Suspend 'pointless' Covid passport plans before Holyrood election, Lib Dems tell Nicola Sturgeon

Planning for the rollout of "pointless and costly" coronavirus vaccine passports in Scotland must be suspended until after the Holyrood election, the Scottish LibDems have demanded. 

Willie Rennie, the party leader, accused Nicola Sturgeon of performing a u-turn over a immunisation certification scheme, which she told MSPs she was opposed to only for it to later emerge that she had held talks over their introduction and had floated a possible Scottish trial.

Ahead of the launch of the Scottish LibDems manifesto on Friday, Mr Rennie told The Telegraph that Ms Sturgeon must halt any further moves towards immunity passports, which could be required to gain access to venues or events, “in the spirit of democracy”.

His party believes that ramping up testing would be a far better alternative to vaccine passports, due to concerns over fairness and implications for civil liberties.

Almost five million tests in Scotland have been unused since Christmas, an analysis by the party found.

"With millions of young people having sacrificed so much over the last year, the last thing the government should do is create divisions and force so many to lose out in accessing everyday services,” Mr Rennie said.

“We have seen the SNP try and create a super ID database to share lots of private information between 120 public sector bodies before. We must bin their pointless and costly plans now.

“We just need to go back to the First Minister’s own words in December to know she is u-turning. Nicola Sturgeon can’t play that game during an election. It is time to act in the spirit of democracy and suspend these plans until after the election.

“The best way to restore our liberties is to suppress the virus with the voluntary use of the vaccine and getting on top of asymptomatic testing, for which the Scottish Government is still lagging behind the rest of the UK.”

Speaking in the Holyrood chamber in December, Ms Sturgeon insisted she had no plans to introduce vaccine passports and added they were “not something that we plan to have or that we favour.”

However, she has since declared herself "open-minded" about them and suggested they could help Scots return to normality, despite accepting the policy poses ethical dilemmas and practical issues.

“I think we will see some kind of vaccine certification starting to be used,” the First Minister said earlier this month. 

“We just don’t know for sure yet, exactly what role they will play. I’m not one of these people that says never, ever, ever, because I think we need to be open-minded to anything that helps us get back to normality.”

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