Chamber and committees

Of course.

Thank you, convener. I will also try to be commendably concise.

I begin by commending the petitioners and everyone else who has contributed as the petition has progressed. I am a South Scotland MSP, and, like Mr Burnett, my mailbag and surgeries are full of people who are concerned about the level of development that is happening in their communities. Ultimately, the petition is about how we balance the national imperative to reduce our vulnerability to volatile and finite fossil fuel resources against ensuring that communities who will have to live in the shadow of that infrastructure are not overwhelmed by it.

It is clear to me that we do not have that balance right. As the petitioners have highlighted in their submissions, all too often communities feel that they are fighting an uphill battle to be heard during the planning process. The complex and bureaucratic planning process for such infrastructure is not something that any group of individuals can take on easily. The costs are high, both in time and money, and the return on all that investment can end up being little more than an automated acknowledgement of receipt email from a Government department.

Some developers go above and beyond to engage with communities and alter their plans to try to accommodate local concerns, but that is often the exception rather than the rule. In many cases, people challenge development not because of a blanket opposition to it, but because they want to understand how it will affect them and to be confident that their concerns are understood. The current approach to planning is simply not equipped to offer any of that certainty, and there is no question in my mind about the fact that the planning process could and should be improved. The best day to improve it, of course, was yesterday.

I gently urge the committee to consider holding a debate in the chamber on the petition, which would allow members of all parties who are dealing with these issues to stand up for their constituents.

We are asking what the bottom line is. It is very easy for us to talk about shifting from spending on acute care to spending on preventative measures, which I am a big advocate of, right up until there is an acute problem right in front of us. You gave the analogy of the spend on 60 very ill babies as opposed the spend on thousands of babies. The bottom line is this: how does PBMA help us shift incrementally towards preventative spend? The trajectory of the acute spend in front of you inevitably leads to less preventative spend, and so to more people needing acute care. It is an ever-decreasing circle. How do we utilise what we are talking about to try to reshape the way in which we think?

Good morning. You have opened a door here. One of the things I want to delve into, having looked at some of the responses to the call for views, is the desirability of moving away from acute spend and towards preventative spend. I was struck by a quote from Dr Will Ball, who said:

“There is a strong case for rebalancing spending towards earlier, preventative, and community-based support to reduce reliance on acute services and improve outcomes.”

I have bored members lots of times with this before, but that reminds me of the Mental Health Foundation’s publication, “Food for thought: Mental health and nutrition briefing” and how improving diet can improve mental health, and Scottish Action for Mental Health’s quite hard push for the idea that being physically active improves mental health. It is very difficult to measure those things, but there is a certain level of intuition that says, “That has to be right.” This really is at the margins, but how do we bring that thinking into the PBMA framework? We have to measure such things, because everything has to be measured these days, apparently, so how do we bring in that intuition? Intuitively, what Paul Sweeney was saying about housing and so on sounded correct. How do we bring that into the PBMA framework?

I was not going to come in on this, but I must admit I am dismayed at some of the responses to Patrick Harvie and Sandesh Gulhane about the education system. Do you not agree that, in the past few decades, we have lost a lot of knowledge about cooking and the understanding of what healthy food is?

There is the idea that we need to make our fast food healthier, but the problem is the rise in fast food and the leaving behind of batch cooking, for example. We do not do enough of that. It is about promoting health and educating people to make better decisions, which then helps to drive the food environment. We never talk about that.

There are so many good examples of that. I am thinking of the model that is used in Copenhagen, where the kids take places on a rota to cook and serve the meals in schools. They sit around a table in a community, and all the food is sourced within 10km of the school. Surely to goodness, that is where we need to get to. If people do not know how to cook and do not have the basics of cooking, we are never going to solve the problem. I do not understand the idea of not educating people, because we have lost that in the past few decades.

Does anyone want to add anything?

That brings me to my main problem in this regard. My feeling is that the battleground for this issue is in the educational environment. What are we trying to tackle there? There are various issues, including physical and mental health, behaviour, attainment, hunger and malnutrition. If we are talking about school meals, it strikes me that, if kids are coming to school hungry, we should take action around the provision of breakfast. However, again, there is a stigma attached to that.

I find it difficult to divorce nutrition from physical activity, because I think that one drives the other. You talked about the idea of working across portfolios. Should we be looking at drawing kids in before school by providing some sort of activity and then saying, “By the way, there’s some breakfast over there”? That would be a subtle change in the way in which we deliver that provision.

I would say that the cost of all that is significant, but so are the costs of physical and mental ill-health.

As I said in my earlier point, the environment in which we sit, especially in the public sector, is not conducive to health. We are building hospitals without kitchens and dragging food up the M6 from Wales to those hospitals, then throwing most of it out. How will the good food nation plan address that? We must address that issue.