Chamber and committees

I recognise the significance of the issue and the importance that is attached to it by Mr Gibson. The Hunterston B site is important for north Ayrshire and the wider community. With the forthcoming decommissioning of the site, we want to ensure that valuable skills are not in any way lost to Ayrshire or the Scottish economy. That is why the Ayrshire growth deal contains a skills fund that will support skills interventions across the region. Also included in the deal is a project, which is sited at Hunterston, to specifically address energy decarbonisation and support offshore renewable energy development.

The Ayrshire regional economic partnership is leading work on long-term strategic economic development, and the Government will support it in that on-going work.

As with other Covid measures, we are under a legal duty to review the necessity of the regulations every three weeks. We have a duty to review the necessity and proportionality of the recommendations, and policy decisions at the review points will be informed by a range of evidence from the four harms perspective, with which Parliament will be familiar.

The review will measure the certification programme outcomes against the policy objectives of increasing vaccination uptake and reducing the prevalence of Covid-19 and the pressures on the national health service. A key factor in the review will be to ensure that the policy impact remains proportionate for the business sector and society at large. The certification regulations are due to expire on 28 February 2022, but we do not want to have the scheme in place for any longer than is necessary. Therefore, if evidence and clinical advice indicate that certification is no longer required, we will remove it.

We are acting to address any particular issues that individuals face on a systemic basis. A number of the points in relation to the common travel area have been resolved already, and we will work as expeditiously as we can to ensure that all the potential scenarios that may emerge can be properly and fairly addressed.

I suspect that the number of cases in such scenarios will be relatively limited. I encourage individuals, should they be unable to be vaccinated for the reason that Emma Roddick outlined, to raise such circumstances with the national helpline.

We are, obviously, trying to ensure that we have in place a proportionate intervention that ensures that we strengthen safety, that we minimise the risk of transmission in certain venues and that we boost the level of vaccine uptake, into the bargain. Those are the objectives that we are trying to achieve. We encourage individuals to secure the necessary vaccination certification to enable us to achieve the policy objectives of that intervention.

If Jackie Baillie wishes to share with me the details of that case, I will, of course, have it investigated.

There will, inevitably, be technical challenges in the roll-out of any scheme of this nature. Obviously, we try to minimise them. Where we identify particular problems, we work to address them as quickly as possible.

As I said, if Jackie Baillie furnishes me with the details of that case, I will address it and respond to her and her constituent directly. I am sorry that her constituent was unable to access facilities, as a consequence.

We are actively supporting economic recovery in Mid Scotland and Fife, as we are across the whole of Scotland. That includes more than £150 million to support local businesses and additional funding of more than £170 million for the area’s four local authorities.

We have committed more than £495 million across the three city region deals in mid-Scotland, which will help to drive a sustainable recovery from the pandemic in the long term. That includes £25 million for the industrial innovation programme in Fife, which will support growth of cutting-edge businesses that can deliver good and fair jobs for local people.

Claire Baker raises a fair point. The economic interventions that the Government is taking forward are designed, in part, to create long-term sustainable economic and employment opportunities for people. By their nature, that involves ensuring that the interests of young people are very much at the heart of the design of the interventions.

We will make sure that all the interventions that I talked about in my original answer will have relationships with higher and further education institutions—with which Claire Baker will be familiar—in the Mid Scotland and Fife region. All the institutions will have particular roles and responsibilities in ensuring that the needs of young people are adequately and fully represented.

I am confident that the challenges that young people have faced in the past 18 months through Covid can be properly and fully addressed by ensuring that we have in place an approach to skills, education and investment that meets their needs, ensures that they are able to access opportunities for the future, and are in no way disadvantaged by their difficult experiences during the course of the pandemic.

The link between public spend and outcomes is complex, but it is critical that it be properly understood. The national performance framework helps us in that endeavour, but there are other things that also do so. The process of audit and evaluation, particularly policy audit and evaluation, is critical in that journey.

There are other interventions, such as the independent care review, which took about three years to consider its evidence. I will summarise thousands of hours of research and analysis in the next couple of sentences not to be in any way disrespectful but because we have limited time. In essence, the review said that the money is not spent well on delivering good outcomes for care-experienced young people and, therefore, we should reshape that spend. We are now doing that, which we set out by our acceptance of “The Promise” report and the steps that we announced in the programme for government.

That is a good example of exactly the point that Michelle Thomson puts to me: we are spending our money one way, but it is not delivering good outcomes, so we need to think about shifting how we spend it, which is what we are doing on that issue. There are other examples that I could cite. In youth justice, over about 10 years, we have substantively realigned the way in which we spend our resources to deliver better outcomes. Many fewer young people have their life chances influenced, affected and undermined by interactions with the criminal justice system because diversionary routes are available to them to enable them to achieve better outcomes when they have faced difficulty in their lives. That involved realignment of spend from how we did it before to how we do it now.

There has to be a willingness to consider some of those questions and we must be prepared to spend the money differently, however complex it might be to decide on the priorities and challenges.

That is my point. In many respects, we are trying to create new data sets. For obvious reasons, we have been severely restricted in the collection of data during Covid. When I pressed the education system for information on participation, engagement and attendance, there was a fair amount of resistance from a number of public authorities—not least, local authorities—to the data demands that I was placing on them, but I wanted to be satisfied that there was online learning and adequate engagement, and I could collect that information only from local authorities. We have to strike a balance in relation to what we can reasonably and legitimately demand at any one time during a pandemic.

That is an entirely fair challenge. I would not advise that a minister’s only interaction with the performance of a policy area should be to look at that chart and say, “Oh, that’s improving, I don’t need to worry about that”. We have to go beneath that and look at the patterns and the trends. I assure Ross Greer that when ministers are briefed about detail and performance—and this relates to my response to John Mason a moment ago and a number of other answers that I have given this morning—the underlying pattern in performance is highlighted, challenged, explored and compared against what might reasonably be expected, so that there is a proper understanding of whether the conclusion that has been arrived at is reasonable.