Chamber and committees

The Tay cities region deal has had a successful first two years since it was signed, in December 2020, with more than £70 million of Government funding already having been received by regional partners. The partnership is currently preparing its latest annual report, which will outline the achievements to the end of September last year, and we anticipate that it will include the securing of over £120 million of investment into the region.

We are certainly open to further discussions on these questions. I compliment the University of St Andrews on the development in Guardbridge. I drove past it the other week, on my way to St Andrews, and it is looking good. It is a significant enhancement of the area and a sustainable proposition.

We have not had discussions with the UK Government about a further round of city deals. On Friday, Mr McKee will be signing the islands deal in Liam McArthur’s constituency—I mention that because Liam McArthur is currently in the Presiding Officer’s chair. The islands deal is the latest of the deals involving the islands communities. However, we are happy to have further discussions with the UK Government on these questions.

I will try to reassure Emma Roddick on both those points on environmental protection and workers’ rights.

The Scottish Government would not sign up to arrangements that would dilute any of the existing commitments. Indeed, from a wider policy perspective, some of our concerns about the United Kingdom Government’s Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill reflect our concerns that those very rights for workers or controls on environmental protection might be diminished.

We have a governance structure to put in place. Those are essential commitments at the heart of green freeport status, so we will ensure that mandatory arrangements are taken forward through the successful propositions.

I think that that quote perhaps illustrates why the concept of green freeports is an excluded area in the Bute house agreement, which allows Mr Greer and me to respectfully take slightly different views on that question, if I can put it as delicately as that.

It is much better if I allow Mr Greer to speak for himself rather than speak on his behalf.

The Scottish Government has identified a range of high-level indicators that will help to measure progress towards achieving the individual outcomes in the Covid recovery strategy. The majority of our outcome indicators are drawn from population surveys or large administrative data sets that report annually and which are more measurable than the outcomes themselves. We are working to identify additional intermediate indicators that report more frequently and can therefore identify and influence real-time trends.

The financial situation, including high levels of inflation, is particularly challenging, given the absence of fiscal powers to compensate for those factors. The Scottish Government has prioritised spending that supports the people who need it most, guided in part by the principles of the Covid recovery strategy. Last year’s emergency budget review and the 2023-24 budget provide funding that helps families, backs business and protects the delivery of public services. The Scottish Government is committed to making progress towards the shared Covid recovery strategy outcomes in partnership with local government and other partners and will continue to prioritise spending that is targeted to support the people who are in most need.

It is important in answering Mr Rennie’s question to reflect the fact, inherent in his question, that there are a number of elements to this matter—it is not just about a financial redress decision.

I had a conversation, which will never leave me, with the advisers who work with Future Pathways. That organisation predates the redress scheme and the advisers are allocated to support survivors of historical childhood sexual abuse. I asked them how they go about it. One of them said to me, “We walk alongside the individual.” What more do we need to know? Those people are probably the first reliable, trusted ally that the individual has had in their life.

I will never forget that conversation and it has gone into the thinking behind the scheme. This area of policy is quite unfamiliar to me. When it all kicked off, when Marilyn Livingstone raised the issues in the cross-party group 23 or 24 years ago, when the Parliament was founded, I thought, “Historical childhood sexual abuse? What?” but, of course, although it was not part of my experience as a child, we now know so much more as a society. I have learned a lot. That concept of walking alongside people has never left me, so the scheme has been designed so that, when we work with people, we walk alongside them to try to help them to a conclusion.

That is the thinking. It is one big thing that I have learned from the process, but I will talk about another thing that struck me. I mentioned that there had been a number of requests for a written apology, which is part of the scheme. That is not about money. One survivor who asked for that and got it, then phoned up their caseworker and asked whether they would mind reading it over the phone to them because they wanted to have it read to them by the state. The caseworker told me that it was a profoundly moving encounter, because they felt that, in a sense, they were conveying to that individual the state’s apology.

I have stood up in the chamber and given an apology on behalf of the Government, which I know survivors value, but there was an applicant asking for a couple of minutes of someone’s time for them to read over the phone the apology from the state. I do not know the individual involved, but I hazard a guess that that is more important than the cheque. At least one survivor has asked the First Minister to write to them, and we have arranged for that to be done. A letter has been sent from the First Minister, signed by her own hand.

Mr Rennie is right to highlight that the scheme is a broader consideration. A wee bit of me is in my usual mode of evidence-based transactional data, but there is an awful lot more to the scheme than that.

It is a developing picture. I have put on the record the fact that we have made redress payments of just short of £11.4 million. We will just need to see how that develops. The data is there to be monitored against our original expectations, but, for this scheme, as I think that I acknowledged when we were looking at the bill’s financial memorandum, it was not possible to be absolutely certain about the cost. We made our best attempt to provide an evidence base, based on international experience. However, we live in Scotland, and it will be what it will be in relation to the applicants who come forward.

Obviously, it is appropriate and important that I continue to inform the committee about the development of payments as a matter of public record. If the committee wishes to reflect to me what information it wants to see regularly, I will happily supply that in letters to the convener to give the committee an update on that or any other information that is relevant to the committee’s deliberations.

I invite Gillian Nixon to explain.

I am not sure that I would know what—