Chamber and committees

Okay. Thank you.

Are there, from a mental health perspective, risks in how you calculate cost avoidance, because you are trying to prove a negative that is, in some instances, hypothetical? Supporting people to stay in a home setting through giving them cooking and other lifestyle skills, companionship and so on might avoid addiction issues or entry into the justice system. However, it is very hard to say, hypothetically, that we have saved the country X thousands of pounds by investing a relatively small sum now in stabilising someone’s situation.

Anecdotally, when I was at HMP Barlinnie two weeks ago, the governor was telling me about a young man who was back in on a short sentence. He had been so humiliated at not knowing how to pay his rent that he ran away from his accommodation, took drugs and ended up back in prison. What if someone had been there to support that young man to deal with the stress of a setting that most citizens would be able to deal with? He just could not deal with it; because of how he had been brought up, he was not taught that stuff. How do you prove that sort of thing? It might be a situation particular to that individual, but it has created a spiral of costs for the country that could have been avoided. It is hard to put that into a spreadsheet.

I want to ask about the mental health implications of the plan, particularly the idea of time poverty as well as financial poverty. We know that there are significant class and gender-based variations in food and nutrition and in the role in food preparation in the community, and there has been a proposal for public diners and more communal dining spaces. What is your view on the potential for that to be rolled out in a more systemic way across Scotland?

I want to turn to the plan’s implications for mental health aspects. We have spoken about the potential social benefits of communal dining, but I also want to consider time poverty. Professor Jaacks mentioned that the time that is generally spent in the UK preparing and cooking food is broadly similar to the situation in France, for example. However, certainly in my experience, there are significant disparities in pressure, stress and childcare that might create variations with regard to class or gender-based roles in the community. Do you have any insights into whether, from a public health perspective, having communal dining or developing spaces such as local pantries and co-operatives might improve mental health in the community? The issue is not about individual behaviour as much as it is about creating more localised settings, even at a multiple family level, that could potentially improve social wellbeing and confidence. Does anyone want to give us their take on that?

How do you envisage that playing out? We talked about procurement, the opportunity cost of using public expenditure and the demand signal from public expenditure to sustain projects in the community. There is currently a kind of absurdity in the system in which third sector organisations are chasing ever-diminishing grant funding, leading to stress in those organisations. At the same time, vast contractual value is flowing through the system that is perhaps bypassing our communities. If that pound was working harder in a local setting, it could achieve multiple effects, including stability of local community projects, while supplying services. The development of more of a co-operative or social enterprise model could be a virtuous cycle.

That is the kind of discussion that has emerged during today’s evidence sessions. Does the minister have any reflections on that, and on providing underpinning for a community to remove the stress in organisations and the burnout that is often experienced? We often hear about communities and charities that are chasing grant funding and are stressed out about it, while service users are worried about the future of organisations to which they have a connection. There is a disparity between health boards, local authorities and health and social care partnerships, where the turning off and on of projects seems to militate against national objectives. Do you think that the whole process could be more coherent, which could provide better security all round?

By taking that approach and having different judgments on what constitutes value, do you not risk introducing inequality? In local authorities, I have often seen massive risk aversion, particularly around budgets. I imagine that there is very little appetite to be experimental.

Thanks.

Ms Brown, we know that farmers and those in rural communities grow food. How could Scotland’s farm to fork journey be more robustly developed by the third sector, particularly with reference to mental health, wellbeing and a sense of connection to the wider community? Could or should that be more robustly referred to in the plan?

I wonder about the design of public procurement in all of this. The opportunity cost of public procurement, food behaviour and system design were mentioned earlier. By my rough calculations, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde spent around £24 million on food in 2018. What is the opportunity cost of that? How could we better utilise such expenditure?

Community catering organisations, social enterprises, food pantries and so on are already on a shoestring and are struggling to get grant funding, so surely the social enterprise model would be well served if such vast expenditure were channelled more into the local economy. Do you have any insights into public procurement design and how that could change?

So that social value demonstrates beneficial mental health outcomes and a public health benefit. How do you capture the opportunity of social value creation in procurement so that it drives behaviour in commissioning and procuring services?