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The Government and the residential rehabilitation development working group are very clear about what residential rehabilitation is and what it is not. The definition is very clear: residential rehabilitation is structured, residential and therapeutic programmes that support people towards an alcohol and drug-free lifestyle. There are other models of residential services, whether those focus on crisis care or stabilisation.

Those models are also important in ensuring that we have a wide spectrum of treatment opportunities and services to get the right people into the right treatment at the right time. I dispute the claim that we are investing in pretendy residential rehabilitation; that is unfair. What we are counting, if I can put it that way, and what we are funding is a traditional residential rehabilitation model that has been undervalued and underinvested in historically.

At the start of this week, I published—in part due to recommendations by the Auditor General—an annual report that details the spend and location of national mission moneys. I am determined to have as much transparency as possible about that.

I am determined to follow the money. I think that that is where I am on the same page as the Auditor General, because I want to ensure that the additional resource that the national mission has secured has the maximum effect. This Government has made a decision to allocate specific resources to residential rehabilitation and I want to ensure that that is used for pathways into residential rehabilitation, for residential rehabilitation beds and, of course, for the associated aftercare. I am accountable to Parliament and I want to satisfy myself that money is being spent on what it was destined for.

Yes, that is not a problem—we will have a look at that.

I appreciate the point that time is of the essence. Again, as members will appreciate, it will not help matters if I step into other people’s duties and terrain. Nevertheless, your point is well made. These services work. They are not the only solution, but they work, and I have seen them for myself.

The core aim of the national mission is to get people into the treatment that is right for them. Although I have—I hope—conveyed my conviction in and around abstinence-based intervention and traditional residential rehabilitation, I also stress that we need to be absolutely fearless about harm reduction, because lives depend on it.

I know that some aspects of harm reduction will feel counterintuitive to many people, but we have to do what works, follow the evidence and do what we can to reach people where they are, so that we can build relationships and begin the journey to connect them with other services. Safer drug consumption is part of that. It is about saying that we care and we want people to live, survive and thrive.

The reason why we have a national mission is to join the dots, so that drug policy does not sit in isolation. Ms Webber asks a fair question about what early intervention looks like in relation to drug policy, our work with families, work with communities and work with housing and homelessness. That all needs to be absolutely aligned. The purpose of the cross-government action plan is to align the whole breadth of actions and the huge investment that is being made—despite what are trying times across government—in a better way and to work better together to achieve better outcomes.

Regarding our support to alcohol and drug partnerships, it is clear that they should not be working in isolation. They need to be very much connected, and the work that they do must be central to children’s services plans and broader community planning.

All public authorities have a fairer Scotland duty. I know that because I introduced it a number of years back, as Mr Cole-Hamilton might remember. In every strategic decision, we need to think about how the decisions that we make here and now have an impact on child poverty and on reducing poverty and inequality. Our work with ADPs is driven by the fact that the work that they have done has often been separate from other work done by IJBs or community planning partnerships—but it has to be front and centre.

Gosh! How to answer that succinctly? I will do my best, convener.

My focus in this job has always been, first and foremost, on what I can do; therefore, my endeavours are focused on the powers and resources that are at my disposal. I am a pragmatist at heart, and I want to crack on and do things now. However, I do not ignore the implications of powers that exist elsewhere. I am not looking to enter into a constitutional debate here and now but, of course, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 has implications for what we can and cannot do. In my view, it impairs some of our approaches to harm reduction—or certainly makes the journey towards improving such interventions harder.

The issue of decriminalisation, or drug law reform, is complex. I would frame the issue as drug law reform more generally. Decriminalisation means different things in different countries, but in terms of going back to principles and the basics, the question is what is gonnae work—what is gonnae make folk safer, if not safe. I am very clear that we cannot punish people out of addiction.

We published a paper last March or May that looked at international responses to drug law reform. The international evidence that we have looked at shows, in very broad terms—I am summarising, convener—that the public health approach has been more effective at reducing harm. Some people have fears around drug law reform more broadly and often worry about increasing drug use, but the evidence does not appear to show that that happens.

In my view, we need to have a review of drug law across the UK, but I think that it is fair to say that the UK Government is not inclined to do that. I will meet the new minister at the beginning of December—that is a frequent discussion point.

