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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.

Is there team-to-team collaboration across health boards, but at a lower level than the boards, in which teams can teach others about operational approaches that they have done well?

It is a pleasure to be back at the committee. I miss coming along, so it is great to be able to come back.

As you are aware, the committee last looked at the petition in November and, since then, there have been some positive developments, most notably that, at a recent full council meeting, Glasgow City Council agreed a motion to look at the future of the M8 and investigate options for mitigating its impact.

Some colleagues might think that the statement about removing the M8 in its entirety is quite provocative, but it is merely a provocation to a wider discussion. We are talking about a large piece of land in the centre of Glasgow that incorporates the equivalent of the entirety of Inverness city centre, and it can still be used as a road for its primary function. However, the purpose of the petition is to investigate how we reduce the rather obnoxious design of the road to address its spatial and environmental impacts on the city centre.

A substantial amount of work has already been done on that. Most notably, a levelling-up fund bid was submitted to cap the section of motorway in front of the Mitchell library, between Bath Street and Sauchiehall Street. Unfortunately, that bid was unsuccessful, but it may well be revisited in a future round of the fund.

Furthermore, work on district regeneration frameworks was commissioned in 2016. That has produced a series of district regeneration frameworks for the entirety of the city centre. It highlighted interventions, particularly on the west flank of the M8 inner ring road, that could be enabled to reduce the impacts of the road, such as removing certain slip roads; capping and decking over sections of the motorway where it is in cutting; and restoring areas such as Anderston Cross, which is completely engulfed by a kind of spaghetti junction.

There is a large cloverleaf junction at Townhead, which was overengineered—it was designed for the east flank of the outer ring road, which was never actually built. The junction was built by Strathclyde Regional Council in the early 1990s to serve a motorway that was never built. Therefore, it is around one third greater in size than it should be. It incorporates a huge amount of land, which disconnects Royston, Springburn and Sighthill from the city centre.

There are options that, while maintaining the fundamental purpose of the road, could significantly reduce the impact in the short, medium and longer term. Although it is good that there is an indicative proposal from the Scottish Government to work with Glasgow City Council, we need a bit more. Significant public money has already been spent on studies, feasibility and specific interventions. Hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent on repairing the Woodside viaducts—probably the biggest infrastructure spend in the city—which is a reactionary spend that has been subject to no public consultation. It is a reaction to the road physically crumbling apart.

Yes. In the case of Charing Cross, the Grand hotel and a number of tenements and retail arcades were demolished to create the cutting for the M8. In that instance, an area was decked over, but it was quite small. The rotating doors that you go through in Cafe Gandolfi in the Merchant City are actually the original doors from the Grand hotel in Charing Cross, which were salvaged.

The key point is that there is an opportunity to further improve the environment without damaging the fundamental utility of the road. That is the question now, half a century on from its first commissioning. We have international examples such as Boston’s big dig project. There are other examples around the world such as in Paris and numerous other cities worldwide. There is a big opportunity to enhance the city centre.

I would also argue that there is potential to realise a positive capital net receipt for the public, because it is Government-owned land. The land was all compulsorily purchased by the Scottish Office at the time to construct the road. Therefore, by utilising the airspace over it, where possible, there is potential for development that could return a positive net receipt to the public funds. That would not only enhance the city centre amenity but be financially sustainable. It is not a quixotic idea about an urban planning utopia; it is about a serious and credible intervention based on international best practice.

That is a fair comment. It was merely a motion that was passed by councillors, so the detailed timeline or sequence of activities subsequent to that by officers has not yet been fully articulated. Furthermore, as the convener said, although Transport Scotland is interested in working in principle, there is no resource to exercise that activity. I therefore have concerns about how that will be expedited, which is where the committee has a role.

Perhaps it is slightly premature to invite everyone together to present a pathway to carry out the changes. Perhaps the committee ought to consider writing to Transport Scotland and Glasgow City Council to ask for an indication of when they will have produced a firm plan, so that we might have an opportunity to talk about it or scrutinise it to an extent, and so that Parliament has a role in overseeing the stakeholders working together. I detect a bit of animosity between Transport Scotland and Glasgow City Council with respect to the policy and how it evolves. Transport Scotland is very much programmed to the road being a trunk road—it just wants to operate a trunk road. It is not really interested in its aesthetic value, whereas there are wider considerations with respect to Glasgow City Council and our parliamentary representatives.

Indeed. The road there has been reduced to four lanes for some time now, and has had a speed restriction placed on it. Nonetheless, that demonstrates that the road, structurally, is reaching the end of its natural lifespan and requires significant further investment. We are reaching a crux point where the Government really ought to be more thoroughly engaged, and the Parliament has a role in overseeing that. Through the petition, the committee has an important position in exercising that role.

I urge the committee to consider inviting key stakeholders from Transport Scotland, the Scottish Government and Glasgow City Council to present their views on existing studies, such as the MVRDV district regeneration frameworks, which were commissioned at significant expense five years ago; the levelling-up fund bid; and how we progress the projects that are shovel ready, to borrow a phrase from John Swinney.

David Ferguson, you touched on the issue of the data picture in Scotland. Do you, and the other witnesses, believe that that picture is sufficient to measure female participation in sport? Is the data in a form that is collected centrally and collated and analysed? Is there any opportunity to further improve that? Are we making informed decisions? How does the data look to you, and how could it be improved?

Do we need to do more to feed that back, particularly to local authorities? It seems to me that a lot of decisions are end-of-year financial decisions because, in order to balance a budget, there is a menu of pretty painful decisions that have to be made. Those decisions are not necessarily well informed about whether cutting something to save £X is pushing the problem somewhere else in the system, which might cause exclusion from sport and, therefore, mental health and physical health impacts. Is that something that we need to improve in Scotland?

I want to touch on the fact that the sickness absence rate at the hospital exceeds the 5 per cent target—it is 7.68 per cent. To what do you attribute that? What additional support has been provided to improve the mental health of staff?