Chamber and committees

We move on to item 2. The committee will hear from two panels of witnesses on Covid-19 surveillance.

The first panel will give evidence on waste water surveillance. I welcome to the meeting: Dr Rachel Helliwell, the director of the Centre of Expertise for Waters—CREW—and the Hydro Nation International Centre; George Ponton, head of research and innovation at Scottish Water; and Peter Singleton, research, innovation and evidence manager at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. They all join us remotely.

I thank the witnesses for giving us their time and for their written submissions. We will allow an hour or so for the evidence session. I will start with some questions, then ask my colleagues to come in. If any of the witnesses would like to respond to a question that is not directed specifically to them, they should put an R in the chat box, then we will be able to bring them in. I am keen that everybody gets as much of an opportunity to speak as possible.

I ask each of the witnesses in turn, starting with Mr Ponton from Scottish Water, to tell us a little bit about their experience with waste water testing, how it worked in practice, what the challenges were and what they have learned from it for the future.

Thank you for that. Do you have any reflections on the value that your work has had in driving Government policy?

Okay. Thank you very much.

I will ask Peter Singleton a similar question to the original question that I put to Mr Ponton. What was your experience of the programme? What lessons have been learned from it for the future?

The issue of long-term illness and disability is an important component in the subject of our inquiry. The evidence that we heard from both Inclusion Scotland and John Burn-Murdoch highlighted two key areas that were contributing to that. One was mental health issues, and the other was chronic pain. Those are two major components in the figures.

When the Scottish Government produced its emergency budget review at the beginning of November, some resource was reprioritised at that stage: £65 million was reprioritised from primary care and £38 million was reprioritised from the mental health budget. I am wondering whether that was a false economy. If these two issues—chronic pain and mental health—are most likely to be impacted by issues with primary care, was it a sensible move to take money out of those spending areas in which an intervention would probably contribute most to helping people to get back into the workforce?

Good morning, minister. When we started looking at these issues, we identified two areas in which we recognised that there had been changes in the employment market, with people dropping out. One area was long-term illness and disability, and the other was people taking early retirement. We got the impression—well, this is my view, anyway—that, on the early retirement issue, people had made that choice and that, whatever Government did, we were not necessarily going to attract them back into the jobs market once they had left. The focus has therefore shifted a little on to the question of how we tackle long-term illness and disability. I am interested in exploring what initiatives the Government could bring in to try to address that.

Let us look at some of the figures. In Scotland, there has been an increase from 6 per cent to 7 per cent in the population of those aged between 16 and 64 who are inactive or long-term sick. That is a 1 percentage point rise but, when set against a 6 per cent base, it is quite a big chunk. A lot of the evidence to the committee has said that, anecdotally, there is quite a large cohort of people who are long-term sick as a result of Covid.

One of the interesting bits of evidence that we got came from John Burn-Murdoch, who has done some research for the Financial Times. It was about whether a component of that group consists of people who are on NHS waiting lists for an operation and are therefore signed off work until they get it. I am interested in hearing any thoughts that you have, or any evidence that the Government has, as to whether the fact that it is now taking so long for people to get operations is a contributory factor in people dropping out of the workforce.

No—I think that my time is up. However, I simply want to say that it is a really interesting area that I would love us to have more time to pursue in detail.

Perhaps if you find some more information on that, you can write to the committee.

I have one more follow-up question. This is interesting, because we have heard a lot—at least anecdotally—about increases in mental illness post-Covid because of lockdown isolation. Are you seeing that, and is it coming through in the numbers?

Good morning to the panel. I will follow up on some of the questioning from the convener because I think that this is at the heart of what the committee is trying to understand about what has been happening in the labour market. We had some interesting evidence from our panel last week about the reasons for the reduction in economic activity and whether that was directly related to health—for example, whether it was people with long Covid who were struggling to work—or whether it was more about other factors, such as people deciding after two years of home working that they were going to take early retirement because they did not want to go back to an office working environment.

I am interested to get people’s perspectives on that. To what extent do you think that this is directly health related? Are there other factors, particularly among the 50 to 60-year-old age group? Professor, maybe you could start. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I will in bring Philip Whyte in a second, but first I have one follow-up question. We know that there is a cost of living crisis and that household bills for energy and food have gone up substantially over the past few months. Is there any evidence that the people who dropped out of the workforce and perhaps took early retirement thinking that they had enough money to sustain them are now having to rethink that because of cost pressures and inflation?