Chamber and committees

Those are important questions. Most of my comments in the statement and in the answers that I have given to questions have been about the people who will come through the homes for Ukraine route and, hopefully, the supersponsor route that will run in parallel in relation to Scotland. However, it is important to say that we are also standing ready to provide support to those coming through the family route. Many of them will not need accommodation because they will be coming to stay with family, but they may need help when they get here to travel to their destination and will need help to access other services, so we are seeking to put that in place. We have been trying over the past week or so to keep track of people who might be coming into the country, whether that is people coming into Cairnryan from Ireland—the Republic of Ireland has waived visa requirements—or people coming in through airports, through the family route.

As I said, I spoke to the Scottish Refugee Council this morning; the council had people at Edinburgh airport at the weekend, who held up boards to say to people who were coming from Ukraine that they were there to welcome and support them. Therefore, some of what the member asked about is happening; we need to make sure that it continues to happen.

Accommodation is, obviously, the critical and most immediate issue for people who come but do not have family accommodation, so getting temporary accommodation in place and then working through the longer-term options is at the top of the priority list when it comes to the various issues that we are working through.

The experience of the Syrian resettlement scheme is that many different parts of Scotland, including rural, remote and island communities, have played their part in welcoming people, and I think that that is what we want in this context.

An issue that we are discussing with the UK Government is that, if the single supersponsor proposal is given the green light, we need to get a sense of exactly where people will arrive. Will they all arrive into Edinburgh airport? Will some people come via London or through other points of entry? Those sound like—and are—points of detail, but they are really important points of detail to get, so that we know where to put the initial welcome hubs and where we will accommodate people immediately and temporarily while we do the wider matching work.

The point about pets is important. People are fleeing trauma. Not everybody who offers accommodation will be willing to take a pet. However, the more information and visibility of people coming here that we have, the more able we will be to assess their needs and properly match them with people who are willing to offer help.

The supersponsor proposal is—I will be perfectly frank about this—partly about short-circuiting UK processes that I still think are too bureaucratic, are too cumbersome and take too long, but it is also about allowing us to offer more comprehensive support by having greater information about people who come here. That is why I really hope that it works. If it does, I am confident that the Scottish Government, working with our partners and with the great body of good will from across Scotland, will make Scotland a place of safety, sanctuary and welcome for as many Ukrainians as possible.

It is our intention that health and care workers will be advised to continue testing after the end of April. That is likely to be on a twice-weekly basis, at least initially, although that will be kept under regular clinical review. As I said in my statement, one of the purposes of testing after the end of April will be the protection of high-risk settings, which will, of course, include hospitals and care homes.

The NHS is working hard to ensure that those who are eligible for antiviral treatment get access to it. I cannot comment on individual cases but, if the detail is sent to me, I would be happy to have that looked at. The availability of antiviral treatment continues to develop and increase, so the eligibility of people to be treated with antivirals will also increase. Again, that will be kept under very close review.

The five-day window is important. Obviously, that is why we have continued to support testing and will continue to support it to help with access to care and treatment. Principally, that will be to ensure that firm diagnosis can be given for those who may be eligible for antiviral treatment. That will not be a fixed group of people as time passes; it will be an increasing group of people as the availability and the effectiveness of those treatments continue to increase. We will continue to ensure that the health service is working in a way that best supports the quickest and most effective access to those treatments as that develops. I am sure that the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care would be happy to provide more information as access to that scheme and its scope widen in the weeks and months to come.

In the paper that we have published today, we have set out our intended approach to testing after the end of April, and I have set out the summary of that in my statement. Many people who are extremely clinically vulnerable—not everybody, but many of them—will be among the categories of people who might benefit from antiviral treatment if they get Covid. They will therefore be among people who are still advised to test, even after the end of April. That group of people will remain under review as treatments develop and become more available.

I recognise that this is an anxious time for people as we make this transition back to normal, but we are doing so with appropriate caution and with those who are most vulnerable in mind. We have tried to do that at every step, and we will try to continue to do that at every step yet to come.

