Hansard

I echo your thanks to everybody who has contributed to the committee. I thank our clerking team, the Scottish Parliament information centre and all those who have helped us. I also thank you, convener. Your stint as convener has been a very short one, but you can put it on your CV for future reference that you convened a parliamentary committee, albeit for just a few weeks. Thank you for leading the committee in collegiate style. I also thank our committee advisers, whom we have not seen for quite a long time, but who were initially regular attenders at the committee: Professor Peter Donnelly, Professor Susie Dunachie and Professor Helen Stagg. Members will recall that they came more or less on a weekly basis to give us updates at the height of the Covid pandemic, and their input was extremely useful to us. We should record our thanks to them. I do not know whether we are going to write to them formally to express our thanks, but I think that we should do so. As a personal reflection, I was the first convener of the COVID-19 Committee in the previous session. If I remember rightly, the committee was established in May 2020, and here we are, just over three years later, bringing this particular journey to an end. I hope that that is an indication that Covid is behind us—and I hope that my saying so does not give a hostage to fortune. Nevertheless, there are some very important lessons that we need to learn from Covid. A lot still needs to be done and put right, post-Covid, in the public sector and in public services, and I hope that the important work that the committee has been doing will be continued by other subject committees as we go into the next parliamentary year.