Chamber and committees

There is not conflict on those issues, but there is a UK Government that is failing to take decisions in an orderly and competent fashion. That is the reality. As recently as Friday, we fully expected that, yesterday, the UK Government would set out in detail the testing infrastructure that it intended to retain and the funding that would accompany that. Yesterday, I had two conversations with Michael Gove; between those conversations, a UK Cabinet meeting was postponed because its members were still having conflict among themselves. I deeply regret that, because it has a knock-on effect on Scottish Government decision making, and I hope that they get their act together quickly.

Jackie Baillie is right to point to the fact that public health responsibilities are devolved. However, that takes us to the very heart of the issue. Public health decisions are devolved, but decisions that determine how much resource is available to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland flow only from the public health decisions that are taken for England by the UK Government. I do not defend that system, because I think that it is unacceptable and unsustainable; unfortunately and regrettably, it is defended by Jackie Baillie and her party. If she is not prepared to take my word for how unacceptable that is, perhaps she will listen to the Welsh First Minister, Mark Drakeford, who has made exactly the points that I am making about the complete unacceptability of the position.

I have said that we will continue to secure free access to PCR and lateral flow testing for a transition period. Today, I have said that I expect that transition period to extend beyond the end of March. We will set out the detail during March. However, before we can set out that detail, we need to know, based on the decisions that the UK Government will take, what resources will be available to support it. The assurance that I can give is that it will be the maximum possible testing capacity and infrastructure. I do not want what we have created over the past two years to be dismantled, and I want our testing arrangements to be fit for purpose and appropriate for the future.

When it comes to whether the categories of people who we routinely recommend for testing will be the same as the UK Government’s, the UK Government has not given clarity on what its categories will be, so I cannot answer that question. I have set out the broad priorities for testing, and we will continue to develop the detail.

Finally on that point, in line with the fundamental principle of healthcare free at the point of use, which I and, I think, Jackie Baillie’s party support—I am not so sure about the Conservatives—in any circumstance in which the Government recommends testing for Covid, it should provide those tests free of charge. To the best of our ability, we will seek to uphold that principle in any future strategy.

Presiding Officer, I have taken some time, but there were a lot of questions in Jackie Baillie’s contribution.

Finally, on the categorisation of low, medium and high threat levels, I have set out in summary in my statement—it is set out in more detail in the document—why it would not be appropriate to rely on fixed thresholds of numbers of cases per 100,000 or numbers of people in hospital. That is because different threats do not have a uniform impact.

It stands to reason that, if we face a variant that is very highly transmissible but less severe, like omicron, that will demand less of a response than a variant that is both highly transmissible and more severe, which puts more lives at risk. That is why we—of course—look at all that data, but we will have to continue to apply judgment to it. Significant detail is set out in the document on that, and on long Covid, which is a significant challenge and something that this Government and other Governments will have to respond to for some time to come.

Yes, there will be updated guidance, and we will ensure that there are updated marketing and public awareness campaigns to help people to understand the changes that I have announced today. That is a very reasonable point to raise.

On the issue of funding, members often call for us to give local authorities more money and the flexibility to spend it. We have, rightly, given the balance of funding to local authorities to ensure that flexibility for the rest of the money that is flowing to businesses right now. For example, if we look at the management information on the local authority-delivered funds for hospitality and taxis, of the almost 23,000 applications that were received, so far almost 22,000 have been paid out.

There is a range of other schemes, such as those that are administered by Creative Scotland, and that money is also flowing to businesses. We will continue to work with the stakeholders that are responsible for delivering that money to ensure that it all gets to the businesses that need it as quickly as possible.

I think that Alex Cole-Hamilton does a disservice to his argument with the hyperbole that he uses. This is a proportionate measure that businesses, after it is no longer a legal requirement, will have the choice of using or not. The app is there and everybody can see the information that is available on it.

For every person who has contacted me to say that they do not agree with Covid certification, I have had at least one other person who has said that it makes them feel safer, in going to places, to know that people there are vaccinated or have tested recently. I think that there will be some businesses that see the advantage in still doing that in order to make people feel more confident about using their services and buying what they have to offer.

This is about giving choice and making sure that we have a package of measures in place that will collectively help to keep us safe as we continue to navigate our way through a challenge that is, we hope, receding but which will continue to pose difficult times for us in the months and years to come.

We continue to work with colleagues across all four UK nations to ensure that we are sharing learning and intelligence. That applies in particular to the learning from the vaccination programme. The work includes monitoring misinformation and disinformation that could adversely affect the success of the programme and proactively sharing information about such campaigns with stakeholders, once we are aware of them.

Research has shown that having Governments directly challenge conspiracy theorists can be counter-productive—although I do not think that we should ever rule that out—often because the conspiracy theorists use such attacks as a validation of their world view. Our policy, which is shared by other Governments, is to continually provide the public with information and reliable sources of truth about the vaccine, such as our own website and the information available on NHS Inform. I think that all MSPs and all politicians have a role to play in helping to ensure that we tackle misinformation and disinformation and that we encourage people to take up the opportunity of vaccination whenever that is available to them.

People outside the chamber might not see this, but members on the Conservative benches seem to think that the cost of living crisis is something to laugh about. [Interruption.] I do not think that many people across the country share that view, and I encourage members to have more respect for the difficult circumstances that people face.

It is the case—as it is very often the case—that what the Treasury appears to announce does not translate into actual money for the Scottish Government. The UK “Supplementary Estimates 2021-22”, which were published today, confirmed that the Scottish budget is receiving £17 million less than the Treasury provisionally indicated before the chancellor’s cost of living announcement.

That is something we have come to expect from the Treasury. We will continue to work with the UK Government to get the maximum support for people across the country, who are really suffering as a result of the pandemic and other factors that are driving up the cost of living—which might, unfortunately, be exacerbated by developments in Ukraine. Undoubtedly, we need the chancellor to take much more action in the days and weeks to come.

