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In essence, it would be to provide the capacity to deal with outbreak management. That is the most appropriate way to express it. Back in 2020, during the development of the pandemic, we saw certain outbreaks fuelling the spread of the virus. During that early part, we tried to isolate those outbreaks as much as we possibly could. Some of them were in workplaces, some were in venues and some were in localities. We tried to take measures that would insulate the rest of the country from those outbreaks, to avoid the virus spreading through the community. Local authority powers and actions in the work that we do with environmental health officers, for example, are critical to enabling that.

We will come back repeatedly to the point about whether the statute book should be equipped to help us to manage a situation that we might have to manage. If we take the argument that has been put to me, which is that we should act only on the basis of precedent, we will never change the statute book on Covid, because we have never experienced anything of the magnitude of Covid.

I have to make a lot of judgments on the merits of particular stances. Having heard about the issues that were on the minds of the Information Commissioner’s team, and given the necessity of ensuring that we had in place an accessible Covid certification scheme for members of the public—I remind Mr Hoy that that was important for not just domestic but international certification—I judged that the appropriate course of action was to launch the app when we launched it, as we had indicated would be the case.

I completely understand why people want to move on from Covid. I am not sure whether I have made this point to the committee before—I might have done; it is difficult to remember not only what day of the week it is, but where you have said particular things—and I cannot remember the date, but it was on a Tuesday in late November that we generally came to the view that things were quite benign. We thought that we were looking forward to a fairly stable Christmas and that things were on the up.

On the Thursday afternoon, Michael Matheson was requested to join a call with UK Government ministers and colleagues in the other devolved Governments to consider placing restrictions on travel to southern African countries because of omicron, and we then received briefings on its spread and transmissibility. Within 48 hours, we had gone from viewing things as benign and thinking that we would have a stable approach to Christmas to having to contemplate measures necessary to prevent transmissibility of what I would say, in retrospect and looking in the rear-view mirror, was an outbreak of Covid that came the closest to overtopping our national health service. All the stuff up to November had been challenging, but it did not come as close to overtopping the NHS as omicron did, and the reason why it came so close was the degree of transmissibility, the volume of infection, the number of hospitalisations and the impact on staff availability. We had not faced that combination with previous variants.

I say that to the committee simply in the hope that we have six benign months ahead of us in relation to Covid. However, I cannot sit here and say that with certainty, and I am trying to put in place the statutory arrangements to ensure that the Government can act fast.

There will be a public inquiry into the handling of Covid, and one of the first issues that Lady Poole will consider is the preparations for the pandemic. I constantly have to make judgments on how prepared we are as, a Government and as a country, for certain eventualities. That is my ultimate responsibility with regard to resilience. As a result, the legislation that is brought to the committee and to the Parliament on this matter is about ensuring that we have the necessary preparations in place to deal with the situation that we might face. I hope that it will not happen, but the legislation will be there to be implemented.

No, I mean generally—in life. We have plenty of powers that we can use in emergency situations, but, when it came to the handling of a pandemic of this nature, we found out the hard way that the statute book was not equipped to handle such things. I am now trying to remedy that.

The Parliament will have the opportunity to accept or reject the regulations, and, under the legislation that I am introducing, the Parliament will also have the opportunity to consider whether it is proportionate and appropriate to ensure that our statute book contains these provisions. That is not to say that the powers are being exercised every day of the week, because they are not. There has to be particular justification for their use. The Parliament has to consider whether the powers should be there to be used if they are required.

That would not be our intention. The committee will know that the Government has introduced primary legislation that aims to ensure that the statute book is equipped to deal with the uncertainties that we might have to face on an on-going basis. That is a separate issue, which will be the subject of detailed and familiar parliamentary scrutiny.

The whole point of extending the expiry date of the act through the instrument that is before the committee is to enable the Government to respond to the emerging situation that we face. I have previously been clear with the Parliament that we hope that we will not have to face those situations, but the statute book has to be equipped, should they arise.

We need them for reasons of public health. In certain circumstances, we might need to take decisions that relate to the prevalence of the virus and its presence in certain scenarios.

The Government and local authorities have a whole range of different emergency powers on the statute book. They were given to us by the Parliament to be exercised only when there is a justification for exercising them. This is no different.

We might face a situation in which we have to act to protect public health. We will continue to rub up against the question of the statute book, and it will affect the longer-term legislation that the Parliament considers. With the benefit of our experience of handling the pandemic, do we consider it necessary to have a range of powers at our disposal that would enable us to deal with scenarios that we might face? That is the question that the Parliament must resolve. As I have said to the Parliament on many occasions, things can happen extraordinarily quickly.

I am offering the justification, convener, to the extent that I will end up repeating myself again and again. I have given the justification that I am going to give.