Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 11 November 2020
The Scottish Government has used Scotland’s hospitality sector as a scapegoat in this pandemic. Despite what the cabinet secretary said, the Government has failed to recognise the scale of the contribution that our third biggest employer makes to Scotland’s economy, providing over a quarter of a million jobs and adding £6.5 billion to our economy. Hospitality was the first sector pushed into lockdown and it will be the last to have the grip of that lockdown loosened. It has suffered a disproportionate level of job losses due to inadequate Government support and the imposition of continually changing restrictions that are rarely backed up by evidence from the Government and are often contradictory.
I will give one example of that inconsistency. On 23 October, the Government published its so-called Covid strategic framework. A few days later, it provided more detail on what that meant for hospitality at each level. For level 2, for example, it said that all pubs could remain open to serve soft drinks or alcohol with a main meal inside and that, outside, pubs could serve soft drinks or alcohol with or without a meal. We debated that framework and the First Minister answered questions on the imposition of the levels, yet the next day, the Government published regulations that closed all non-food pubs at level 2 upwards from last Monday, utterly contradicting the very framework that we had debated. No hint was given in those debates by the Government that it was even considering doing that.
I get why the Government took that decision—at the time, it looked as though legal closure was the only way to allow those pubs to claim support from the UK Government’s planned new closed job support scheme. However, on Saturday 31 October, that scheme was withdrawn and the existing job retention scheme was extended for a month; it has since been extended until March 2021 and, like all my Labour colleagues, I want that extension to continue beyond that period.
That extension to March means that the Government’s regulations to close wet pubs are no longer needed. Those pubs can access the furlough scheme, whether they are closed or open. I will happily give way and take an intervention from any Scottish National Party member who wants to get to their feet and tell the pubs in my region, many of which invested significantly in outside areas to meet previous Government restrictions, why the Government has not scrapped the regulations closing the pubs, which we know are no longer necessary and are completely unfair. Not a single SNP member has taken up that offer—[Interruption.]—I will take John Mason’s intervention.