The £80 million Covid economic recovery fund that I set out yesterday will give councils the ability to consider the needs of local businesses, communities and households in their local areas, and will let them target support and maximise economic recovery as we move into the new phase of the pandemic. We have given councils the flexibility on how to use that money. They may give money to individual businesses but also support initiatives such as Scotland Loves Local, business improvement districts or some place-based investment programmes as they see fit and in ways that they think best contribute to the recovery from Covid. I know that that flexibility has been welcomed by local authorities and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and, as I was hearing from businesses in Edinburgh yesterday, that money will go a long way towards helping with that recovery process.

I have said today that we intend—assuming that there are no adverse developments between now and then—to lift on 21 March the requirement for businesses to take account of Government guidance, and to take all practicable measures to reduce the risk of infection on their premises. We will continue to update guidance to give businesses and other organisations the right steer on what to do. We anticipate moving to a position whereby none of those things is a legal requirement for businesses or for others. However, as we have just been talking about in the context of individual behaviour, businesses, for obvious reasons, will want to operate in sensible ways that allow them to keep their staff and customers safe. We will continue to engage with businesses about the nature of that over the coming weeks.

First, on the dreadful developments in Ukraine, the actions of Putin are utterly indefensible and he must face the most severe sanctions as a consequence of those actions. The announcement by the Prime Minister a short time ago does not go nearly far enough. He described the limited sanctions that were announced today as a “first tranche”, but it is essential that we see further tranches soon, with very severe sanctions imposed on Putin and interests in Russia. We must all be—I hope that, across the Parliament, we will be—united in standing in solidarity with Ukraine and its people as they defend their independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. I am sure that that will unite us across the Parliament and the country.

I turn to the issues that were raised in my statement. Douglas Ross says that we have now done what he asked us to do all along. I pause to note that he opposed the use of face coverings and Covid certification ever being legal requirements. He has opposed almost everything that this Government has done to try to control the virus and keep people safe from it.

The Government will continue to take a responsible approach to steering the country through the pandemic. We will take decisions in a timely manner; we will be driven by the data, the evidence and the application of judgment; and we will not follow the opportunistic and thoroughly oppositionalist approach that is and has been recommended at every interval by the Scottish Conservatives.

Of the specific issues that were raised, I will start with testing. It is a bit rich for Douglas Ross to accuse me of picking a fight with Boris Johnson, but we will leave that to one side for the moment.

I have had many discussions on testing with UK Government representatives over the past few days, and we all agree that, in time—at least, I think that it should happen in time—we should move to a more targeted system of testing.

The difference between the Scottish and UK Governments is that we think that we should do that in a careful, phased basis and that we should put great care and thought into the testing infrastructure—built up over the past two years—that we retain for the future. To dismantle that in a significant way would be inexcusable negligence, given the threat that Covid still presents to us.

Yesterday, we had an announcement from the UK Government about what it will stop doing, but there was no clarity on what it intends to retain or on the funding that will be in place to support that. That is deeply regrettable. We will continue to work with the UK Government to try to get clarity so that we can set out our longer-term plans. We think that we should retain testing on the current basis during a transition period and then, in a managed and careful way, move to a more targeted system that, nevertheless, retains the capacity and contingency that we might need in future.

On issues around continuing to have contingency measures that we might use in the future, I note that Covid has not gone away. It will not simply disappear because we want it to. I heard the chief medical officer for England make the point yesterday that it is highly likely that we will face new threats from the virus in the form of new and potentially harmful variants. We need contingency measures in place and we need to ensure that we have laws that are fit for purpose, which is why the Parliament is currently scrutinising coronavirus legislation. We will continue to do that.

Finally, my ministers engage with businesses on the detail of Covid measures, as is right and proper. We will continue to do so and to take appropriate steps to keep businesses safe while we keep the overall population of the country safe. I am sure that many people across the country will breathe a sigh of relief that Douglas Ross has not been in charge of these decisions.

This is an important issue and I stress again that we are not changing our advice to people who test positive. That advice remains that they should isolate for the recommended period. We will keep the recommended period under review, but it is important that people who are positive with this highly infectious virus stay at home to reduce the risk of infecting others. That has always been in guidance in Scotland rather than in law. I think that the position is well understood and we are not changing that position.

Crucially, though—again, unlike the position that was outlined by the Prime Minister yesterday—we will retain self-isolation support grants for those who are eligible, in order to help people to do the right thing by isolating. I think that that is one of the most basic but most important things that we can all agree to do. The converse of that, of course, would be saying that it is fine for someone who tests positive with this highly infectious virus to go to work, to go shopping or to go to restaurants as normal, knowing that that would then allow the virus to circulate and infect others. That would be counter-productive overall in terms of our efforts to control the virus, but it would also make all of those settings much less safe for people who are highly vulnerable and are at highest clinical risk. I think that, as we return to normality, it is important that, as a matter of principle, we all get to return to normality and we do not create a situation in which those of us who have other health conditions or are, for example, frail by virtue of age have to continue to effectively shield while those of us who are not in that position can go about our normal lives.

Let us all continue to do the basic and important public health things to keep the country as safe as possible for everybody so that we can all get back to normal as safely as possible

As a result of the announcement yesterday, we will give money to East Lothian Council, which will allow it, using the flexibility that councils often ask us for, to consider whether the businesses that the member mentions merit that kind of funding. Given the stage that we are at, it is not for the Government to step in and make those decisions for councils. We have given councils the balance of funding so that they can make those decisions on the basis of what they think is right for their areas. I am sure that the member will engage with local councils on behalf of the—I am sure—excellent businesses that he just mentioned.