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Farah, would you like to respond?

Good morning. Thank you for being with us—I appreciate that juggling various things is not easy. I appreciate the time that you have taken to give evidence to the committee.

I have a couple of questions about the disproportionate impact of Covid on women, and BAME women in particular, which has been reported in the media and which many of you have mentioned. I am interested in understanding the complexities of the issue, including how BAME women have experienced disproportionate susceptibility to Covid and disproportionate financial burdens.

I think that it was Mariam Ahmed who talked about digital poverty, a lack of digital connectivity and the knock-on consequences, so I will come to her first. Could you say a bit more about the personal experiences of some of the women you support whom Amina has worked with? What were those women’s experiences of the lockdown and the restrictions that were placed on society as a whole from the point of view of their ability to maintain any kind of work-life balance and, importantly, the impact on their mental health?

I have another question, which I will ask after we have heard from Mariam.

Thanks for that, Joy. I will hand back to you, convener.

Good morning. I thank the witnesses for joining us and for their opening remarks. You have covered a lot of ground and a lot of different issues. I was struck by what Ian Maxwell and Marsha Scott said about the old normal not being good enough; it is not satisfactory and is not working for anybody. Will Ian Maxwell and then Megan Farr say a bit more about their experience of how the pandemic has shown just how bad the old normal was? What can we do better? In all of this, there is a conflict or tension between the welfare of the child and their rights to be heard and to have their views expressed. I am interested in how you balance those experiences with what I perceive as the welfare versus rights conflict.

Thank you very much for that. This perhaps shows my lack of knowledge of the complete landscape, but I am interested in this. Megan, you seemed to be speaking about the challenge of infantilisation and not taking children as human beings with their own minds, and about them being used as pawns in some cases, in some ways, perhaps more so where there is actual conflict—and you highlight the cases that go to court. I wonder whether we need to be thinking about doing some work around this. I do not think that everything can be solved with training, but there is something around training on what trauma means and on what people’s capabilities are. Capabilities will change within an individual, never mind among a group of people, as they grow up. Could you say a little bit more about those kinds of issues, which we need to be able to get at?

I hear what you say about the scope of the pardon and its being limited to actions around and travel to and from picket lines. We have heard from miners who were directly involved in the strike and we have heard from members of the wider community that supported striking miners. One of the concerns with the limit of actions around and travel to and from picket lines is that it does not cover everybody. In one evidence session, somebody said that the pardon is welcome but will not mean anything unless it covers everybody. I will give you an example that does not relate to a picket line. As you know, miners who broke the strike were living in the same communities as striking miners and there were often tensions around that. Sometimes, the attribution of blame for violence—not violence to people but damage to property—was problematic. There are questions around why those kinds of incidents that were directly related to the strike but not at or around picket lines cannot be covered as well. Can you say more about why we cannot extend the criteria? Have you considered the option of extending the criteria to actions associated with the miners strike, which would include those kinds of activities in the community?

I appreciate what you say, and I appreciate that the act that you mentioned might cast the net wider than we think appropriate, but I am interested in exploring whether there is a way through. I do not necessarily mean that we should include the activities that you described, because we cannot assess things such as the degrees of malice involved, and, in many ways, we cannot make judgments about what happened at picket lines or on the journeys to and from them. However, it is important to understand that the strike happened in the context of the community, and not only at the picket lines. Recognising that aspect somehow is important, although I am not sure exactly how we do that.

In response to my earlier question, cabinet secretary, you talked about some of the reasons for not extending the bill’s scope to certain aspects of community tensions. I have been thinking and listening to your answers to my colleagues, and I wonder about that. We know and accept that the bill is about a pardon and not about quashing convictions, so what would be the harm in doing that? You said that it would set precedents elsewhere, but we are not talking about quashing convictions; we are talking about, as you said, recognition of the wider circumstances, which were different from the normal functioning of society.

Will you say a bit more about the setting of precedents and why, given that the bill is not about quashing convictions, that would be the consequence? I am not sure that I quite understand that link, given that it is a pardon and not a quashing.

Thank you. I ask Stephen Montgomery, too, to speak about the rural-urban difference that Marc Crothall identified, if there is one in relation to your sector.

I am interested to hear Leon Thompson’s thoughts.