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I thank Denise Hooper for the petition. We will be investigating the issue further.

Good morning, and welcome to the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, here in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.

At our last meeting, the committee agreed to review its policy on written submissions. Our first agenda item is a decision on whether the committee’s consideration of the policy should be taken in private at a future meeting. As colleagues will recall, we expect to have a paper shortly on our policy about receiving submissions once a petition is actively under consideration. I suggest that we publish the paper but that, other than that, the item is conducted, as normal, in private. Are members content to consider the item in private?

Members indicated agreement.

I am very grateful for your experience, passion and comprehensive range of suggestions, Mr Sweeney. Colleagues, I am very happy to embrace all of Mr Sweeney’s suggestions. Are there any others that you might wish to add?

We might also ask specifically the Scottish Government where the pilots have managed to get to and what the outcome was.

Are they any other organisations that we could write to in relation to all of this, or do we we want to hear from the Government in the first instance? I think that there is merit in hearing from the Scottish Refugee Council and the Refugee Survival Trust.

I am minded that the Scottish Parliament’s Conveners Group will be putting questions to the First Minister directly next week, and I wonder whether this might not be an issue on which I, on behalf of the petitioner, could put questions directly to the First Minister. That is something that we might consider, because the question session with the First Minister next week is on the programme for government. From everything that I have heard, I think that this fits in quite nicely with that, and it might be an opportunity to highlight the work of Mr Sweeney and Mr Ruskell as well.

The nice thing about the Conveners Group when you are convener of the petitions committee is that you are not raising something on behalf of any political party but are raising it on behalf of the petitioner. It would be an opportunity for the petition concerned to be put directly to the First Minister. It seems like something that might give the petition a little bit of impetus.

We will keep the petition open. We may take evidence subsequently, but let us see what progress we can make in the first instance. There seems to have been a measure of good will towards the proposal, but it seems from what Mr Ruskell said that, having got so far, it has then got into a basket of things where nothing then makes further progress.

Thank you very much. I think that we are content.

Members indicated agreement.

Our final petition this morning is PE2031. I have a feeling of déjà vu. When I first joined the Public Petitions Committee, some 12 years ago, one of the first petitions that we considered was on the availability at all of insulin pumps at that time. Here we are again, with a petition, lodged by Maria Aitken on behalf of the Caithness Health Action Team, which calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to ensure that children and young people in Scotland who have type 1 diabetes, and would benefit from a lifesaving insulin pump, are provided with one, no matter where they live.

The petitioner highlights what she views as a postcode lottery relating to the provision of continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps for children with diabetes, with a particular concern about the waiting lists for those devices across NHS Highland.

Responding to the petition, the Scottish Government refers to the diabetes improvement plan, which aims to increase access to existing and emerging diabetes technologies that can significantly benefit people with type 1 diabetes. The Scottish Government response highlights that, between 2016 and 2021, it invested an additional £15 million to support the increased provision of insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring. The Government also points to current work to roll out diabetes technology with a particular focus on reducing regional variation.

Do members have any comments or suggestions?

We will keep the petition open, and we will make those inquiries and consider it afresh when we get responses.

That concludes the consideration of our petitions today. We are next due to meet on 4 October. On that note, I formally close the meeting. Thank you all very much.

Okay. We will write to all those organisations, if members agree.

Members indicated agreement.

The next petition is PE1982, which has been lodged by Gary McKay. It calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to review the funding that is provided to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and to help to enable more places to be made available to Scottish students who pursue ballet at that level. This is about funding from the Scottish Government—the Scottish taxpayer—for Scottish ballet.

The committee has received a response from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which begins by challenging the petitioner’s claim that there is a five-person cap on places for Scotland-domiciled dancers. The response explains that the figure 5 appears in data sets because standard rounding methodology has been used, whereby numbers have been rounded to the nearest five in order to avoid identifying individuals.

The conservatoire also challenges the petitioner’s view that its process for awarding places discriminates against Scottish applicants, and states that Scottish dancers who present for audition and who meet the required standard have been offered places.

The petitioner’s response highlights the subjective nature of auditions as a means of assessment and raises questions about five dancers who, he says, were rejected by the conservatoire despite having been offered places by a number of other dance schools.

I have to say that I found some of the responses that we have received quite intriguing. Do colleagues have any thoughts on the petition?

I have to say to the Royal Conservatoire that I think that its response is disappointing. I felt almost as though it was designed on the basis that if we read it we would not take much more interest in the petition and we would be fobbed off with what, to my mind, is a very generalised and not terribly constructive response.

As I said, this is about funding—as the petitioner points out—that comes from the Scottish taxpayer and the Scottish Government. I think that the response that the RCS has given almost validates the concerns of the petitioner. It might well be that, in due course, we will take evidence on the petition if we do not get something slightly more satisfactory by way of a written response. Of course, in consequence we will make our own recommendations to the Scottish Government in relation to Royal Conservatoire funding.

We will get back to the Royal Conservatoire, if members are content to do so. I found its argument to be odd. I presume that all the people within any aggregated number are receiving funding, so I am not quite sure what the confidentiality issue is. If everybody is getting it, who would we be naming in particular, in consequence? If that is an argument that the RCS wishes to maintain because it is bound by a protocol, at the very least it is perfectly possible for us to ask it how many Scotland-domiciled students in, say, the past five years aggregated, were offered places. That would allow sufficient anonymity for us to have a handle on the number who were involved and how many then took up the offer, in case there is variation in that respect.