Chamber and committees

The app has been revised to include the booster jag; we expect that to be completed and the update to be available in early December. A critical date is 15 December, when a number of European countries will make it mandatory for booster jags to be evidenced on Covid vaccine certificates, and the update will be in place by then.

I will bring in Professor Leitch because of the clinical nature of some of the points.

Obviously, the vaccine will wane. Over the past few weeks and past two months, there was an increase in cases in the older age groups. Then, when the booster vaccination programme started to kick in for those age groups, the number of cases for them came down more aggressively than for other age groups. Professor Leitch can tell me if I have got this wrong, but I deduce from that that the vaccine was waning but the booster arrested that and gave more protection.

That is an entirely reasonable and understandable point for unpaid carers to make. Although I am certain that there will be dialogue with unpaid carers’ organisations, I will ensure that that is the case as a consequence of the debate and the issues that have been raised in it.

A range of different tools are available to us as a society to deal with the challenges of Covid and to enable us to make progress in recovering our society while meeting the challenge of not lowering our guard. That involves us all participating in the baseline measures: hand hygiene, cough etiquette and physical distancing. It also involves the use and maximisation of the vaccination programme. That incredibly successful programme is delivered by hard-working people, and the result is that, on every possible permutation of the programme, we are leading vaccination levels in the United Kingdom. There is a huge amount to be confident about in the resilience that we have in place.

One other tool that it would be helpful to have is financial flexibility. Pam Duncan-Glancy made the point that financial support should be provided in the absence of furlough. That is precisely why, in the aftermath of the discovery of the omicron variant, the First Minister, along with the First Minister of Wales, wrote to the Prime Minister to indicate the need for us to have sufficient financial flexibility to tackle such issues.

We will consider those issues carefully. The self-isolation support grant is material to ensuring that people who are not in a financially strong position are able to fully comply with the self-isolation arrangements. That, of course, is material to interrupting the spread of the virus. Pam Duncan-Glancy is right that we must ensure that that tool is effective in interrupting the spread of the virus.

I am pleased that the Government has agreed that the tackling of inequality must be at the heart of the Covid recovery strategy. Mr Marra knows that he and I part company on the rhetoric that he adds to the debate. The first big test of Labour’s commitment to take measures on child poverty will be whether it decides to support the Government in doubling the child payment from April next year. That will be the big test of the budget. We will wait and see whether we get any rhetoric out of the Labour Party about that.

If, in the spring of next year, the Labour Party decides to find another excuse not to vote for the Government’s budget and not to support doubling the child payment, that will say to all the children and families around our country who live in poverty that it is more interested in political rhetoric than it is in putting in place the practical solutions to tackle poverty. The Government will have no truck with that, because it is prepared to put its money where its mouth is to tackle child poverty. We will see whether the Labour Party is with us.

I am grateful to Parliament for the opportunity to respond to the important scrutiny work that the COVID-19 Recovery Committee has undertaken and to the contributions from other committees so far. We thank each of the committees for their work and the scrutiny that is a vital part of the process of parliamentary accountability, which will strengthen our approach to recovery.

As we look towards an uncertain winter period, it is clear that the pandemic is far from over and that we must all continue to take the appropriate steps to keep ourselves, our loved ones and our communities safe.

Because of the measures that we have all taken to control the virus and the outstanding efforts of those who have developed and deployed the vaccine, we find ourselves in a stronger position than that in which we were this past year. However, the risk that we could see a dramatic rise in cases in the coming months remains significant, especially with the identification of the omicron variant and the fact that we are moving into winter, when people are less able to spend more time out of doors.

Public Health Scotland is working rigorously to assess how many cases of omicron there are likely to be in Scotland. Together with local test and protect teams, it will work to identify how the virus might have been transmitted and to break further chains of transmission. However, we should not await the outcome of that work before taking necessary action. We must act now to reduce the virus’s opportunities to spread.

