Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 02 March 2021
I, too, take the opportunity to welcome Anas Sarwar to his position. I do not want to brag and I would have to count, but I think that I am probably well above five when it comes to Labour leaders that I have faced across the chamber. In all seriousness, there is a historic nature to Anas Sarwar’s election as leader of the Scottish Labour Party and it speaks well of the diversity of our country, so for that reason, if for no other reason, I wish him well in the job. [Applause.]
Anas and I will not just face off across the chamber as respective leaders of our parties, as we are also opponents in the constituency of Glasgow Southside, so we have just proved again over the past few days that Glasgow Southside is the centre of the universe, which I know everybody in the chamber will agree with as much as Anas and I do. I wish him—I was going to say that I wish him all the best, but I wish him a modicum of success in the weeks ahead.
In answer to Anas Sarwar’s question on a national recovery plan for education, I say that the work to support recovery in education is already under way and I have set out the steps that we are taking to support local authorities—for example, the provision of tutoring support through e-Sgoil, the money that we have made available for additional teachers and the extra funding for local authorities that they can use flexibly based on what they consider is most appropriate—and we will keep that under review. The Deputy First Minister and I have said that supporting children to come through and catch up from the experience of the past year—not only educationally but in a whole range of ways—will be a long-term project.
Similarly on mental health, we have already published a mental health recovery plan and the Minister for Mental Health will continue to keep Parliament updated. Before the pandemic, transforming and redesigning the provision of child and adolescent mental health services was a priority; one of the things that we had made progress on was mental health counsellors being available for all secondary schools. That work needs to pick up and intensify as a result of the experience of the pandemic.
Finally, on vaccination, we exceeded 400,000 vaccinations a week when we had the supplies to do so. [The First Minister has corrected this contribution. See end of report.] The constraining factor right now is supply, which is not in our control. The dip in daily vaccination rates in the past couple of weeks, which we flagged in advance, was entirely down to the supply. The numbers across the four nations show that same dip. We expect that there might be another dip in supply next week, but we do not expect that to affect the mid-April targets. I am not complacent about this—it takes a lot of work by a lot of people across the entire country—but we are able to go as fast as we have the supplies to vaccinate people. The constraining factor is the supplies, and that is why we continue to talk regularly to the pharmaceutical companies to get as long term a line of sight on their manufacturing and supply prospects as we can. We will vaccinate people just as fast as we have the vaccine to do so.