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I welcome Siobhian Brown to the meeting.

Good morning, and welcome to the 28th meeting in 2022 of the COVID-19 Recovery Committee. We have received apologies from Brian Whittle MSP, and from our convener, Siobhan Brown, who has been unexpectedly detained but might be able to join us in the course of the meeting.

The first agenda item is to decide whether to take in private item 4, which is consideration of our approach to our inquiry into long Covid. Do members agree to take item 4 in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Would the number be in the hundreds or fewer than that?

Thank you—that is really interesting.

I move on to you, Rachel Helliwell. As I did with the others, I ask you to reflect on your experience of the process.

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.