As I explained to the COVID-19 Recovery Committee this morning, the Scottish Government considers the state of the pandemic each week on the basis of assessing the case for proportionate action in the context of the evidence that is available to us. We always work on the precautionary principle, given the necessity of acting as swiftly as we can to interrupt the spread of the virus.

As was set out to Parliament on Tuesday, the Government has so far taken the stance of asking people to significantly step up and increase compliance with existing procedures rather than introduce new protections. Existing procedures include getting vaccinated; taking tests more regularly, particularly in relation to levels of socialisation in our society in the run-up to Christmas; maintaining hygiene measures; working from home wherever that is possible—the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy has been encouraging the business community so that more organisations enable more of their staff to work from home—and showing Covid certification, where needed.

I take this opportunity to thank everyone who continues to play their part to protect Scotland. During the past few months, the committee has necessarily focused on baseline measures and our approach to trying to live with the virus. For that reason, I will focus my remarks on some of the issues that have arisen from the committee’s scrutiny and on the importance of ensuring that the emphasis on baseline measures is a message that is clearly understood by members of the public and applied to how we all live our lives.

The vaccination programme has fundamentally changed the balance of harms that are associated with the pandemic, with the relationship between infections and serious health harms weakening significantly. The fact that we have a significant level of protection in the population has meant a strategic change in how we are able to handle the pandemic. As of 2 December, 88 per cent of the adult population in Scotland have been vaccinated and 39 per cent have received a booster or third dose.

This debate was initiated by the COVID-19 Recovery Committee, which it has been my privilege to appear regularly before since the election; I appeared before its predecessor committee on some occasions prior to the election as well.

I agree with Willie Coffey’s comments about the role of the committee; I will come back to some of his further comments in a moment. The committee offers a generally thoughtful place to reflect on the difficult dilemmas that are at the heart of handling the Covid-19 pandemic. I say a “generally thoughtful place”, because sometimes some committee members just cannot help themselves, but I, as always, am on my best behaviour in those situations.

In Mr Coffey’s reflections on the work of the committee, one of his important points was that he learned, from the expert opinion that the committee has heard from many sources, the importance of not lowering our guard against Covid at any stage. Those are particularly wise words for us to reflect on in this debate, because, at different stages over the past 18 months or so, there have been moments when we could have felt incredibly optimistic about the situation that lay ahead of us, only to have a development come along to challenge us. Just last week—a week past Tuesday—the Cabinet, in its assessment of the pandemic, took a fundamentally optimistic view of where we were. That view was reflected in the First Minister’s statement to Parliament that afternoon, but, by Thursday afternoon, we were dealing with the hard realities of omicron and what it can do to drive the path of the virus. Mr Coffey put on the record some very important words about not lowering our guard at any stage.

Another central point about the COVID-19 Recovery Committee’s work is that it airs the dilemmas that lie at the heart of handling Covid. Its predecessor committee heard from me, as the Parliament has on many occasions, about our development of the four harms framework in the summer of 2020. We developed it because we had taken dramatic action to lock down our society and economy in March 2020 for everything other than essential purposes, and we had to have a means of establishing the safest route out of that and of navigating a way through. Therefore, we created the four harms framework, which acknowledged the relationship that exists between the direct health harm of Covid, the non-Covid health harms in our society, and the economic and social harms that could be created. Mr Whittle has regularly revisited the questions about non-Covid health harms; indeed, we rehearsed some of them again at committee this morning.

Those honest dilemmas are difficult to resolve. I will share one illustration that I presented to the committee today. One body of opinion can pressurise us to speed up the vaccination programme, which could involve taking staff out of elective care to put into that programme, at the same time that another body of opinion is quite legitimately asking for more elective care.

Those are the dilemmas that we have to honestly air. Indeed, we have heard about some of them during the debate. Pam Duncan-Glancy talked about the fact that carers feel sacrificed at the altar of economic growth, while Liz Smith argued for our getting on with delivering economic growth. Those are some of the dilemmas that have to be wrestled with, and they are at the heart of the way in which we navigate our recovery from Covid.

