Chamber and committees

I thank the minister for her response. I am heartened by her indication that she is willing to co-operate on the wording of an amendment to be lodged at stage 3. On that basis, I am content to rest and I will not press amendment 16 to a vote.

Amendment 16, by agreement, withdrawn.

One point that came out quite strongly in a previous evidence session was that around 90 per cent of funding for sport in Scotland is channelled through local authorities. There is quite a highly disseminated model of funding. In that model, councils are faced with 80 per cent through central Government allocations and 20 per cent through council tax and charges.

There is a bit of pressure, to say the least, on council finances. Often, the first things to go are things that are seen as non-statutory service provisions. The focus is on areas such as social work and education, and things such as sport are seen as potentially less severe options when councils are looking to make savings or cuts.

What is your assessment of the impact of council finances on the provision of sport, particularly for women and girls and those kinds of specific facilities? What can you do to ameliorate that impact?

I know that there is a contested space around real-terms cuts from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. I would not want to get into that debate, because I think that the focus should be on what we can do to highlight risks in the estate that you mentioned, for example. Could things such as investment in district heating networks or capital investments be targeted? If councils are making decisions that involve a risk to the future provision of sport facilities in Scotland, is there a mechanism by which that risk can be flagged, and potential mitigating measures—for example, capital investments or targeted investments—looked at with the Government? Could there be opportunities to look at best practice in other authorities that have been able to crowd in some external investment, or where sponsorship or entrepreneurial activity has ameliorated the impact?

I wonder whether there is potential for a more developed ecosystem of feedback in relation to local government dealing with challenging situations on the ground versus sharing best practice and measures that have worked better. Swimming pools, for example, are energy-intensive assets. Could there be ways of investing capital into them to reduce the revenue costs? Is there potential to develop something there?

I note some of the points that you made about capacity and constraints. Those are a major concern. For example, you mentioned A and E departments being designed for a lower population. Do you have other metrics for assessing capacity and bottlenecks? I refer to process mapping of your services and areas of constraint around, say, key items of capital equipment such as computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging scanners. Are those areas that you have identified as needing extra capital investment that would improve patient flow? Have you identified particular examples in your analysis of operations?

Do you think that that is effective? Could it be more efficient? Are there ways to improve it further?

NHS Lothian’s written evidence notes that you do not have a low-secure forensic unit and that there are no female high-secure beds in Scotland more widely, which means that people are being managed in units that are not suitable for them. How is your health board managing the lack of forensic mental health capacity? What could the Government do to improve the situation?

Thanks. That is great.

You have both highlighted what sound like quite impressive process improvement activities. From a cultural perspective across the health boards, how do you disseminate best practice? How do you benchmark against each other so that you are able to say, “Right. That is an excellent workstream. How do we carry that into the national picture so that we can make an impact?” Do you have a protocol or process for doing that?

That is a fair point. I come from a low-income background, and one of the things that I did as a kid was swimming lessons because they were free, so my mum was able to take me to the local swimming baths.

Earlier, we mentioned the cost pressures that people face. Free swimming is an increasingly scarce opportunity for young people, but statistics from Scottish Swimming show that 60 per cent of swimmers are female and that it is the top participation sport for people with a disability, so it is an obvious community-based facility that is accessible at a relatively low cost—for equipment required, and so on. However, councils have reported an increase of 90 per cent in electricity costs and a 200 per cent increase in gas costs.

In England, they have introduced a swimming pool support fund to the tune of £60 million, of which £40 million is for capital investment and £20 million is in revenue grants. Are there plans to introduce similar relief in Scotland to try to maintain access to swimming pools? Perhaps it could be conditional on providing things such as free access to young people.

I accept that there are opportunities to do things differently here, and that it might not be necessary to automatically read it across, but would you say that there is a reasonable and pretty decent business case to ensure that there is targeted discrete support for—in this instance—swimming pools? It is an obvious opportunity. Whether it is designed in the same way as in England is secondary to identifying the threat to such facilities and addressing it specifically.