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It seems reasonable. If I have interpreted the hand signals correctly, Mr Blyther has indicated that he will provide the information quickly.

Yes, briefly. I agree entirely with Mr Golden. The law exists, but, if it is not enforced, it is just words on a page and the worry is that that might be applicable in this instance. In particularly tragic circumstances, the petitioner buried his three-year-old son in a cemetery just opposite his home and visits the cemetery every day, and he says that hundreds of people visit with dogs and that it is more or less a dog’s toilet. That is not appropriate for cemeteries—it is just not. We cannot allow that to happen.

I think that Mr Golden’s suggestion that we should not just let this go is correct, and we should ask for information about whether the law is being enforced. Otherwise, I suspect that the issue will come back again, and people will ask why we did not at least try to find out what local authorities were doing about it.

As I am sure we all know, some cemeteries are particularly large, and I can well imagine that they might be used for dog walking. However, it is not really appropriate to use cemeteries for dog walking, any more than it is appropriate to have dogs in fields with livestock. That is another serious problem that is not properly addressed by the law, even after the passing of the relevant members’ bill, because it does not require dogs to be kept on a leash.

I am sorry to be a bit long winded, but I think that we should pursue the issue.

To be fair to the cabinet secretary, she has said:

“I remain open minded towards the proposal”,

so this is not a case of the Government saying, “No, we’re not doing that.” If it had said that, our response at this stage of a parliamentary session might be to leave the matter to the next election, when people can vote for parties that will do what they feel is correct in a democracy. We are not at that stage. If the cabinet secretary thinks that what the petition proposes can be done, why can it not be done soon, before the next election? Why can we not just do things in this Parliament, with this Government?

I agree with that. We should write to the cabinet secretary to seek further data on the extent to which sexual assaults involving strangulation have been treated differently. We should find out in how many cases that was found to have been the case and what analysis has been done of those statistics. Do such statistics exist? Is that information retained properly?

As Mr Golden said, the sheriff court has limited sentencing powers. It has been a long time since I was in the sheriff court—three decades—but I think that it is possible for a sheriff to remit sentencing to the High Court if he feels that the maximum sentence that he has the power to give is inadequate.

Be that as it may, I would have thought that every such case should be dealt with under solemn proceedings, not least because, as the petitioner points out, non-fatal strangulation often signals a heightened risk of homicide. It is quite staggering that a BBC survey showed that 40 per cent of women aged 18 to 39 in the UK reported experiencing choking, strangulation or gagging during sex. That is a hugely worrying percentage. We should therefore seek further data from the cabinet secretary.

We should also seek details of when officials will meet partners, because, in our view, the matter should be approached with great urgency and not be left to drift for months, as so many things do. We should ask whether officials and the cabinet secretary will engage directly with the petitioner and get a timeline for the work.

When asking for all that, we could indicate that we might well be minded to hear evidence from the cabinet secretary, given the interest in the issue. All the other countries in the UK seem to have taken action to deal with it, so why are we at the coo’s tail? Although the current system can work in theory, I feel instinctively that, in practice, it is probably not working as it should.

I am grateful to Tess White for setting out these extremely serious matters with such lucidity. I wanted to supplement Mr Golden’s suggestions with those remarks.

I was struck that the ministerial response was quite detailed and specifically pointed to the national planning framework, which requires such environmental matters to be considered at a general level.

I am not sure that the law can be quite as specific as the petitioner is asking for it to be, and I am not quite certain as to whether the word “suitable” has been incorporated in the petition—the call is only for the use of such bricks to be “mandatory” in suitable premises. As I understand it, the petitioner argues that not all house construction is suitable, because if houses are not more than 1 or 2m apart, it is simply not practical for birds to fly in and out as the buildings are too close. From what I can gather from the papers, on the one hand, the word “suitable” has been inserted, but even if that is the case, the current planning framework allows for such things to be considered, and no doubt they would be raised locally, in areas that have a strong swift population.