Despite some well-documented differences of opinion with Kit Malthouse, who was the first UK Government minister I met in relation to this job, we nonetheless had a lot of engagement. The quick succession of ministers in recent times that has coincided with recent changes of Prime Ministers means that two ministers were in office for such a short period of time that, although I wrote to them welcoming them to their role and raising all the issues that I wished to discuss with them, time did not permit us to actually meet them.

There is some agreement between us and the UK Government on issues such as leadership, investing in the reform of services and the importance of treatment. We have some agreement in and around the need to legislate for the regulation of pill presses, which is very important for tackling the illicit marketing of benzodiazepines. We will see where we get to with Home Office applications in and around drug checking. We are at a completely different place on safe drug consumption facilities, but I will see where the new minister—a gentleman called Chris Philp—is on that.

Uppermost in my mind just now is the UK Government’s white paper on “swift” and “tough” consequences. That approach is misguided. I think that it will potentially cause more harm and that it is based on an outmoded punitive approach, and I continue to seek urgent clarity as to whether and how it would apply to Scotland. The Home Office white paper states that tier 1 and tier 3 interventions could potentially apply to Scotland and Northern Ireland, and I would have grievous concerns about that. I am conscious that I have written to the committee about that, too.

As you will appreciate in the context of those 20 recommendations and 139 actions, the task force was an iterative process; other recommendations came out earlier. Through the information that I have given to the committee, I hope that I have demonstrated that progress is already under way. We did not sit back and wait for the final recommendations of the task force. I gave a very warm welcome to the challenge, and to the criticism—to be frank—that the final report contained for the Government.

Given all those actions, we have a lot to work through, but I will endeavour to demonstrate an overwhelmingly positive response at the turn of the year, when we come back to the Parliament with the cross-Government action plan and the stigma action plan.

On whether we will implement every recommendation in the precise way that is envisaged in the report, you will appreciate that it is the role of organisations and people who make recommendations to make those recommendations, and it is for Government to work out how they might be delivered.

First, I offer my condolences to the family of Mr Cole-Hamilton’s constituent. Any death is a tragedy. We all feel that, and the death of young people is always particularly sore.

That points to the need for drug-checking facilities. I have discussed the matter fairly extensively with the United Kingdom Government and UK ministers such as the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire. Mr Cole-Hamilton may have a slightly different understanding of the position in England. In my engagement with UK ministers, they have been really resistant to drug-checking facilities at festivals. I am aware of one licence having recently been made available to support festivals on a short-term basis.

It is fair to say that we do not have enough drug-checking facilities at those types of events across the UK. Drug-checking facilities require a Home Office licence. For years, a postal service has operated in Wales whereby people can get substances tested.

The important thing about drug-checking facilities is how they are layered with other methods of harm reduction. I am very much in favour of extending drug-checking facilities. Across the UK, we are not doing enough of that . In Scotland, there is work on three projects, and research is going on at the same time that those projects are being developed. One of those projects is nearing a position at which it will be able to make a licence application to the Home Office. The projects are geographically specific.

We will, of course, engage with all colleagues, including the Lord Advocate, on whether different approaches are required, based on experience and such tragedies.

I distil that into three important factors. It is complex, and we have deep-rooted challenges in Scotland. The task force and various other academics have written extensively about the acute poverty in particular areas of the country. We all know the research on the relationship between substance use, past trauma and poverty.

You asked specifically why there is an issue in Scotland. First, according to the information that we are able to gather, there is a higher prevalence of problematic drug use in Scotland. There is an existential question as to why that is.

The second point is the prevalence of heroin and benzodiazepines in drug-related deaths. It is not always possible to make direct comparisons, because England is a bit different when it comes to the underlying work on drug misuse deaths and the proportion of cases that go through toxicology and forensic screening. However, benzodiazepines are much more greatly implicated in our deaths than is the case in England and Wales—although I have noticed that some reporting and recording have begun to indicate a rise in benzodiazepine problems south of the border. The higher implication of opioids and heroin in our drug deaths speaks to higher-risk behaviours, more injecting and the lethal combinations of polydrug misuse and people with multiple and complex needs.

Thirdly, it is about treatment. Time and again, I have been utterly frank that not enough of our people are under the protection of treatment. We need to get more people into treatment—and, if they fall out of treatment, we need to follow up on that. That speaks to the importance of the MAT standards, and not just investing in services but reforming them. I have opinions on other aspects—for example, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. However, a core part of the national mission is about the need to invest in and reform our treatment services, which we are doing. Crucially, however, that must not be done in isolation from the other cross-Government work that is so important.