Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has made available a number of funding streams in the South Ayrshire area. As part of the local government finance settlement, South Ayrshire Council is receiving funding of £247.6 million, which represents a real-terms increase of 8.2 per cent, and cost of living support of nearly £5 million will be made available to South Ayrshire.

In addition, South Ayrshire Council was allocated £533,000 from the flexible element of the winter support fund. We also allocated more than £1.7 million in discretionary housing payment to the council to fully mitigate the damaging effects of the UK Government’s bedroom tax.

Our strategy is focused on those who have been most affected during the pandemic and on creating a fairer future for everyone who has been affected. We will do that by transforming public services to ensure that they are person centred in design and delivery, and by working closely with our partners, including the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, local government and the third and private sectors. That will multiply the impact of our actions and support communities and the most vulnerable to thrive.

The Government has declared tackling child poverty to be a national mission and is working to mobilise all of Scotland to help us to achieve that goal. We will publish the second tackling child poverty delivery plan tomorrow, which will outline the transformational action that we will take, alongside our delivery partners, to tackle child poverty, which lies at the very heart of the Covid recovery strategy.

The Government will, of course, consider carefully the views of Parliament as it completes its stage 1 scrutiny of the bill, but I must stress that removing key provisions from the bill in the way that Ms Baillie suggests would mean that Scotland would not have the public health protection measures in place that are needed to counter future public health threats, and I do not believe that that is in the public interest.

I am not ignoring them—I am addressing them. I understand the perspective of commentators and commissioners, but ministers have duties to protect public health. Members such as Mr Rennie come to the chamber and complain, if ministers do not act quickly enough to protect public health. I see that Mr Rennie is shaking his head, but I have sat here and listened to him complaining about ministers not acting quickly enough to do certain things.

I am happy to engage in discussion and dialogue on the provisions of the bill, but there is one fundamental point: we must have in place a legislative framework that will allow us to act quickly, should appropriate circumstances arise. That is the purpose of the legislation, and the Government will engage constructively with Parliament to try to achieve it.

The statute book in England and Wales contains many such provisions, and they have enabled the UK Government and the Welsh Assembly to act, within their legal framework, swiftly and immediately.

Mr Mason has characterised how the Opposition parties sometimes contribute to the debate. I will not comment on his assessment, but I will say that Opposition parties often come here and ask us to learn lessons. We have learned a lesson from the pandemic, which is that our statutory framework was not adequate to deal with the issues, which is what I am trying to address in the legislation that is before Parliament.

On scrutiny, I regularly appear in front of the COVID-19 Recovery Committee to explain the necessary measures that the Government has been having to take in these extraordinary circumstances. I will happily appear in front of the committee any time that the committee wishes to see me so that it can scrutinise what I say and so that I can answer any questions that the committee wishes to put to me.

I answer faithfully the questions that Mr Whittle and his colleagues put to me in committee. I cannot be responsible for the fact that Mr Whittle does not like the answers that I give him. I faithfully attend that committee to give answers on behalf of the Government.

That is a pretty fundamental issue, and it will affect the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill that the Parliament will scrutinise fully in the normal parliamentary process. It relates to whether we have a statute book that is capable of addressing emergency circumstances such as we have faced. In the past, the United Kingdom Parliament has legislated for England and Wales to have statutory powers to—[Interruption.]

Mr Whittle is muttering from the sidelines that this is not the same thing—it is exactly the same thing.

The UK Parliament has legislated for powers that can be exercised by ministers in an emergency such as a pandemic. We did not have those powers in Scotland; we had to legislate for them in a great hurry at the start of the pandemic. The Government—Parliament having considered the legislation—is asking that we extend some limited provisions for six months. Parliament can consider the full legislation.

There are motions on four sets of regulations before Parliament today. I will not rehearse all the details in them. However, if they are not passed today, local authorities will not be able to make the wider public health interventions that they have been using to deal with the pandemic at local level, because the interventions are in the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Directions by Local Authorities) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2022.

Also, if we do not extend the deadlines for the regulations tonight, we will lose our ability to maintain in place the arrangements for face coverings. As Mr Mason has just pointed out when he asked about hospital cases, more than 2,000 people are in hospital with Covid. We have never had so many people in hospital during the pandemic.

We need to continue to address the gravity of the situation. There are measures that the Government will remove as a consequence of the regulations, which is consistent with what we say in the strategic framework—that we will not retain any of the powers or responsibilities for a moment longer than is necessary. I therefore invite Parliament to support the motions on the statutory instruments at decision time. They are essential to ensuring that we have in place the public health protections to deal with the continuing severe situation with Covid. It is the duty of Parliament to ensure that we have a properly considered legislative framework that can address that situation.

It will be published shortly. Essentially, the thinking around the plan has been informed by two years of experience of dealing with various outbreaks of different shapes and sizes around the country. Professor Leitch mentioned the significant outbreak at the 2 Sisters plant, and we have had a number of other examples in industrial, education and community settings, and in localities. Local health protection teams have developed a lot of good intelligence on how to respond in given circumstances.

In relation to the 2 Sisters plant, I remember the very effective approach that was taken by the public health team in Tayside, which decided not to recommend a localised lockdown, but to recommend isolation for staff and their families. That was a supremely successful intervention that was well executed and communicated. Essentially, that population was insulated from the rest of the population and there was no community transmission. That has been possible at certain moments of the pandemic.

In future, that is a more likely intervention to be undertaken than has been the case in the past six to nine months, when there has been extensive community prevalence, meaning that such tactics have been less relevant. The plan will draw on the expertise that has been built up over the past two years.

There will not be an obligation on people to do so. That is what is different.

The issue is a challenging and sensitive one, and I will invite Professor Leitch to add some comments to my initial remarks.

To ensure that we have knowledge of the emerging situation, we must have adequate surveillance measures in place at two levels. First, we must have such measures in place at a population-wide level. It would be difficult to justify on a persistent, long-term basis the type of intense testing arrangements that we have had in place at a population-wide level, but we need to have some population-wide information. We believe that a high-quality Office for National Statistics infection survey, combined with the data that we collect from waste water, for example, gives us a sufficiently strong base of information at a population-wide level to be able to assess what I might describe as the generality of the position on the prevalence of Covid in our society.

The second important element is our contribution—which is the same as the contribution of other countries around the globe—to developing the detection, understanding and appreciation of any new variants that may emerge. We must be able to continue to do a sufficient level of testing in the population to enable us to identify any variants that are emerging, in the way that the testing approach that was taken in southern Africa identified the omicron variant, which was then identified in a number of other jurisdictions very quickly. We were alerted to that and were able to respond swiftly.

That matters because, as I have rehearsed with the committee before, we took decisions very quickly to tackle the situation that we faced in relation to omicron. I am pretty certain that, if we had not done so, the national health service would have got into very deep difficulties. We averted that because of the speed of our actions. I know that our actions were controversial and that they did not command universal support, but the alternative would have been seeing our national health service overtopped. Intelligence about new variants is critical in enabling Governments to respond appropriately.

I do not know whether Professor Leitch wants to add to that.