I am open to hearing what other colleagues say, but I am not really sure that we can do much more with the petition. I suspect that, if we write to pressure groups, they will just ask us to support it, and if we write to builders, they will say not to support it. We could write, but I am not sure that doing so will take us any further, particularly since we have already responses with copious detail from SPICe and the minister.

I concur with that. I am just rereading some of the papers. In a previous discussion of the petition, you observed, convener, that people should not

“be denied the benefits to which they are entitled”.—[Official Report, Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, 18 January 2023; c 24.]

As I recall, it was the petitioner’s wife who had severe Alzheimer’s disease and who took the matter to a tribunal, which established that the present law allows councils to wait until not GP certification but the much later event of a qualifying benefit being received. That means that Governments can limit their liability to pay debt benefits by allowing the process to become protracted and delayed, which is entirely wrong.

I will supplement Mr Golden’s suggestion. Because the issue of disability benefits entitlements is very much in the news at the moment, I wonder whether we might ask the minister to do two things. The first is something that the minister failed to do in the original reply, which is to say whether the Scottish Government agrees in principle that the petitioner has a strong argument. All that the Government said was that the suggestion would require a change in the law, but it ducked the question of the principle.

My second point follows on from that, if the Government agrees that that principle is applicable. I cannot really see how it could not apply—it must. There is a political question about how severe disabilities should be before someone gets benefits but, if someone has severe Alzheimer’s, there is no doubt that they should be getting the benefits from the day that the diagnosis is made. The Scottish Government should take that up specifically with the UK Government as a point of principle. I commend Mr Brown for being dogged in his pursuit of that principle.

There is that as well, yes.

If equine guidance is currently being developed, perhaps we could ascertain when it will be produced and provided, and allow the petitioner the opportunity to comment once it has been produced. I know that he argues that guidance in itself will be insufficient, because it would not outlaw practice that he believes to be injurious. There seems to be a fair amount of evidence to support that; indeed, the minister talks about injurious ill-health side effects.

To be fair to the petitioner, if guidance is to be produced, he should be given an opportunity—given all the work that has been done subsequent to his lodging of the petition—to see whether the guidance cuts the mustard.

I am very grateful to Mr Sweeney for his most informative introduction and for giving us the interesting background to the history of the Clyde, which has a place in the hearts of many Glaswegians.

I originally hailed from Glasgow, my grandfather won a medal for swimming the Clyde and I used to be the cox to my father’s team of four oarsmen, who were called the “Senior Argonauts”. They certainly were very senior. As the cox, I managed to steer them into the river bank on many an occasion. We never needed to be rescued by George Parsonage, though, who was the riverman and who for 50 years rescued people from the Clyde. He saved so many lives; indeed, he used to say, “If there were a notch in my oar for every rescue I carried out, there’d be nae oar.”

However, irrelevant personal reflections aside, I just wanted to convey that I think that we all have an affection for the River Clyde, and many of the arguments towards the end of Mr Sweeney’s remarks about how it can better be cherished, appreciated and protected are, I think, ones that we would all agree with. Therefore, rather than close the petition, we should explore how that could be done.

Without wanting to sound any discordant note, I should also say that it was in Glasgow 48 years ago that I studied the law of persons, and I have to point out that the river cannot be a person in law. Therefore, we can have sympathy with the petitioners’ aims, but the means by which they seek to give effect to them would not, I think, really fit with Scots law—and, in saying that, I pay all my respects to other countries that have taken a different view on that matter. There could be some new form of body—after all, the Glasgow Humane Society had a role, the Clyde mission has a role and other bodies have been mentioned. A new charity could be established if that was felt necessary. That would be a more orthodox manner of pursuing aims that we might all agree are worthy ones.

The idea of having a conjoined session that deals with various important outstanding health petitions and hearing from the cabinet secretary on all of them is sensible. Incidentally, that is what we are doing with Fiona Hyslop on transport issues. It would be a good use of the committee’s time and save the cabinet secretary from repeatedly attending.

However, to take up Foysol Choudhury’s suggestion, we should make it clear that, prior to the oral evidence session, we would benefit from receiving a written response from the cabinet secretary and ask that he provides that. Actually, was it Marie McNair who made that suggestion?