Chamber and committees

I will, but, first, as someone who used to be a member of a valuation joint board, I would say that, if there was going to be a full-scale revaluation right across the country, the resources to carry out that work would need to be made available.

David Phillips touched on the growth in disability benefit case load and spending, and several others have mentioned it. I want to revisit that issue to get more evidence from you all. David Phillips, will you expand on your earlier contribution with regard to what progress has been made in understanding the reason for the increase across the whole of the UK in the number of people who are on disability benefits? You said that you looked comparatively at other countries and that you did not see the same significant growth. Can you or Tom Wernham talk about that?

Perhaps the rapid onset of that change has caught everybody on the hop a bit with regard to the need for adequate resourcing to deal with the rise across the board in mental ill health, as opposed to being mentally unwell.

I have found this part of the conversation fascinating. The principle of early intervention and prevention is one of the key reasons why I am in this place—it is something that drives me. It is very interesting to hear what Tom Wernham has said, and I am interested to see the paper that is coming out on the two-child limit in England.

Is there space for researchers to come out of the siloed thinking as well? If we ask only certain questions, we will be looking only at one part of the issue. In terms of short-termism, how do you quantify that when you are looking at studies in the States that have thrown money at families but then not given a lengthy period to actually see the outcome? Alternatively, the services might not be the wraparound ones that we need, such as the sure start centres. I made good use of those when I was first a mum way back in the early 2000s.

I think that we need both. We cannot look at things in the short term with a cash-first approach without considering everything that comes out of the siloed approach. I am thinking off the cuff, but I feel as though you have introduced some interesting concepts this morning that we really need to explore a little bit more. I do not know whether anybody has anything further to say.

Do our local authorities provide a lot of that information in the returns that they submit? Do we know what is happening in the area through the national performance framework? How can we gather that data better, although not in a way that is more onerous, and take account of the data that we already have?

That was going to be my follow-up question. Where was that paper looking at? Did your paper on ill health look across the UK?

Sticking with the issue of good nutrition in early years, Lindsay Jaacks spoke about the studies showing that two to four-year-olds are among the healthiest population groups at the moment. I want to think a little bit about the stage before that. We know that those who are eligible will get the best start grant, so they will be able to get nutritious food in their very early years.

Consider the food environment in those very early years, which takes parents away from thinking about what they could do in their household to give their youngest children nutrition from what they regularly eat. The food environment out there is all about pre-prepared, pre-packaged food that is sometimes not as nutritious as it is made out to be. How do we ensure that we are focused on early years nutrition—before the point when children access early years education—so that we are giving kids and the families who are supporting them the best opportunity?

I agree. We have anchor institutions such as local authorities doing all of that good work, and we would hope that, in the future, we would have, say, the health and social care partnership as an anchor institution in a particular area starting to look at how local food could be used in care home settings, or the NHS starting to do the same thing locally. When we see that sort of thing receding, it raises a slight concern. Is it your view that this plan, and then the local plans, should help drive all of that forward?

I am going to spend some time thinking about the food industry itself and will also come back to the issue of procurement.

The food and drink industry responded to our call for views and is clearly engaged in the creation of a good food nation. How can the plan ensure that industry involvement in the development of a good food nation is suitably balanced with public health policy objectives and with ensuring the prevention of ill health, malnutrition, alcohol-based harm and obesity? We talk a lot about the food and drink industry, so where in the good food nation plan is there space for the drink industry when we are thinking about harm prevention? How do we balance the strong and powerful voices of some of the big actors in this space with a public health approach?

On outcomes or indicators, if we think about school meals, should universal school meals or discounted school meals be a feature as an indicator or an outcome that is desirable in the plan? We know that that is a tricky environment for families.

When I was speaking to the previous panel, I mentioned that East Ayrshire Council has trialled half-price school meals for secondary school children. That £1.25 meal deal resulted in an increase, for the first time, in the uptake of school meals in the secondary setting, which is one of the trickiest things that we have been trying to grapple with. Should some of those aspects feature as an outcome or an indicator in the plan?

We heard from the earlier panel that best start food vouchers have clearly benefited young people in their earliest years, and that families are trying new things that they might not have tried before using those vouchers. Is there any way that the plan could have due regard to that when focusing on early years nutrition? We know that parents have a complicated landscape to negotiate. The big companies play a role in what the food environment looks like in relation to things such as pouches and jars for kids’ food, and a lot of people might not have an understanding of what they could cook at home themselves. How could the plan effect change early in young people’s lives?