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I agree with Mr Ewing that days are critical. Earlier, I mentioned the requirement to be able to make decisions at speed. Days really count when we are talking about the impact of a virus on public health—we have seen that serious impact very clearly during the coronavirus pandemic.

I appreciate that Universities Scotland has concerns about the granularity of the powers. I will not comment on the example that Mr Sim decided to give to the committee. I attempt to work in partnership with universities and, if they have concerns about those aspects, the Government is happy discuss them with Universities Scotland. I appreciate that there are concerns about that, but Universities Scotland needs to see where the Government is coming from in relation to why we feel that we need the powers. On that basis, I hope that we can reach a better understanding with Universities Scotland than we have at the moment.

As the pandemic has gone on, the Government has continued to learn lessons about whether the powers that we have had have been effective and whether there are any limitations to or difficulties with those powers in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Had we gone through two years of the coronavirus and not felt that the proposals that we were bringing forward would deal with the coronavirus, we would not be putting them forward. Indeed, over the past two years, stakeholders would have made it very clear if they felt that the powers that we had were not helping us to deal with the coronavirus.

However, we must try to ensure that this bill is able to deal with not just another wave of the coronavirus, but other public health emergencies as they might arise. In this bill, we are trying to make sure not only that we are ready for the coronavirus, but that the powers would work for other public health measures. In drafting the education parts of the bill, we have looked very carefully at how the powers have worked in practice and, importantly, how stakeholders have felt that the powers have worked in practice, as we have used or not used them during the past two years.

You are quite right to point out the importance of this being about regulations rather than direction and the process that must be gone through to ensure that regulations are brought in through the parliamentary system. As well as ministers having to have regard to the advice of the CMO on protecting public health, we must be satisfied that any regulations that we bring in are necessary and proportionate for the continued provision of education. Parliamentary approval is required before any regulations are made or, where necessary—when regulations are made for reasons of urgency—within 28 days of the date on which they are made. In addition, any regulations will apply only for a specified period and will be subject to review every 21 days.

I hope that that signals to the committee the fact that safeguards are in place. Although the Government will be able to work quickly in a public health emergency, we will certainly not make change for change’s sake, given the safeguarding mechanisms that the bill rightly contains to prevent us from making unnecessary changes.

That is an important point, which points to a lesson that was learned in relation to how the bill would be framed, compared with the way in which the emergency legislation—which was considered at great speed, necessarily, and to the best of Parliament’s ability—was framed. As the pandemic moved on, Parliament became concerned about the fact that safeguards were not in place, simply because of the speed with which the Coronavirus (Scotland) Bill went through Parliament and became an act. We have given serious consideration to that, which is why the safeguards are in place in the bill.

As you pointed out, it is right that we look at the whole package, which includes not only individual aspects that could be included in the regulations, but the steps that would have to be taken before we got to the point of having regulations with those specifics in them. It is important to bear in mind the overall package.

We are keen to hear more about the concerns of colleagues from the Educational Institute of Scotland. My door is always open to them to have those discussions.

Education authorities have wide-ranging powers in relation to schools, and it is the education authority that makes any decision to close one of its schools for public health reasons or for any other reason. For example, education authorities closed their schools on 20 March 2020, which is before the Coronavirus (Scotland) Act 2020 came into force. They relied on their own powers to do that in response to public health advice. Ministers did not give a direction under the UK act until mid-May 2020.

Clearly, if a union, local authority or COSLA is concerned and wants further work to be done on clarification, I am more than happy to hear from them. I listened very carefully to what happened yesterday, and we will continue to work with EIS. The fact that the authorities could close the schools so early on in the pandemic shows that they could take a decision if it was required.

Of course, when local authorities take that advice, they are working exceptionally closely with public health authorities. I understand that the committee heard from Diane Stockton of Public Health Scotland, who talked about the local outbreak management process, how it was handled, and the integral relationship between local authorities and local public health officials during that process. I hope that that has given you a bit of a picture of what happened at the start of the pandemic and how decisions were taken.

My answers are based on the fact that we will very much seek consensus, given the importance of public health measures. We will take our time to get this through Parliament. We are determined that the bill will be fit for purpose—it needs to be fit for circumstances that we cannot foresee.