I do not take that view. If I did take that view, the contents of my statement would have been different. I think that we are on a justified journey back to normality. Thanks mainly to vaccines but also to natural immunity, there has been a considerable weakening in the link between cases and severe illness. If we did not have vaccines or some natural immunity, we would be in a very different position and we would need additional protections to avoid people becoming seriously ill and dying. Thankfully, we are not in that position, so we can migrate back to normality with a different approach to managing the virus. However, it is important that we do that with appropriate care and caution, which we have done at every stage—particularly when this BA.2 spike is causing challenges. We will continue to do this carefully and cautiously, but I think it is in everybody’s interests, given the wider harms of Covid restrictions, that we continue to get back to normality as soon as we possibly can.

The groups who will be called for the additional booster will, of course, be determined on the JCVI’s advice, which we follow.

The point about accessibility and ensuring that those with particular conditions such as autism are properly catered for was well made. Given the stage that we are at in the vaccination programme, there is less reliance on large-scale vaccination centres and much more reliance on smaller-scale settings. We have tried all along to balance the need for speed and large-scale approaches to vaccination with accessibility, and we will continue to do so. Although there are still people who could come forward for vaccination, and we encourage them to do so, our high vaccination rates speak to the success of that approach. However, we will continue to bear in mind these important issues.

It is for the court service to manage its business. We have provided additional funding, including an increase in its routine resource budget, to help with recovery. All legal restrictions, with the exception of the short-term, temporary requirement on face coverings, will be lifted on Monday. Many of the restrictions have already been lifted, and the remaining ones will be lifted on Monday. We will continue to work with the court service, as we will do with other parts of the public sector, to get services back to normal and to catch up on backlogs as quickly as possible.

First, Scotland is not stuck. Let me remind everyone in the chamber and, indeed, all of Scotland that, as of Monday, every legal measure to help us to control Covid will have been lifted, with a limited temporary exception for a continued requirement to wear face coverings. Given the spike in cases that we are seeing right now and the very high risk of infection, that will help us to protect each other and, in particular during this spike, it will help us to protect the most vulnerable people in our communities and I think that it will help us to get the spike under control more quickly than might otherwise be the case.

That is very much in the spirit of solidarity and mutual concern for each other that has characterised the public response to the pandemic over the past two years. In the light of the very high number of cases right now, I think that many people in Scotland will welcome that precautionary move and that even people who may not welcome it—I understand that there will be people in that category—will nevertheless accept it and understand the reasons for it.

I will update Parliament again in two weeks’ time, before the Easter recess. I would hope, and the expectation is, that we will then convert that regulation to guidance in the early part of April, with 4 April being the first Monday. I think that it is right to take that approach. How we will make that decision is set out in the strategic framework that we published three weeks ago. In short, though, we will want to see the increase in the number of cases stabilise and the risk of infection—it was at one in 18 in the most recent week, according to the ONS—start to reduce so that the most vulnerable people in our society, in particular, are not at the risk that they are right now. However, let me remind everybody that that will be the only legal measure that remains in place and it will be in place for a short, two-week period of time.

On testing, I have got news for Douglas Ross. We will now have to fund all our continued testing requirement, including the more proportionate and targeted testing system that will be in place for the longer term, because the consequentials are not continuing. Those decisions are, of course, driven by the situation that the UK Government arrives at for England. We will continue to assess the overall cost of testing over the next period—[Interruption.] If the Conservatives want to listen to my answer—

The overall cost will depend on factors such as outbreaks and whether we see any new variants emerging, and we will have to flex that cost based on the reality of the situation. The cost of extending access to LFTs prudently for a period and, unlike the situation south of the border, making sure that, where we are advising testing, it is free of charge for people who need to test, will be a relatively small part of the overall annual cost. We will continue to judge that cost on the basis of the circumstances that prevail with the pandemic at any given time.

As I indicated earlier, I will set out in a statement tomorrow more details of the arrangements that we are working to put in place to welcome and support refugees to come here from Ukraine. However, I can say now that that includes intensive work with Public Health Scotland to look at exactly what we should offer by way of testing when people arrive and by way of vaccination if they are not already vaccinated. That work is under way as part of the wider preparations to welcome people here, and I will set those out in more detail tomorrow.