The First Minister:

Anas Sarwar is shouting, “Wow”. I am saying to Anas that he is absolutely correct, and that that is one of the reasons why we are standing here.

During the 2021 election, I do not think that our retention or record management policy was an issue; it was about whether we got the calls right in relation to the vaccination programme and did the right thing in relation to introducing non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Anas Sarwar talks about, in his words, an “industrial-scale deletion”. We handed over 28,000 WhatsApp messages and 19,000 documents.

Anas Sarwar is right to ask questions about care homes, PPE, and lockdown and its impacts. Those are exactly the questions that the inquiry is examining.

On Anas Sarwar’s suggestion that we are somehow not being transparent, I remind him that not only are we co-operating with a UK inquiry, but we are the only nation in the UK to specifically establish an inquiry in our country. We will also be co-operating with the Scottish inquiry.

Nicola Sturgeon did more than 250 media briefings and ministers in this Government attended this Parliament on not dozens but hundreds of occasions, explaining the reasons why we took decisions.

I go back to the very central point. We did not get everything right, and certainly not in relation to retention of messages. What we did get right was the intention behind our decisions, which was to protect people from harm. According to the World Health Organization, what we did, through the interventions that we took, helped to save more than 23,000 people’s lives. Those are 23,000 people who would not be here if it were not for vaccinations and the non-pharmaceutical interventions and decisions that this Government took. I make no apologies for that.