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Any new scheme inevitably takes time to find its feet and its effectiveness, efficiency and pace of work. There will be a range of applications to a scheme of this type, and a new issue will be uncovered in probably every application. That issue will have to be considered and related to the legislation. Colleagues will recall that the legislation for the scheme inevitably has to be very complex. A variety of considerations must be made on literally every application, so it is fair to say that the scheme will be slow to begin.

The pace will be maintained. One way to illustrate that, which might help to address Mr Dey’s question, is to look at March 2022, which is a couple of months after the scheme began operating. In that month, 26 applications were passed from the Scottish Government to Redress Scotland for determination. Those were applications that had been completed and were to be judged for a redress payment. In November 2022, that number was 66. I hope that that gives the committee some reassurance that the pace is increasing. The November figure also predates the recruitment of essentially double the number of caseworkers.

I unreservedly accept that any scheme of this type takes time to find momentum. More applications came in more quickly than we had anticipated. The total number of applications is not adrift from our expectations, but the rate at which they have come in is most definitely different. The state of development of those applications is variable: some are very advanced, some are not. It has taken a lot of time to support applicants to get to a conclusion. There is now a growing sense of momentum within the scheme, which I am keen to build upon.

Yes, we did.

I do not know the answer to your question, and I do not know whether I could answer it. I cannot answer it now because I most definitely do not have detailed knowledge of any application, and I am not actually sure that I could ask anyone, if you get what I mean.

I am not being difficult, but we have to be awfully careful about the personal data issues involved, so I am not sure about that.

Nevertheless, there is a deeper point that underpins Mr Marra’s question, which is whether there is a route for such a process to happen. I think that there is. That is the reassurance that I have given to the group that came to see me.

I listened to the quotes that Mr Marra gave—this relates to the key paragraph that I read out from Jackson Carlaw’s letter to me—and I can understand why people think, “The state was all over this.” An interesting and disturbing conversation can be had with Fornethy survivors to work out why they were there. I am really struggling with that point because, from listening to their stories, I cannot fathom it.

That is why I say that I think that the scheme is perfectly open to Fornethy survivors. However, I have to satisfy myself, and I do not think that I can do that by being able to answer the question that Mr Marra put to me on whether a survivor has been successful. I do not think that I will ever know the answer to that question unless a Fornethy survivor tells me.

At this stage, I would say that all public organisations have to be open and candid about things in the past. The Scottish Government established the Scottish child abuse inquiry because we came to the conclusion that, despite a number of very welcome, well-thought-through approaches to try to address the deep trauma, hurt and agony of individuals, we had not done that successfully without airing the truth about all this.

The Scottish child abuse inquiry is generating material that is unfathomable. In some cases, I readily admit to finding the material unreadable—I literally cannot read some parts of it. It is about the country facing up to its past and its obligations, which is incredibly difficult. I say to any organisation in the country that this is not a moment to be anything other than candid.

The advance payment scheme was handled pretty swiftly, pretty timeously and pretty straightforwardly. Of course, there is a big difference between the advance payment scheme and this scheme. The advance payment scheme had a much lower bar of evidence and process than is involved in the fully legislated-for scheme. In that respect, Mr Mundell puts his finger on a fair point, which is that we probably conveyed the impression that there would just be a continuation of the swiftness of the advance payment scheme, when that is not what would happen. What we were legislating for was more complex and demanding, so that is one factor.

There is another factor. I hope that I have been as candid during the meeting as I set out to be when I came into the room this morning. I have said that applications came in with varying degrees of evidence: some applications came in with literally only a name, an address and “I was in care at X” and others came in with a folder of stuff and with all the evidence marshalled and all the rest of it. Those two examples of applications require significantly different levels of time and attention.

Therefore, although we have a number of applications that require a lot of development work, I am not sure that I could describe them as “applications”—they are almost pre-applications. In saying that, I am not being in any way disrespectful to what has come in, but I am trying to give colleagues the sense that a lot of development work was required. Although we have got—

No, 22 is the gap between Redress Scotland determinations and acceptances; it is the number of people considering offers that have been made to them. There have been 19 review cases: four of those remain in progress and have not yet had an outcome; three have resulted in the initial determination being upheld; and 12 have had the initial determination varied—which means that the offer of financial redress was increased.

The process is about looking again at the information; I am not sure that it involves new information.

It is important in answering Mr Rennie’s question to reflect the fact, inherent in his question, that there are a number of elements to this matter—it is not just about a financial redress decision.

I had a conversation, which will never leave me, with the advisers who work with Future Pathways. That organisation predates the redress scheme and the advisers are allocated to support survivors of historical childhood sexual abuse. I asked them how they go about it. One of them said to me, “We walk alongside the individual.” What more do we need to know? Those people are probably the first reliable, trusted ally that the individual has had in their life.

I will never forget that conversation and it has gone into the thinking behind the scheme. This area of policy is quite unfamiliar to me. When it all kicked off, when Marilyn Livingstone raised the issues in the cross-party group 23 or 24 years ago, when the Parliament was founded, I thought, “Historical childhood sexual abuse? What?” but, of course, although it was not part of my experience as a child, we now know so much more as a society. I have learned a lot. That concept of walking alongside people has never left me, so the scheme has been designed so that, when we work with people, we walk alongside them to try to help them to a conclusion.

That is the thinking. It is one big thing that I have learned from the process, but I will talk about another thing that struck me. I mentioned that there had been a number of requests for a written apology, which is part of the scheme. That is not about money. One survivor who asked for that and got it, then phoned up their caseworker and asked whether they would mind reading it over the phone to them because they wanted to have it read to them by the state. The caseworker told me that it was a profoundly moving encounter, because they felt that, in a sense, they were conveying to that individual the state’s apology.

I have stood up in the chamber and given an apology on behalf of the Government, which I know survivors value, but there was an applicant asking for a couple of minutes of someone’s time for them to read over the phone the apology from the state. I do not know the individual involved, but I hazard a guess that that is more important than the cheque. At least one survivor has asked the First Minister to write to them, and we have arranged for that to be done. A letter has been sent from the First Minister, signed by her own hand.

Mr Rennie is right to highlight that the scheme is a broader consideration. A wee bit of me is in my usual mode of evidence-based transactional data, but there is an awful lot more to the scheme than that.

It is difficult for me to give a specific answer to that, because the applications are so individual and come in at such different stages of development. Some applications come in with quite a lot of information and evidence, and they can be processed and passed to Redress Scotland quite quickly. Once an application goes to Redress Scotland, the process time for determination is something of the order of 21 days.

It is difficult to give a figure for the stages prior to that, because the evidence base and the quality of the applications vary significantly and caseworkers might well be actively involved with an applicant in trying to source additional information. An individual might submit an application and be allocated a caseworker, and the caseworker might have to work with them to develop a sufficient evidence base to make the application as strong as possible. That will influence the amount of time that is deployed and the turnaround time on individual applications.