Chamber and committees

I am very sympathetic to those issues, because a fundamental point that was clear to me during all my interactions as Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills is that communication difficulties lie at the heart of many of the challenges and issues that are faced by young people who have perhaps been isolated in society or have been unable to fulfil their potential as much as they should have been. Early addressing of communication difficulties is utterly fundamental to the life chances of such individuals, so I am wholly supportive of the point that Carol Mochan has made.

As I said in my answer to Audrey Nicoll, the Covid recovery strategy is designed to tackle fundamental inequalities. We are determined to ensure that equality of access to services that support people to overcome difficulties is anchored at the heart of our strategy.

I fear that, on that point, we will go round the houses regularly for the foreseeable future because, fundamentally, the issue comes down to whether our statute book is equipped to deal with all eventualities that come our way. That is the point. That is why we are doing this. On any other day, the Conservatives could be criticising the Government for not taking enough steps. I have heard them do that on countless occasions in the past, during my service in the Parliament.

We are simply preparing the statute book for difficulties that might come our way. I hope that they do not come our way, because we want to avoid them, but if they do, I want us to be prepared and ready for them. That is not an unreasonable thing for even the Conservatives on their most grudging afternoon to come to terms with.

I am very happy to engage on that question. If Rhoda Grant wishes to supply me with further examples or areas where she believes that to be appropriate, I will happily consider them.

The Government designed a host of different business support schemes, some of which applied to a particular sector, such as hospitality. We tried to design them to have as broad a reach as we possibly could, but I accept that some businesses will not have been neatly caught by any of them. That is why we put in place discretionary relief funds for local authorities to do exactly as we envisage with the £80 million fund that the First Minister announced a week past Monday. It is designed to give local authorities the ability to address the issue that Ms Grant puts to me, which is that there might be businesses that have not been reached by discrete funds that could be supported by more general provision.

I will be happy to receive some further information and thoughts from Rhoda Grant on that question, but I also encourage her to point businesses in the direction of local authorities, which have been given substantial discretionary relief funds to try to address exactly the circumstances that she puts to me.

We might have to identify areas as being related to outbreaks, or we might have to restrict access to them if we are trying to prevent the spread of the virus in the same way as we had to do, regrettably, during the pandemic.

Time and again, we are going to come back to the crucial point: do we want a statute book that is fit to handle such circumstances or do we want to have to do things in a hurry? Mr Sweeney has, quite fairly, said to me that we need a process of thinking through what we need to do in certain circumstances. I am simply asking whether, on the basis of our past experience, we want to prepare the statute book for that. That is the crucial point.

That is the subject of a regular process of review, which, ultimately, involves Cabinet decisions and the statements that the First Minister has made to the Parliament on a regular basis. The process involves analytical work that is undertaken within Government to consider a range of perspectives on the state of the pandemic, such as its seriousness and the level of threat to public health. Essentially, that leads to the production of the “Coronavirus (COVID-19): state of the epidemic” report, which is published on a regular basis and is publicly available.

A group at a senior level within the Government considers that report and explores the four harms—which we have described and which committee members will have heard me talk about before—which are the direct Covid health harm, the non-Covid health harm and the social and economic harms that are caused by Covid. That group is populated by the chief advisers to the Government: the chief economist, the chief social policy adviser, the chief medical officer, the chief scientific adviser, the chief educational officer and the chief social worker. All those individuals consider that material and provide advice to the Cabinet, which makes a judgment about whether regulations are proportionate.

That is, ultimately, a judgment to be made. Indeed, the Government made it explicit last Tuesday, in its strategic framework update, that that is, always has been and always will be a judgment. However, ministers recognise—appropriately, given that all our decisions are justiciable—that we must be satisfied that the stance of regulations being proportionate can withstand legal challenge, should that arise. The Government takes such issues very seriously in its deliberations.

It all leads to a set of decisions that are taken by the Cabinet and then reported to the Parliament. Accordingly, any legislative measures that flow from that are brought to the Parliament in the fashion with which the committee will be familiar.

My reading of the Information Commissioner’s communication with the Government indicates that the issues that the Government has to address are about the explanation of the approach that has been taken to information handling, not the information handling itself. The remedial action that the Government has to take is to explain better to members of the public why their information is being handled as it is being handled. The issue is not the means of handling the information.

As to my knowledge of the situation, I became aware of the concerns of the Information Commissioner’s Office on, I think, 28 or 29 September. I would have to verify exactly which day it was, but it was one of those two.

Mr Hoy will be aware of the contents of the Information Commissioner’s letter to us last week. Obviously, the Government will take all necessary steps to ensure that we address those issues, but I stress that they are about the explanation that is given to the public about the basis on which and the way in which information is handled.

That would not be our intention. The committee will know that the Government has introduced primary legislation that aims to ensure that the statute book is equipped to deal with the uncertainties that we might have to face on an on-going basis. That is a separate issue, which will be the subject of detailed and familiar parliamentary scrutiny.

The whole point of extending the expiry date of the act through the instrument that is before the committee is to enable the Government to respond to the emerging situation that we face. I have previously been clear with the Parliament that we hope that we will not have to face those situations, but the statute book has to be equipped, should they arise.

We need them for reasons of public health. In certain circumstances, we might need to take decisions that relate to the prevalence of the virus and its presence in certain scenarios.

The Government and local authorities have a whole range of different emergency powers on the statute book. They were given to us by the Parliament to be exercised only when there is a justification for exercising them. This is no different.