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Official Report · Committee

Annual Reports

Thursday 29 June 2023 COVID-19 Recovery Committee About 10:30–10:45 Committee business 7 contributions · 3 speakers

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The record

7 contributions
Jim Fairlie SNP The Convener · Perthshire South and Kinross-shire
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Agenda item 3 is consideration of the draft annual reports for the parliamentary years from 13 May 2022 to 12 May 2023 and from 13 May 2023 to 12 May 2024. The purpose of the reports is to set out our activities during the relevant reporting periods.

Members will see that we are considering an annual report for the previous parliamentary year as well as for the current one. That is because, as members will be aware, the Scottish Parliament yesterday agreed to motion S6M-09720 to wind up this committee. As a consequence, this will be our final meeting before the committee is formally dissolved on 14 July 2023.

I will leave general remarks about the reporting year to the end of this agenda item. First, I propose to go through the reports page by page to identify any corrections. Any member who has a comment about any paragraph should raise their hand when I reach the relevant section. Any typos have already been picked up and will be addressed later.

We will go through the reports page by page, starting with the “COVID-19 Recovery Committee: Annual Report 2022-23”.

Are there any changes to pages 1 or 2? We are agreed on those. What about pages 3, 4 and 5?

John Mason SNP Glasgow Shettleston
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Paragraph 9 on page 5 says “tackling misinformation”. Could we add “and disinformation”? We looked at both, one being perhaps unintentional and the other intentional.

Jim Fairlie SNP The Convener · Perthshire South and Kinross-shire
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Okay. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

Jim Fairlie SNP The Convener · Perthshire South and Kinross-shire
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Are there any comments on pages 6 to 13?

There being no comments, we move on to the next report, which is the “COVID-19 Recovery Committee: Annual Report 2023-24”. We will go through the same process.

Are there any comments on any of pages 1 to 6? There are not.

Are members content with the two annual reports?

Members indicated agreement.

10:45

Jim Fairlie SNP The Convener · Perthshire South and Kinross-shire
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Thank you. I confirm that the annual reports are agreed to. The clerks will make minor revisions to the statistics and any other relevant factual information prior to publication in due course.

I take this opportunity to thank all the stakeholders who have participated in the work of the committee, in particular, from my point of view, the long Covid people who came in under great difficulty—some of them were clearly struggling. I want to single them out, as their participation greatly benefited our consideration and scrutiny of the issues relating to Covid and to recovery.

I thank the current and former members of the committee for the collegiate way in which they have undertaken their scrutiny. At the height of the pandemic, it was of great benefit to the Parliament to have a dedicated committee to scrutinise the relevant legislation and our transition to a recovery period. It will now be for the other subject committees to take forward the scrutiny of Covid recovery as it relates to their remits, and we will make recommendations on that when we come to consider our legacy report.

Do any members wish to make any other remarks before we conclude this agenda item?

Murdo Fraser Con Mid Scotland and Fife
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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.

Jim Fairlie SNP The Convener · Perthshire South and Kinross-shire
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Indeed. Thank you, Murdo.

There are no further comments from members. I would like to offer my personal thanks to the members of the clerking team, who have been absolutely brilliant and have made me look almost competent. I will also mention Alex Rowley, who has been a fantastic member of the team, and Siobhian Brown, the previous convener, who was given a ministerial post, which is why I am now sitting in this chair.

That concludes the public part of our meeting.

10:48 Meeting continued in private until 11:06.

Motions, questions and votes

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In this meeting

Everything on 29 Jun 2023 →
  1. 09:30 Decision on Taking Business in Private Procedure · 1
  2. 09:30 Recovery of NHS Dental Services Committee business · 86
  3. 10:30 Annual Reports Committee business · 7

The type of each item (debate, statement, questions, members’ business and so on) and the times shown are worked out by this site from headings, the chair’s opening words and the Official Report’s running timestamps. They are not the Parliament’s own classification. Text: the Scottish Parliament Official Report.