Chamber and committees

I raised that point in my budget statement to Parliament in December, because the issues that Mr Fraser correctly highlights will undoubtedly put pressure on these long-term projects. Projects that, for example, had an estimated cost in the benign climate of 2020 are now in a significantly different position because of the effect of hyperinflation.

We hope that there will be reductions in inflation, but I have to say quite openly to Parliament that there will be challenges around uprating projects that have been affected by inflationary cost. It is a problem that we are wrestling with right across Government. We will do our level best to address that in the capital programme, to ensure that projects can be taken forward. However, there will be strains in city deals, which are long-term growth deals, because of the effect of inflation.

Annabelle Ewing raises an important issue. As I rehearsed in my answer to Murdo Fraser, it is important to encourage uptake of the vaccination programme, and we are encouraged by the level of uptake that we are seeing. I would encourage anybody who is in the eligible population groups but who has not been vaccinated to take up the opportunity of that vaccination.

Our approach to vaccination is based on the clinical advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. I would expect the JCVI to consider the question that Annabelle Ewing puts to me about the provision of further booster vaccinations in 2023 or in later years and provide advice to the Government. Obviously, we stand ready to implement that advice.

I reiterate that, in the interim, the winter 2022 booster programme campaign remains open until the end of March. Appointments are still available, and I encourage anyone who is eligible and is yet to be vaccinated to come forward.

I do not know the answer to whether the review process will involve the ability to gather new information. That is an issue for Redress Scotland, and is not on the Government’s side of things because Redress Scotland is making determinations at arm’s length from Government.

I am grateful to Mr Marra for raising that question, because it offers a timely opportunity to reflect on the case. I will address his question—if you will forgive me, convener, this may well take some time—in two parts. The first concerns the situation that we face today; the second concerns my thinking in the light of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee’s letter to me.

I will outline the current situation. I have listened carefully to the group that has made representations to me, all the members of which are Fornethy survivors and are part of the wider group. I do not believe that, as things stand, there is an inherent impediment to applications to the redress scheme coming forward from people who spent time at Fornethy. I acknowledge that the nature of the environment in which individuals were spending time at Fornethy could be considered to fall within the ambit of the scheme, so I do not think that there is an inherent impediment to applications coming forward and being considered. To put it slightly more bluntly, I reject the idea that the scheme is not for Fornethy survivors; I think that it is possible for Fornethy survivors to be successful in applying under the scheme.

That brings me to my second point, which concerns where I stand in relation to the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee’s letter—as Mr Marra correctly said, I received the letter from the committee’s convener, Jackson Carlaw, just this week.

In that letter, Jackson Carlaw made a key point to me. He said:

“The Committee heard that parental responsibilities were transferred to local authorities, such as the then Glasgow Corporation, temporarily and in these cases the local authority could be considered to be acting ‘in loco parentis’ when providing short-term respite and holiday care.”

That is the key point: the scheme for which Parliament legislated provides redress because of the obligation of the state to ensure that proper care was provided to individuals when they were in an in-care situation as the responsibility of the state.

If a young person was at a holiday camp and was dropped off and picked up by their parents, it would be difficult to substantiate the view that the state was exercising responsibility. However, I do not think that the situation at Fornethy ticks that rather neat middle-class box—if I may say so—that I have just outlined to the committee. The more I understand about the situation at Fornethy, the more I find it difficult to reconcile it with the idea of some form of voluntary endeavour, and I think that the matter hinges on that point.

That is a long way—forgive me for the length of time that I have taken, convener—of saying that I am going to reflect carefully on the letter that I have had from the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee. I gave the ladies who came to see me an assurance that I would look carefully at the issue, and I have said publicly that I do not think that there is an impediment to their cases being considered under the redress scheme. With regard to whether I need to do something more explicit, I am certainly considering whether there is a case for doing so based on what is, it would be fair to say, an emerging picture of the circumstances in which people found themselves at Fornethy.

I am now in mental arithmetic mode, and I am looking at percentages.

It is quite a high number, I guess. I think that we have to keep the process under constant review. The review panels will continue to look at evidence and come to conclusions, and we need to see a build-up of caseload and evidence to determine whether that is an issue about which we should be concerned. However, that number is a product of the final decision making of Redress Scotland, which is carried out at arm’s length from Government.

Twenty-three.

When we started, our original plan was to recruit 12 caseworkers, which we did, and the team was constructed on that basis. It quickly became clear to us, however, that that was not going to be sufficient, given the shape of applications that had come in, so we took the decision to expand the number of caseworkers.

It is no secret that it is quite difficult to expand civil service employment just now—that is not really flavour of the month. The decision to double the number of caseworkers should therefore be considered in the context of the recruitment constraints under which we are currently operating as an indication of the fact that we recognise that the scheme had to be more substantively resourced than it was to begin with.

In the first months of this year, we will begin to see the effect of the new caseworkers coming in. I expect the numbers that I shared with Mr Dey to grow—the number of applications being passed to Redress Scotland went from 26 per month back in February to 66 a month—and I will be monitoring that progress, because it will be an indication of the effect of those caseworkers in processing more cases.

I am anxious, however, that people should not be waiting longer than is necessary for a determination. They have suffered enough, and that is the last thing that they should have to do. If we need to expand the number of caseworkers further, therefore, we will do so.

I make one point, however: recruiting caseworkers for this particular task is not a straightforward exercise, because not everybody is suited to such work. It is very taxing, emotionally and psychologically, on individuals, and staff have to come to the job with a deep sense of commitment to the task. It is a difficult task, and they have to be trained to have the necessary resilience to deal with it. We have to be satisfied that they are trauma trained and can deal with trauma appropriately, and that process is not straightforward.

The recruitment process in itself takes some time, and we have to be satisfied that we have people who can deploy the right approach in handling the applications. Although I am leaving the door very much open to continued expansion, I add the caveat that we have to be satisfied that the necessary recruitment and training approaches are in place. Without being in any way disrespectful, I note that we cannot just go to a temping agency and say, “Send us another 10 people”—that would be totally counterproductive.

I put that on the record in order to seek some understanding from the committee that we have to take a lot of care in the recruitment of those individuals.

Yes. The recruitment process was completed in November.

Yes, I am, but I acknowledge that people will be frustrated by the time that it will take, because we have a backlog to work our way through. To go back to the deputy convener’s point that I responded to, we can throw temporary resources at a routine application process for administrative information, but that cannot be done in this situation. It is too sensitive and too complex. Frankly, it would be disrespectful to do that.

I feel that we have a robust and well-resourced scheme, but I acknowledge that there is frustration at the length of time that it is taking. I again go back to the deputy convener’s point—this was contained in one of the points that Mr Kerr put to me from the correspondent who has responded to my letter. We are prioritising people with a terminal illness and older applicants. We are working through the applications as systematically as we can.