We can look at discussions that have been had. Professor Aileen McHarg has talked about the

“difference between having access to emergency powers and using those powers ... There is a better opportunity now to design an effective control framework than there would be if powers”

were

“to be acquired urgently ... in the context of another health emergency.”

We could discuss a draft bill at this point, but, if we were in the grip of a public health emergency, we could still be rushing a bill through Parliament. If we have learned anything from the early days of the pandemic, it is that we need to be as prepared as possible for when we will need such legislation. The suggestion is that we should have a draft bill that we could then present to Parliament, but that would not allow the Government to take the swift action that was necessary. The next stage, following the enactment of such a bill, would be the making of regulations. By then, we could be quite far into a public health emergency.

I ask colleagues who were here in the previous parliamentary session to remember how difficult it was to get emergency legislation through on that timetable and then to move on to the regulations that followed from it. Doing that necessarily takes time, and time is something that you do not have in a public health emergency.

I think that, with the experience of coronavirus, the right way to do things has been demonstrated. Regulations should not stay in place for one day longer than they should do, and guidance should not be stricter for one day longer than is needed, but, obviously, we do not want things to change for the sake of it. I cannot for the life of me see why, in the middle of a public health pandemic, a Government would make changes if those changes were not based on advice from the chief medical officer.

We should look to the safeguards in the bill, which states clearly that there needs to be advice from the CMO to allow Government to make regulations that are proportionate to what is happening. The safeguards are in the bill when it comes to why we would make regulations; it is all about the seriousness of a public health emergency.

Changes involving the removal of regulations would, of course, be made to ensure that we could get back to as normal a situation as everybody would want us to be in. The bill sets out that changes would be made to speed things up or make things tighter; it also explains why regulations would be taken away.

One of the key areas that the bill covers is the importance of continuity of education rather than a blanket closure approach. That points to the impact that the pandemic had on children, young people and students across the country. They will all have experienced it differently, depending on their individual circumstances, but, in many cases, their experiences have been exceptionally difficult. We have spoken about that when I have been before the committee previously.

The Government needs to rise to the important challenge of ensuring that we have the powers to enable us to deal with public health emergencies and ensure continuity of education. That has a real primacy in our thinking, because we must do everything that we can to protect students as far as we possibly can.

I would caveat that by saying that students’ experience might be variable because of different requirements in different parts of the country. Indeed, that is what we saw with the coronavirus. Different parts of the education system might require different types of regulation, so we are not taking a blanket approach in which the same thing happens from early years all the way up to the universities. Within that, we are endeavouring to protect students as much as possible and to put that absolutely front and centre in our work.

I appreciate that the Conservative members of the committee might agree with the approach taken to the coronavirus by the UK Government, but, if a senior management team of an institution took more of a Boris Johnson approach to dealing with coronavirus rather than listening to public health guidance, such as we have up here, we would need the powers to deal with that. Otherwise, large institutions with thousands of staff and thousands of students, that are integral part of our communities, will be able to take a very different approach to dealing with coronavirus than the Government does, and I do not think that that would be particularly welcome in our university towns and cities across the country.

We absolutely need to take account of the different scenarios that will arise. Boarding schools and school residences are unique environments. Throughout the pandemic, we worked closely with the Scottish Council of Independent Schools and individual schools to reflect their special circumstances in the measures, particularly for boarding schools.

It is important that we are cognisant of the fact that we are dealing with young people who are away from home and that, in essence, those places are their homes during term time. It is about providing the foundation for the correct support and ensuring that we do not make any unnecessary calls on that sector. We want to ensure that young people can still have their education and be supported, but that that happens in a safe way that recognises that, for example, many pupils might come from different parts of the United Kingdom or from across the world.

Obviously, there is a specific requirement to ensure that what is put in place for boarding schools and school residences takes that type of environment into account. However, I suppose that it comes down to the same types of issues about provision of support and the protection of the wider public. The guidance on how we might do that will be very different for university halls compared to boarding schools. However, the continuity that runs through the measures in the bill is to do with support and the protection of public health.