memorandum. What, of course, the financial committee has said and your answers about your financial memorandum is what is based on what is in the bill. Clearly, there are costs that the Government has identified, which inevitably follow from the bill, even an amended bill, passing into law. Surely that should have been included in a financial memorandum and I am just wondering why it has not been. It goes back to the scope and the ambition of a member's bill. They are not Government bills and they have a different character, as Mark has said. Secondly, Mark's responsibility under the standing orders is to bring forward a financial memorandum that costs everything that is on the face of the bill. There was a debate during the development of the policy about whether the body should be compelled to translate everything. The decision came down on the side of not doing that at that point in time because of consideration of financial resources and availability of interpreters and translators and so on. For various interlinked policy reasons, it was decided that the bill would be silent on the question of translation. The Government has shown that it believes that plans should be translated and that consultation should take place. Mark is very happy to welcome that, but it was not quite proper to envisage what kinds of costs might come on the back of the bill that were not on the face of the bill and set those out in the financial memorandum. It is always a slightly fine line and that is the reason why we ended up with the memorandum looking the way it does. Obviously, I appreciate that there is no compulsion to translate plans and so on. I think that it is almost a night follows day obvious that I cannot imagine that you would not do so. That is why I understand the point that you are making about members' bills and the fine line there, but if something is absolutely inevitable, it would seem to me that you should have put the stuff in. Mark has many, many ambitions that this bill could have been ten times the length, but it had to be a starting point. It had to be realistic and achievable. I disagree slightly that it is inevitable that consultation and translation the BSL would be deployed for those, but you are right, it falls very much into the highly, likely, highly desirable category. Liam? I will, again, have heard me expressing a degree of interest in the approach to financial memorandum in relation to a member's bill compared to the Government's bill. There is a sense that the Scottish Government has rather thrown the kitchen sink at the costings of this bill in a way that, with Government bills, we are invariably trying to tease out of them and question whether those costs are at the upper end of what is likely. However, to some extent, we are dealing with a bill here that may change substantially if the amendments that the Government is proposing are taken on board. Some of the costings here—the Scottish Government is suggesting 140,000 in the first session of Scottish Government costs up to 100,000 in subsequent years. From the discussions with the Scottish Government, do you have a sense as to what those additional costs are in response to questions from, I think, Mary Scanlon? Minister was suggesting that there was not a great deal that the bill was requiring of them that they are not really already doing. I have not had any discussions with them in terms of discrepancies between the two cost estimates. It is purely being on the basis of amendments to the bill. The reason for that has been that, because of the level of cost associated with the bill, the Government will have to table a financial resolution, which a Government minister will have to propose. It is an assumption on my part that, if they are supporting the bill, they will have to table their own financial resolution and be supportive of the costs that will be incurred. Presumably, in relation to the financial memorandum, I think that it was a minister who made clear that the estimates are in relation to the bill itself, rather than any knock-on implications for service delivery. However, it would be fair to say that one of the not just happy coincidences, but presumably one would hope that the inevitable consequences of passing such a legislation is that issues in relation to allowing individuals to fulfil their full potential and all the rest of it do not come at a cost. They are a saving to the public purse across a range of different areas. That would be your assumption, too. Exactly. I hope that you have realised that people would not be underemployed. People would be achieving their full potential, earning accordingly, contributing to tax revenues, issues of isolation and the mental health issues associated with that. That would not be as prevalent and would be a lower burden on the NHS. If that is done properly, there should be savings to the public purse and increased taxation revenue. I am going to have to go back to the financial memorandum again. I have no chance to look at standing orders. In the back of my mind, when you were discussing the financial memorandum, standing orders say that a bill shall, on introduction, be accompanied by a financial memorandum which shall set out the best estimates of the administrative compliance and other costs to which the provisions of the bill would give rise. That seems to me that the bill would give rise to those other costs that the Government has identified and therefore should have been in the financial memorandum. Do you disagree with that? Is that not your interpretation of what the standing order is? I will take that. I think that what the Government do in their memorandum is to identify a number of desirables. They also set out some activity that is already taking place, and then they come up with a global figure that is not necessarily at odds with what is in the financial memorandum. I think that they have identified a number of areas where costs, savings and deficiencies will be achievable through collective consultation and so on. It is not until those amendments are properly drafted and explored and then recosted that we can ever hope to come up with a final figure. I am very satisfied that the financial memorandum did what it was supposed to do, and that is to cost the provisions that are an absolute necessity under the bill. That is the production of a national plan, the production of local plans and a degree of consultation. My interpretation of the standing order would have been that the bill would give rise and would have covered the best that are not. I think that one of the witnesses at the last session put it very succinctly when he said that what the bill is asking bodies to do is look at their resources and state within those resources what they will do to achieve the aims of the bill. This has always had to be the starting point for a member's bill, because it is not backed with—it is not a Government aspiration at the moment, and it does not come with a budget behind it. Therefore, the bill was drafted in a way that compelled certain authorities and bodies to look to their budget, state what they are already doing, state what they could do, start to think about working together and provide, if you like, a public record for what is being done and on what is planned. Mark, do you want to add to that? In bringing this forward, I hear what you say. If I look at the paper that we have in terms of just taking one cost, the cost of the Scottish Government of supporting a national advisory group to support implementation of the bill, it is the same number every year. In terms of the computation, for example, supporting the development of the second BSL national plan is exactly the same as supporting the development of the first BSL national plan. We must have learned something from the first BSL national plan to make a much more effective and productive development of the second BSL national plan. I do not know whether there is inflation bill in there or what prices. There has to be a meaningful supportive financial basis for the plan, for the bill. In the financial memorandum, it is set out where those costs come from in terms of time to be taken by a particular level of official public body level. We have set out a reduced cost for producing subsequent plans with the expectation that the bulk of the work would be done in the first plan. A performance review at the end of the cycle would inform the production of subsequent plans, so there would be a lower cost. In the financial memorandum produced with the bill, there is that recognition that things would change at subsequent times. I understand that. I apologise. Those are the Government numbers. I was looking at my evening discussion with the Government. I just want to understand the methodology that goes into all of this in terms of you supporting the plan bill. I have one final question mark. It is about the cycle for publishing BSL plans and performance reviews. Obviously, there is a difference of opinion in terms of what you have originally published and what the minister said today. I wonder if you can make comment on that and what you have used that for. The reason that I had set out the timetable as it was, as I said at my previous appearance at committee, was not because of any knowledge of cycles of national plans or anything else. It was purely so that, in the first year of office, a Government would produce its plan and, in the final year of office, it would review its own performance rather than having cycles overlapping different Governments. I thought that that was the best way to go. Obviously, the minister has the extensive experience of the Gallic Language Act, and if he has evidence that a longer cycle is better, I am happy to look at the detail of that evidence and open to that amendment. Okay, thank you very much. We appreciate your attendance today, Mark, and your accompanying officials. That concludes our evidence-taking at stage 1. Our next step is to report our views on the bill to the Parliament, which will be followed by the stage 1 debate on the bill. Our website will provide information on the report and the debate when the information is available. Next, we will consider an approach to a possible short inquiry into the educational attainment of school children with sensory impairments. We will move on to that now, but, as we decided earlier on in the meeting that that will be in private, I will now close the meeting to the public.