COVID-19 funding allocation and Care home residents date of hospital discharge: FOI release

Information requested

1. A full and detailed breakdown of where the £8.2 billion allocated by the UK government has been spent, how much has been retained and the reason for doing so.

2. What exact date did the First Minister find out that care home residents were being sent back from hospital and without test, or known positives.

Response

1. The Scottish Government has been provided with £8.2 billion of COVID consequential support from the UK government, which is allocated in Scotland according to need. The allocations for this funding have been set out in the Summer and Autumn Budget Revisions and in a letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Finance to the Finance and Constitution Committee.

Details of funding for the initial series of commitments made by the Scottish Government have been provided in the Summer Budget Revision document which was published on the 27th of May and the Autumn Budget Revision document which was published on 24th of September.

The Summer Budget Revision document can be found at the following link:
Summer Budget Revision 2020 to 2021 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
The Autumn Budget Revision document can be found at the following link:
Autumn budget revision 2020 to 2021 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

Through these budget revisions around £6bn of consequential funding has been allocated. Since then, consequential funding has been increased to £8.2bn and the details of this additional £2.2bn and how it has been provisionally allocated can be seen in the link below.

The letter to the Finance and Constitution Committee can be found at the following link: Latest COVID-19 funding allocations - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

This letter illustrates that circa £330 million of funding has been allocated as contingency due to:

• the nature of the COVID-19 outbreak;

• the potential asks for further demand-led spend with regards the strategic framework support for business in Scotland;

• potential additional demands on health;

• and the requirement from the UK government that the funding provided to date will cover all costs until the end of March 2021.

This approach is consistent with the terms of the funding guarantee provided by HM Treasury to the devolved administrations, which specified the funding was to cover the period until March 2021. This contingency is also required in order to support any additional funding requirements as a result of the end of the EU transition period.

As you will appreciate Budget Revisions are necessarily a snapshot of the position at that time and this is a continually evolving picture: the overall allocations are based on latest requirements and forecasts. Additional details on the ongoing allocation of funding for the response to the COVID-19 emergency will be set in the Spring budget revision later in this financial year.

2. The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport confirmed in Parliament on 4 November 2020 that prior to the Sunday Post publishing their FOI, neither Scottish Ministers nor Government officials had information on the results of Covid-19 tests prior to discharge, or where these patients were discharged.

You can read the full exchange in Parliament here: Meeting of the Parliament 04 November 2020 [Draft] | Scottish Parliament Beta Website

The Cabinet Secretary commissioned Public Health Scotland to enable us to more fully and consistently understand how many people were assessed as being discharged with a recent positive test result, and the rationales that were in place for such a discharge. The PHS report is available here Discharges from NHSScotland hospitals to care homes 28 October 2020 - Data & intelligence from PHS (isdscotland.org)

The Sunday Post article was published on 16 August 2020 Hospitals in five Scottish health boards sent patients into care homes after they had tested positive for Covid-19 - The Sunday Post

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.