Chamber and committees

Yes.

Therefore, a range of data is available. I would be surprised if that were not available at a health board level.

It will be available at a health board level, so all that data about who is waiting and for how long is publicly available. Obviously, that data will show that today, in a number of different disciplines, people are waiting longer than they would have done pre-pandemic, but we are working hard to ensure that we address that and as quickly as we can.

It is perhaps not for me to discuss or question the motivations of media coverage. If we do that, we will be here a long time, I suspect.

I go back to the point that I made in answer to Mr Fraser, that individual companies have to assess how they take forward their working environment as a consequence of the pandemic. The substantive point that I was making is that some organisations have probably found that it is possible to undertake a lot more tasks outwith an office or workplace environment than they previously thought was possible. Obviously, that affects their way of working. There will be consequences of adopting that as a more permanent model, which will include some of the issues that Mr Whittle raises in relation to leasing costs of premises. However, individual companies will have to consider whether they can sustain that approach and whether it is the appropriate approach for them to take.

There is a set of events and arrangements that have not yet restarted. To take the example of Mr Whittle’s mother’s exercise class, obviously, we are trying to get all these arrangements back up and running as soon as possible. My father’s exercise class has been going for some time now, and he goes to it and it is great for him. I am delighted that he does that. We are trying to get some of these events back up and running, and we are now in a position where that is plausible, because of the improvement in the Covid situation generally.

There is another set of circumstances—to refer again to Mr Whittle’s question—whereby there are public facilities that stand locked up quite a lot for no good rational reason. We need to maximise the use of those public facilities. Of course, some of that might be tied up in the contractual arrangements that procured those facilities, and I encourage public authorities to stretch those arrangements and ensure that they are not an impediment to their use, because the activities that Mr Whittle talks about are possible in communities if there is access to appropriate facilities.

A third element is about the general messaging that tries to get to the point of principle that Professor Leitch was talking about, which is basically that, the healthier you are, the greater your ability to withstand the health adversities that might come your way. Therefore, encouraging public messaging about exercise and looking after individual health is critical as part of the preventative health interventions that we are able to take forward.

Lastly, there are good examples in the health service of interventions being designed—I say this for simplicity—not by the prescription of drugs but by the prescription of exercise. Increasingly, health professionals are trying to say to people, “Look, you’d be better off joining an exercise class than me prescribing you something.” That is important in winning hearts and minds about how we can individually take steps to strengthen our health and wellbeing.

Children in that age group who are clinically vulnerable or are in households where there is a clinically vulnerable adult are now the subject of the roll-out of the vaccination, and that is under way in different parts of the country.

A number of points have to be made in response to that question. First of all, we have had a global pandemic that has affected the delivery of healthcare for the past two years. The committee must be careful that it does not forget about the fact that we have had a very disruptive global pandemic that has put enormous pressure on our health service. I make the point bluntly to the committee that we cannot just wish away the past two years, because they have been hugely disruptive to the health service.

Secondly, throughout the pandemic, the health service has maintained as large a range of core services as possible. Some treatments—for example, for cancer—have been sustained throughout the pandemic. There has been less capacity to provide elective treatments, because we have had to allocate capacity to deal with the pandemic. Indeed, I am reminded that there has been significant resistance to some of the Government’s measures to protect capacity in the health service by putting restrictions on the general population. Some of these measures have been resisted in Parliament. However, if the Government had not done that, even more hospital capacity would have been used up dealing with Covid rather than other cases. Therefore, hard choices have had to be made. I regret the fact that, as a consequence of that, some members of the public are waiting longer for treatment than they should have to.

Thirdly, there is a recovery programme under way to ensure that people can receive the treatment to which they are entitled. That work is under way now, and elective treatment is being expanded. The more that we can suppress Covid numbers and Covid hospital admissions, the more scope there is for other treatments to be taken forward.

Finally, in relation to the publication of data on those who are waiting for treatment, waiting times data is made available on, I think, a monthly basis. Is that correct?

I would contest a bit of what Mr Fairlie has put to me. Thinking back over my time in Parliament, I came in here—my goodness, what is it?—23 years ago, when death rates from cancer, heart disease and stroke were significantly worse than they are today. Successive Governments concentrated their messaging and measures on proactive interventions to try to address that. For example, screening programmes were introduced, which raised awareness about the degree of risk that individuals faced in relation to particular conditions. Messaging campaigns were undertaken to raise public awareness about symptoms and signs, and the availability of screening programmes, in order to try to reduce the number of deaths.

Those programmes have, by and large, delivered better outcomes. Obviously, they have not taken away the risks entirely—sadly, people still die from those conditions. Nonetheless, as a consequence of the investments that were made in messaging to raise awareness, fewer people are dying from those causes.

I say to Mr Fairlie that, just now, we have to focus public attention on Covid because of the threat that it continues to pose to our population. Nevertheless, there are other threats out there, and we absolutely need to raise awareness of them and to get the public to comply in their behaviour to ensure that those threats can be properly addressed.

I think that the experience of the pandemic, and the fact that many thousands of our fellow citizens have had to work from home, has demonstrated the potential for different models of working. For some people, working from home has been beneficial—they have been able to organise their lives in a way that has enabled them to sustain their lives and undertake all the rest of what various people have to fit into their days, so they may have a slightly less congested life as a consequence.

For others, it has not been successful; it has been a challenge. Many people have missed social interaction in an office or other working environment. There are obviously economic implications for town centres in terms of footfall—as you say, convener—but there are benefits from a reduction in traffic movement. In my anecdotal experience, I have found that the journey into Edinburgh by car, which I make reasonably frequently, is a good deal more straightforward than it has been for most of the past 10 years of my life. There are ups and downs.

Part of the response has to come at an individual business level. Businesses have to work out their way of working, and they should do so in dialogue with their staff. The Government is certainly not going to prescribe a model that must prevail; it would be inappropriate for us to do so. Nonetheless, we encourage hybrid working in the context of the pandemic, and we encourage employers to discuss the subject with their teams.

Equally, as public authorities—both Government and local authorities—we have to look at the appropriate future strategies for town centres. They have been facing challenges for many years—what is happening now is not a new phenomenon. The upsurge in online trading has changed much of the approach to town centres. Nevertheless, there has been a number of imaginative redevelopments and repurposing of town centres as places of leisure and residence as opposed to exclusively retail environments. Such repurposing is possible, and the Government is engaging with a range of local authorities and communities on what that might look like. We will work with public authorities as effectively as we can to try to address those issues.