Liz Smith added to the debate the aspirations of the business community that we minimise the impact of the virus while securing recovery and growth. I suppose that I agree with both those aspirations. However, we will probably not be able to agree with everything that the business community wants, because we want both those aspirations to have the same volume. Fundamentally, as a minister, I have to ensure that the public are protected from the impact of Covid to enable us to move on to economic growth.

Pam Duncan-Glancy’s point drew out the fact that we can try to make progress on the recovery of our society but, to use her words, that risks saying to carers that their interests do not carry as much weight as the move towards delivering economic recovery.

We have to take steps to ensure that the vaccination programme is available to individuals. I am certainly satisfied that we have comprehensive availability of vaccination venues in accessible locations.

One of the questions that has been raised with us is on the possibility of creating mass vaccination centres—Dr Gulhane has raised that point in the chamber previously. There is an argument to be had about whether we should have a wider range of locally accessible facilities that maximise convenience, reduce travel costs and provide a more reliable way of securing access to vaccination for some of the people in the communities to which Dr Gulhane refers or whether we should have facilities in larger, more centrally located venues, which is what the Conservatives have been arguing for, although I noticed that Mr Carson was rather arguing against a centralised approach during his speech this afternoon.

We have to ensure that we have available facilities that are accessible to members of the public and, crucially, the communication to encourage and motivate individuals. The best messaging around that is the significant protection that the vaccine offers people to reduce the risk of serious health harm.

The vaccination programme has a crucial role to play in protecting the public and reducing the pressure that the national health service faces, which will be significant as we go through the winter.

The Scottish Government set out a significant NHS recovery plan on 25 August. We have also set out measures to invest in the national health service, to ensure that we have sufficient staff capacity and sufficient investment in facilities, such as the new national treatment centres, which will enable us to make progress on addressing the delivery of care that has been interrupted for some individuals by the pandemic in the past 18 months or so. The recovery plan focuses on ensuring that we have the necessary resilience in place over the winter, and it complements the work that is being undertaken to ensure that we have population-wide protection as a consequence of the vaccination programme.

I turn to the Covid recovery strategy, which was set out to Parliament in early October. It is focused unreservedly on tackling the inequality in our society that existed before Covid and has been exacerbated by Covid, a point that was raised by Ariane Burgess and Richard Leonard. The strategy is unapologetic about focusing on the necessity of tackling child poverty by focusing on increasing financial security for low-income households, enhancing the wellbeing of children and young people by undertaking early intervention activity rather than waiting for CAMHS support, and creating good green jobs and fair work to enable families to access higher-quality employment.

We have developed the strategy very much in collaboration with the local government community in Scotland. I will chair a joint board with the president of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to monitor the implementation of the Covid recovery strategy, because we accept that there has to be alignment between the activities of the Government and local government and those of the voluntary and private sectors, to ensure that we make as much progress as possible on the work of Covid recovery.

Covid recovery has to be about ensuring that we protect the population from the risks of the virus at this stage and that we create a fairer and more equal Scotland in which every individual has the option to prosper and thrive. That is the focus of the Government’s work on Covid recovery.

It is always helpful to have experts to hand, convener.

I would make two points in response to Mr Ewing’s question. First, a further instrument that will come to the committee in due course will look at circumstances in which there might be recovery of redress payments. The instrument under consideration does not affect that matter, but the further instrument will deal with recovery of such payments in cases where concerns have been raised. As I have said, that will come before the committee in due course.

Secondly, if it is suspected that an application has been made fraudulently, the matter will be dealt with under common-law powers on the handling of fraud issues. The matter could potentially be referred to Police Scotland for consideration as a criminal offence, in line with common-law powers.

Yes, that is correct.

That will be the case. The regulations contain a power of discretion as to whether consideration should be given to the response to a potential error that has emerged. In other words, there is no obligation in the regulations to take such a course, but there is provision for consideration of any steps that might be taken in that respect. Of course, the issue that Mr Mundell has raised would be material to such a consideration.