Meeting of the Parliament 23 October 2018
On the timescale for legislation, I reiterate that I want to move as quickly as possible, but we must go through the necessary dialogue with survivors in order to make sure that we get the details correct. We have built up a very strong and positive relationship with survivors in advancing many of the issues: I am profoundly grateful to them for their contributions to that discussion. As I said in my response to Iain Gray, I am in the hands of Parliament. If Parliament is willing to move in an expedited fashion in relation to legislation, the Government will be happy to co-operate with that aspiration.
In relation to the payment timescale for survivors, the review group wrote to me on 2 October, as I said in my answer to Alison Harris, setting out the criteria that it considered to be relevant in relation to people who are approaching the end of their life, and made a recommendation of an age of 70. The group asked me to keep that under review, which I will do as we design the advance payments scheme.
I also point out to Johann Lamont that other forms of support are currently available to individuals and can be accessed. They are not in the form of financial redress, but of support to assist people in trying to deal with the circumstances that they face. I encourage any survivor who feels the need to access a degree of support to take steps to do so, because that support—from what I have heard from individual survivors about their experiences—has proved to be very beneficial.