Chamber and committees

The Covid recovery strategy sets out how we will rebuild by working collaboratively across Government and with our partners in local government, business and the third sector.

Recovery priorities will vary by location and local needs; therefore, we will continue to work in partnership to deliver the joint leadership that is necessary for that effort. Both Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway will benefit from the Scottish Government’s £85 million contribution to the Borderlands inclusive growth deal, which will support a range of projects and programmes designed to drive sustainable economic growth across the region.

We have also provided up to £125,000 to support the South of Scotland Regional Economic Partnership to develop the area’s first regional economic strategy, thereby establishing a framework and delivery plan for national agencies and regional partners to work together to achieve a sustained and inclusive recovery from the effects of Covid-19.

I would certainly want that to be the case. I acknowledge the importance of public transport in ensuring that connectivity is available for all citizens. Its importance is particularly apparent in an area such as Dumfries and Galloway and, for the benefit of completeness in relation to the question, the Scottish Borders.

The Government has, of course, put in place significant levels of financial support to sustain the operations of transport providers during the pandemic. Of necessity—because of restrictions—public transport has carried many fewer passengers than would have been the case otherwise. However, we want to see a vibrant public sector network to ensure that the needs of all citizens, whether they are accessing college, training places or employment, or making connections across the community, are able to be satisfied. I give Mr Carson the assurance that the Government is working to that objective, although a lot of dialogue is to be had about specific services and provision.

I thank Mr Dornan for his kind remarks. They prompt me to thank a range of civil servants who have worked extraordinarily hard since the passage of the act in March to ensure that we arrive at this moment. A huge amount of complex work has been undertaken. I gave them a timescale that, I suspect, was described in civil service parlance as heroic. They have risen to that heroic challenge and I am profoundly grateful to all of them for what they have contributed.

Redress Scotland recruited the panel of experts through the normal Scottish Government public appointments process, so those individuals were subject to a range of scrutiny. I had the pleasure of meeting the first grouping of panellists in the past couple of weeks. A very broad and diverse range of skills, experience and perspectives, including lived experience, has been brought into the panel. We will be well served by those individuals.

The forum will be launched swiftly once we begin to build up the engagement with survivors. I assure Mr Stewart that it will be able to submit its thoughts and views to Redress Scotland and the Scottish Government.

To go back to the point that I made to Mr Marra earlier, we must ensure that the voice of survivors is heard loud and clear in the process. If we have failed on that in the past, we cannot fail on it in future. That is uppermost in my thinking about how we engage survivors to learn of their perspective on the issues.

The analysis that has been undertaken so far indicates that increasing the amount of the Scottish child payment to £20 a week could lift 40,000 children out of poverty, reducing overall child poverty by an estimated four percentage points in 2023-24. That is based on initial analysis; we hope to publish further analysis in early 2022. It will give the families of more than 106,000 children under the age of six an immediate cash boost when it is introduced in April 2022.

We will, of course, look to take other steps to support the financial wellbeing of low-income families and to ensure that the interventions that we make—for example, for the creation of employment or the expansion of wraparound childcare—are also targeted at supporting those families. We will look to make sure that we use a combination of different interventions, including the child payment and employment support, to enable us to achieve the outcome of reducing child poverty and improving the financial security of low-income households.

I thank Mr Greene for his questions and I acknowledge the enormously helpful role that he played in the bill’s passage through Parliament in the previous session. That was appreciated by me and by all members of the Parliament.

Mr Greene asked about forecasting. We have not changed our position from what was set out in the financial memorandum on the bill, which gave estimates—they will always be rough estimates, by their nature—of the volume of investment that will be required. He is correct that our financial approach is to pursue contributions from organisations, although the Government expects to make a substantial financial contribution to the scheme over a number of years.

On the contributions that have been achieved to date, I note that more than £115 million has been committed to the scheme, of which £100 million is coming from Scottish local authorities. I welcome the contribution that local authorities are prepared to make to the scheme. The list of contributors is published on the Government’s website today. We will continue to update it, as a number of contributions are specifically being negotiated at present. I therefore expect the list to change and develop over time. Some organisations will have waited to see the scheme get off the ground and to see others being prepared to take decisions to contribute. I thank those that have made contributions already, and we will pursue further discussions with individual parties.

Local authorities have been very constructive about the issue in their discussions, and we have come to an agreement that the local authority contribution will essentially be top-sliced from the Government’s contribution to local authority funding over a number of years in order to spread the burden appropriately.

Mr Greene makes a valid point on an issue that, as he will know from the passage of the bill, we wrestled with at length in the legislative process, and this is where the thinking around fair and meaningful contributions comes in. We must take care to ensure that, while we pursue legitimate contributions for the past, we do not jeopardise the ability of organisations to provide vital services on which young people depend today. That sensitive balance will be applied by the Government.

I acknowledge the inconvenience to members of the public and the hardship that comes with that, and I acknowledged that when I made a statement about storm Arwen last week. The issues that we have faced in relation to storm Barra have been of less gravity than those faced in relation to storm Arwen. Following storm Arwen, all Scottish Power customers were reconnected to supply by Thursday of last week, and all but a handful of cases relating to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks were reconnected by Saturday. A few isolated and unoccupied properties were connected on Sunday morning.

I have been advised that, at 8 minutes past 3, the total number of customers that are off supply is 511, most of whom are in the north-east of Scotland. The entire Scottish Power network is back up and running, subject to the fluctuations that take place on any normal day. The final restoration time for the last fault is expected to be 7 pm tonight.

We wrestled with slightly different issues in the advance payment scheme, simply because of the eligibility criteria that it involved. I assure Meghan Gallacher and Parliament that we will support individuals in accessing records, because I recognise that that is a significant and potentially very stressful experience for them, and we want to minimise the risk of lack of availability of records being an obstacle to individuals accessing the scheme. That support will be there.

In addition, wider support for wellbeing will be available through a number of channels—I recounted some of them in my statement—in recognition of the fact that individuals may need non-financial support to enable them to navigate their way through what I recognise will be a very challenging period for them.

The waiver scheme is a sensitive part of the scheme, and it was sensitive during the passage of the legislation. In the Government’s view, and ultimately in the Parliament’s view, it was the right measure to enable us to secure contributions. We have to make sure that, when individuals are making applications, they are doing so with the full knowledge and understanding of the issues with which they have to wrestle. Independent legal advice is crucial in equipping individuals to make a judgment on whether the scheme is appropriate for them and whether the waiver is appropriate for them to sign.

If Mr Fraser would care to send me the details, I will look into it. I can see no good reason why that should be the case. Certainly, in light of the information that Mr Fraser has given me about the case, it makes no sense for that individual to be requested to come back to Scotland to receive the booster vaccination. If Mr Fraser writes to me with those details, I will attend to that.