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There is provision for free bus travel. Why is it so important to extend that to rail travel?

I share the concerns raised by the petitioner about whether home reports are fit for purpose. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Glasgow City Heritage Trust. In tenemental properties in particular, there are major deficiencies in assessing overall building condition in home reports in Glasgow.

Our colleague Graham Simpson MSP has reconvened the cross-party working group on maintenance of tenement scheme property. Perhaps we should write to Under One Roof, the charity that provides impartial advice to home owners and people purchasing homes, as well as the Built Environment Forum Scotland, which is the secretariat for the working group on tenement maintenance. I know that an action on the matter is to improve the standard and quality of home reports.

I also understand that the Scottish Law Commission is undertaking a project on improving tenement law. It might be that an element of its work is about improving the regulations on home reports. There are major issues with people purchasing property based on highly defective information that leaves them liable for significant repairs to, say, the roof of a tenement that was not assessed as part of a home report. For example, if somebody has a ground floor flat, they are still liable for the roof, which will not have been looked at as part of the home report.

The home report is particularly problematic in relation to tenemental properties.

I have a small supplementary, convener, if that is okay.

Transport Scotland’s submission refers to the disabled persons railcard. You might already have hinted why that is insufficient. Is it insufficient because of the lack of arrangements for companion travel?

I am interested to know what costings you have developed. You hinted that money would be saved. I was intrigued by your point.

I take your point entirely, and I think that it is really important. Anecdotally, from my experience in representing Barlinnie, the largest prison in Scotland, and having visited it on several occasions, prison officers have described to me quite candidly that they have repeat customers who they liberate on a Friday, who then go into the city centre to shoplift, purchase and take drugs—usually in an unsafe way—and who will likely then be arrested and back in prison on the following Monday. Those people are, in effect, serving life sentences in short bursts.

When I participated in the unofficial overdose prevention pilot in Glasgow, we frequently had people turning up to the ambulance who had just come straight from Barlinnie prison or Low Moss prison and were seeking a safe place to inject.

You made a very important recommendation, but I want to know whether there has been any indication from the Government that it considers that recommendation to be an urgent action that it is willing to expedite. Are there any indications of the timescales for adjustments?

That is certainly helpful for when we come to future evidence sessions. Would Dr Hunter like to make any points in relation to my questions?

I thank Monica Lennon MSP for coming along today and offering such a compelling account of why the petition is so important and why the committee should consider it.

I was struck by the submissions from Transport Scotland and Transport for London. According to Transport Scotland,

“ScotRail delivered a pilot for Account Based Ticketing ... allowing for fare capping and tap in/tap out technology. The pilot took place on the Cathcart Circle ... for a period of four months and although proving to be a good customer proposition it was deemed unsuccessful on commercial grounds. Since ScotRail has been transferred to public ownership ... an account based ticketing trial has been included within its business plan”.

I am not satisfied with that response. It is totally inadequate, particularly when viewed in contrast with the submission from Transport for London, which says:

“The core principle of our fares system is to make it as simple as possible”.

TFL has a “best value promise” that,

“when travelling using pay as you go ... on Oyster or contactless”

debit or credit card,

“customers just need to touch in and out when travelling on our services and we ensure that customers pay the cheapest fare for the journeys they make.”

The cheapest fare is no more than the cost of the equivalent travel card, and there is an automatic refund when a journey has not been completed. The contrast between the two submissions is striking—it is night and day. It is the greatest contrast between submissions to the committee that I have seen in recent times, and I think that there is an opportunity for the committee to probe further.

It is interesting that I knew nothing about the pilot, and I do not know how many Glaswegians knew about the pilot. However, I note that TFL says that it issues

“press releases publishing changes to fares, and advertising campaigns to highlight the cheapest way to travel around London (these can be seen in media advertising and on our services).”

It goes on to say that it has seen “strong growth” in the adoption of pay as you go, with

“over 70 per cent of all journeys now made using PAYG.”

I take the point about population density and scale, but, nonetheless, there are cities of equivalent size to Glasgow that have that technology and it works very successfully. I wonder whether, sometimes, there is risk aversion, leading to our not persisting with a measure that might initially make a bit of a loss but that, in the longer term or even in the medium term, would result in a perception change and in a lot more people using a service because it has become much more convenient for them to do so. Perhaps we can be too timid.

I agree, and the point that Mr Ewing makes is important. Perhaps the removal of the road in a broad sense is a bit of a provocation, but the petitioner goes into that question in more nuanced detail in his comments; he talks about specific interventions that would reduce the road’s impact such as capping or constructing buildings above the road. There are areas where it is overengineered—for example, the Townhead interchange was built for a flank of the motorway that was never built. That is a massively overengineered solution that could largely be deconstructed without having any material effect on traffic. There are ways in which that could be done.

The point that the petitioner is perhaps trying to drive at—pardon the pun—is that the issue has never been seriously reflected on by Transport Scotland, and it is only recently that the city council has started thinking about it. It feels like there is an opportunity for the committee to be a catalyst.