Chamber and committees

The issues of regional diversity are central to the strategy. Yesterday, several ministers, including me, were involved in a meeting of the south of Scotland convention, which brings together several south of Scotland bodies to consider areas of shared activity. We had a healthy discussion about the regional economic strategy that has been formulated by that partnership in the south of Scotland, which is very community and local authority led. The Government is actively engaged in the process.

After the recess, I will chair the convention of the Highlands and Islands, which is a further opportunity for that regional perspective to be considered. I look forward to continuing those discussions.

The Government makes funding decisions and announcements at different times, and we have set out commitments around the north-east of Scotland training fund and the transition funds for the north-east and Moray in relation to the oil and gas sector. The funding decisions will be taken to reflect the decision making that has taken place at a local level—and to complement some of the other financial arrangements around growth deals that distribute resources around different parts of the countries.

That is a very serious matter. The issues that some individuals will face due to changes in their supply caused by the difficulties in which certain companies have found themselves might well exacerbate the other challenges that individuals are already facing.

In the short term, the Government will ensure that we have in place the necessary support measures for individuals, including the advice services that enable people to wrestle with such challenges, while ensuring that the heart and focus of the strategy on strengthening the financial security of families is on enabling them to withstand the pressures that Mr Gibson has, quite reasonably, cited. I assure him that, although the energy prices issue is one manifestation of the financial insecurity of families, tackling the basic question of financial security is central to how we will take forward the strategy.

The provision seeks to provide the appropriate opportunity for us to designate individual events that might be of a particularly noteworthy nature. For example, Her Majesty the Queen is coming to the Parliament on Saturday and I would describe that as a flagship event. There is no necessity for us to consider the issues in question, because the numbers of people involved will not be appropriate, but I can envisage flagship events to which we might all wish to give appropriate recognition. I invite Ms Sadler to come in.

Forgive me: I do not have the number in front of me, but my recollection is that delayed discharges came down to about 700, compared with 1,581 yesterday. That created space in our hospitals to deal with the upsurge in Covid patients.

I accept that our hospitals are congested just now; there are 1,581 delayed discharge patients within that congestion. A proportion of them could go to home settings, if the appropriate care packages were available to them. I am of the view—I am pretty satisfied that this is the case—that the problem in availability of care home packages is not availability of money to provide for the packages but availability of personnel to deliver them. That is to do with the shortage of people in our country who can be employed in care. We have lost from the workforce people who, because of Brexit, returned to their countries. As a consequence, we have fewer people available. I also point out that unemployment is sitting at 4 per cent. Furlough ends today; we will see the effect of that on unemployment, but we do not expect its impact to be significant.

What that means is that we have to do one or both of the following. First, we should maximise the number of people who can be activated to enter the labour market and deliver the care services that Mr Rowley highlighted. Secondly, we could take a different position on free movement of individuals; abolition of free movement has, as was predicted, been a disaster for Scotland’s labour market.

Those are not new issues. When he was First Minister in the early part of this century, Lord McConnell highlighted—rightly, in my view—the dangers of Scotland’s population falling below 5 million and the population profile being weighted more towards the older population and economically inactive people. In 2004, those issues in the labour market in Scotland were addressed by free movement; now that has been taken away, which is creating real difficulty. The matters that Mr Rowley has highlighted represent a significant threat to our ability to manage our way through the winter. Because there are not enough people, the care packages that could get people out of hospital and into their homes cannot be supported.

Forgive me for giving such a long answer, but Mr Rowley raised some big questions. He also asked whether a task force is necessary. We are probably straying into the portfolios of my colleagues Mr Yousaf and Ms Robison, but I can say that we are focusing on the issues every day in our dialogue with local government and health boards. I assure Mr Rowley that the issues are being addressed. I can make no criticism of the level of engagement of public bodies in the process, but if we need to think about using some other means, channel, mechanism or device such as a task force, I am very open to considering that.

It is important to look at the matter in two ways. There is the Covid vaccination certification scheme; one of its purposes is to increase take-up of the vaccine. It is, however, not the only tool in the box. Among the other tools in the box we must have very tailored communication and dialogue with the particular sectors of our society in which there is a challenge in relation to vaccine take-up. That is about, for example, trying to ensure that respected figures or voices in a particular community make the case for vaccination. Many people in specific communities have been encouraged to do that and are doing it.

It is also about vaccine availability and making sure that getting the vaccine is practical and conceivable for communities. It is unlikely that somebody who is living in poverty and for whom the vaccine is an expensive public transport journey away will get it, so we have to take the vaccine to those individuals. A lot of work is being done on vaccine buses and other approaches to enable the vaccination programme to be taken right into communities.

I do not want the committee to take the view that the Government views the vaccination certification scheme as the only means of encouraging take-up. There are a variety of other interventions to enable that to do with messaging, practical measures and wider targeting of communications.

I invite the chief medical officer to respond to that question.

I covered a lot of that in my response to Mr Fairlie. I see Covid certification as one part of a two-part strategy. I cannot give Mr Whittle a tangible number of members of the Polish and black and minority ethnic communities who will get vaccinated as a consequence of Covid certification. However, I am confident that, if we have that scheme plus measures to reach those communities in a direct, focused and targeted way, with messaging from within the community and access to vaccination services, we can increase vaccination levels in those communities and in others. In particular, we want to ensure that take-up is maximised among younger people and those who use higher-risk settings.

I am delighted that the convener’s knowledge of nightclubs has come to my assistance. Mr Simpson raises a serious point, and I will reflect on whether there is a way in which members of Parliament can be briefed about the approach in order to provide some reassurance about those issues. I totally understand the sensitivity of the question.

Therefore, on a weekly basis, we publicly express what we think to be the scale of the challenge and provide the evidence base for why we need to take action. We are taking other actions. We maintain a position that face coverings have to be worn in indoor settings in public places, such as on public transport, in shops and all the rest of it. We encourage physical distancing. We are taking a variety of interventions based on the evidence that we have marshalled and communicated publicly.

I fear that we are not going to have a meeting of minds on that issue. Let me make a sweeping generalisation and say that people below the age of 39 are more likely to be in nightclubs than people of my vintage—I am sorry to break the solemn news to Mr Whittle that he will not bump into me in a nightclub. Vaccination levels for people below the age of 39 are lower than they are for people above that age. Part of the approach to Covid certification is to further incentivise those people to get vaccinated so that they can participate in those activities.

Obviously, a large number of people of different ages go to some of the other settings; I accept that there is a much broader age demographic at football matches, for example. However, I encourage colleagues to think of Covid certification as one part of a two-part strategy.

I do not dispute Mr Whittle’s point about making sure that we have targeted and focused interventions for people living in deprivation, the black and minority ethnic community and other social groups that have low take-up. We accept that we need to concentrate our efforts on that. I pay tribute to the vaccinators for their efforts in that regard. In that way, we will reach the point, as Mr Mason said, of having such high vaccination levels that they provide the population with as much protection as possible.