We need to ensure that we fund people. We also need care homes. We will potentially lose five council care homes in Edinburgh. I hope that our new councillors will look at that alongside care at home.

I want to formally thank the witnesses for all the submissions that we received in advance of the meeting—it is useful to get different perspectives, even when you are saying similar things. It is still good to go through the high-level issues that you have raised and the detail.

The issue that I want to follow up is: what do we do about this? Even from the previous hour, you will have detected a difference in emphasis and thoughts among committee members. To go back to the points that Professor McHarg made about the age of the convention, the issue of clarity, what we mean by normality, and the whole issue of political consent and context, there is an issue about lessons learned from 1999 to 2022, and with the 2016 legislation, and what we think now as a Parliament.

I am interested in the two sets of potential solutions and changes from Professor McHarg and the Institute for Government. There is an issue about accountability, which was clearly not designed in by Sewel. At the UK level, ministers can initiate a piece of legislation and not be accountable at that level—there is no structure for that. There is also an issue about how we hold the Scottish Government to account on secondary legislation and how the UK Government is held to account on secondary legislation. However, at a higher level, with primary legislation, there is no accountability.

The Institute for Government and Professor McHarg have made some good and clear recommendations. Will you give us a quick summary at a high level and mention some practical changes?

That is helpful, because Maurice Golden has just triggered the point that I was very keen to get a response on. I thought that point 6 in the Institution for Government’s recommendations, about dispute resolution, was interesting. Maurice Golden has suggested an interparliamentary body as one way of holding Governments to account and you have suggested an independent advisory panel established as a standing body to consider the competence issues that arise in disputes. I would be keen to get your view, and maybe also Michael Clancy’s, about different ways in which you could do that; what are the pros and cons?

Given the worry that we will not see even a 90 per cent completion rate for this year’s delayed census, does the First Minister agree that, in addition to encouraging people to fill out the form if they have not already done so, we need an inquiry into what went wrong, given the millions wasted, the issues of the safety of front-line staff and the pressure that was put on them and the importance of the census to the allocation of resources and the tackling of inequalities?

I thank Fiona Hyslop for giving us the opportunity to debate and celebrate 200 years of the Union canal. As she said in her speech, it is an incredible piece of engineering infrastructure. We must all ensure that it continues to get the investment that it needs, whether that is to keep the canal bridges usable or to make the canal navigable for canoeists and canal-boat users.

I have been interested in the Union canal as a part of our history and culture, and as a fantastic connecting route through central Scotland, since being a Central Region town planner and through my time as a minister in Donald Dewar’s Cabinet, when I was privileged to see the plans for the Falkirk wheel and to be part of the millennium project. In 1999, Donald Dewar cut the first sod of turf at the start of the project to reconnect the Forth and Clyde canal and the Union canal.

As an Edinburgh resident, I love walking and cycling beside the canal. I say to Graham Simpson that my route goes from Linlithgow to Edinburgh or from Falkirk to Linlithgow: that is quite enough for me. The point about the canal is that we can choose our route and how long we want to follow it; it is accessible for people. That is what we celebrate today.

The canal is at the heart of the city of Edinburgh and is an incredibly popular green space. The city centre has been regenerated where we used to have an historic brewery, which, at one time, produced 2 million barrels of beer a year and was a key local employer. In recent years, we have moved on from that, with Boroughmuir high school opening in 2018, new homes having been built and the opening of cafes and art venues, including the Edinburgh Printmakers gallery.

Most recently, I have been involved in an inspiring project that was proposed by the late Chris Wigglesworth, who was a Labour councillor, geologist, church minister and community activist. He came up with the fountain for Fountainbridge project, which uses the Archimedes’ screw principle for a gravity-fed fountain. We managed to get the fountain included in the development plans and proposals to provide new homes and regenerate the area, for which I thank Fountainbridge canalside initiative members and other community activists. I also thank Heriot-Watt University academics and students for their work; they took Chris’s project, developed it and told us how we could implement it.

I thank all the local activists not just for their commitment and support on the fountain for Fountainbridge project but for all the work that they do in promoting access to the canal. It is a key part of our community. It is a mixed sustainable environment: it is biodiverse, it improves people’s quality of life, it is socially inclusive and it gives us a wellbeing neighbourhood, which is something to celebrate—and that is just the city centre part of the canal.

Like Gordon MacDonald, I am really looking forward to tomorrow’s flotilla celebration. It was organised by Scottish Canals, which I thank for all its work. I am looking forward to networking with our new councillors, our local community and local businesses.

I want us to continue to maximise the positive impact of the canal as a fantastic feature. As Fiona Hyslop’s motion suggests, it brings joy to all the people and communities who use and access it. Let us hope that it continues to do that for years to come.

Given the challenge of new variants, the most recent of which are those that have been identified in Portugal and South Africa, what risk assessment has the Scottish Government done on the impact of ending routine testing, given the on-going health issues that Jackie Baillie raised, as well as the effects of long Covid? Does the Deputy First Minister agree that, without a commitment to free vaccines in low-income countries and around the globe, we will not be safe until everyone is safe?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on what modelling it has undertaken to estimate the impact on its Covid recovery strategy of removing population-wide testing and contact tracing at the end of April. (S6O-01092)

I am glad that the policy statement will be on the Parliament’s website, but it is not quite there yet. Would it not have been helpful to have put it out before this morning, so that we could have reflected on it in the debate?

It is helpful that the deputy convener has outlined the range of different witnesses who made those comments, because, just to clarify to the cabinet secretary, the committee’s recommendation was not about criticising staff, who do fantastic work in those offices, but about being clear, having set priorities and enabling some kind of transparency.

There have been a couple of comments about the international budget not being as much as we would like it to be. There have to be priorities and trade-offs. The more clarity that we can get, the more we will see where the political priorities could be, not just in the international offices but in international projects across the world, through which Scotland can make a distinct and important contribution.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?