³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

It has certainly been a challenge in the past. I think that we have improved our data collection over the past few years; I will let Andy Sinclair give a fuller answer on how we have gone about doing that. However, certainly from a Government perspective, we are looking for ethnicity data as well as physical activity data in our household survey.

In relation to the data that sports governing bodies collect, we are doing a little bit better than we did in the past, when there was no data; we saw that in relation to health as well as physical activity. It was not really until the pandemic that we went out and routinely collected data that gave us the level of detail that we would like about ethnicity. Although anecdotally there were a lot of concerns about particular ethnic groups participating or not participating in the vaccine programme, we did not know the details until we got the data, so data is really important.

There is a balance to be struck around data collection—I will let Andy Sinclair tell you a little bit more.

I agree that it is frustrating that it has been 10 years. However, if you think about the taboo around menstrual blood, that has been in place for millennia. The idea that we could overturn some of the taboos and the challenges that women face around participation overnight is, frankly, wrong.

We are now having some really good conversations. I have never before known a time in my life when elite athletes have talked openly about issues such as menstruation, contraception, pregnancy and sport or menopause and sport. It is really healthy that this debate is finally happening.

In the same way that we have seen women’s health understudied, we have seen women’s participation in sport understudied. Historically, there has not been an understanding of the influence that our different physiology has on performance sport, for example, because that has not been looked at. First, women have participated less in sport. Secondly, we have been studied less, as we have been studied less in medicine.

There is now a great deal more understanding of those issues. Sportscotland is doing some particular work in the elite performance athlete field, which is really helpful. There are better conversations going on and there is more understanding and tackling of the barriers. However, it would be foolish to imagine that there is just one thing that would unlock sport and physical activity for women and girls. There are multiple barriers. As I said earlier, a sports bra is a pretty essential piece of kit and the fact that it can cost £30 to £60 is a barrier that many women and girls will not be able to overcome as they hit puberty.

I will let Andrew Sinclair comment on that as well, but that tension has always existed. There is a difference between elite sport and social or recreational sport. As a Government, we want to encourage participation across the board. I could sing the praises of sport morning, noon and night, given its benefits for physical, mental and social health. We want everyone to have access to it. If it was a pill, it would be worth billions, would it not? We want to increase participation. One way to do that is to take away the barriers and another is to offer a diversity of experience, which means a diversity of sports.

Sometimes—there might be a gender difference in this regard, although I am not sure whether it is just a perception—there are different levels of appetite for competition, and there are definitely occasions when participating just for the joy of it is really important.

Scottish Gymnastics sees itself as a feeder for all other sports. Participation in gymnastics is particularly gendered, with a very high number of girls and women participating. They often go on to other sports, but gymnastics is where they gain their physical literacy. Only a small number of people go on to compete as gymnasts, but people very often use the skills that they picked up as youngsters in that sport when they take part in other sports.

We watched the Olympic games with a lot of interest last time they were on, and there were brand-new cycling events that captured the imagination of the world, such as BMX events. Exciting innovations are happening in sport, and new kinds of competition have come along. We are going to host the Union Cycliste Internationale—UCI—world championships in Scotland later this year, and I cannot wait to see football on a bike and gymnastics on a bike. There are really interesting innovations going on and I passionately believe that there is a sport out there for everyone.

I joke that I got into rugby because I was a bit clumsy. I banged into people often and fell over quite easily and I found a sport where those characteristics were an asset to me. Admittedly, I have always participated in social sports. I was never going to be an elite athlete. I trained hard and I played hard, but it was only ever going to be a social or recreational experience. Everybody should have that.

As I mentioned, on my daily mile this morning I reflected on my journey to the body confidence that I now have at the age of 50, and participating in rugby was a big part of that. I recognised that my body could do things that I never imagined it could do; it is really strong and I can knock down people who are much faster than me. We need to recognise that there are sports out there for every single body shape, because that is powerful. We need to broaden everyone’s horizons, get everyone participating and give them loads of opportunities.

A number of members of the committee were at the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Scottish Football Association that was held in Parliament last week. At that event, we heard from Sam Milne, who talked about starting a recreational football group. She talked about a lassie called Farrah Mackenzie who came along to play recreational football. She was not competitive at all but just wanted to do social sport. Sam and Farrah talked powerfully about the camaraderie and the social benefits of football, but also about the physical and mental health benefits. Farrah spoke about losing 6 stone. She had been a type 2 diabetic who was on the brink of going on to insulin, but participating in recreational football pushed that back for her.

Let us ensure that there are as many opportunities as possible for absolutely everybody to participate in sport and physical activity. We need some competitive opportunities. I am not dismissing the elite athletes among us, who need competition. Some people who play recreational football said that they have begun to enjoy competition and they gather together once a month to have football games so that there is an opportunity for that. However, I want participation. I want us to move more, to enjoy our bodies, to be fitter and stronger physically and mentally, and to get all the social benefits that those things bring.

The board has made some great contributions and there are some absolutely phenomenal leaders and glass-ceiling busters in that group. I think that Dee Bradbury is in that group, so there is a female president of a tier-1 nation in rugby, which has not been replicated in the rest of the world. Scotland has some very powerful people in leadership roles in that collective. Andrew Sinclair might want to say more about the future of that group.

That is a really difficult and challenging area. Local government is democratically accountable to the populations that it serves, and it is not the Scottish Government’s role to oversee its spending decisions. There must be locally accountable decision making.

Paul Sweeney mentioned how much of the budget is already ring fenced. I think that ring fencing more of it would not be welcome. To be honest, over the course of the pandemic, we have worked really closely with local authority partners. We rose to face an incredibly challenging time for our nation together, and we navigated the challenges together.

There is keenness on both sides—the Scottish Government and COSLA—to continue that positive working relationship. Although everybody acknowledges that challenging decisions will have to be made on both sides—local authorities might contest some of the spending decisions that we make, and we might contest some of the spending decisions that they make—there is absolutely room for respect on both sides and working together to collaboratively find a way forward in this really challenging time.

It is challenging, but there is precedent in that area. Tobacco—or certainly smoking—advertising has been restricted. Last year, I had the absolute privilege of meeting Billie Jean King, who talked about the Virginia Slims circuit, which was a big tennis tournament in America that was sponsored by a cigarette company. We have made strides in reducing the appearance of tobacco and smoking in sport.

Unusually, our sports minister in Scotland is part of the health department. I am a junior health minister, and I absolutely recognise the health benefits of sport and physical activity. The benefits are not just for physical health; they are for mental health, too. I am sure that we will get on to that.

It is really important to remember that when we consider how we fund sport. The challenge is in getting the balance correct. As Andy Sinclair has said with regard to getting access to sponsorship in Scotland, there is a relatively small pool of companies to fish in.

It is important that we consider those issues, particularly for those groups that are particularly susceptible to advertising, which are young people and people who are in recovery.

I think that everyone would acknowledge that we are in challenging financial times at the moment. Things are challenging for central Government—the Scottish Government—and for local government. This particular cost crisis has come on the back of over a decade of austerity politics, which has undoubtedly had an impact on our public services for more than 10 years. We therefore face a challenging situation.

The Scottish Government has not only maintained funding to local government; we have increased it in real terms, and we are very keen to continue to prioritise local government spending in our budgeting. We recognise how challenging things are. We all see that in the press at the moment. In particular, a small number of local authorities in Scotland are making decisions on the closures of particular individual facilities. Just last week, we had a debate in Parliament about the challenging situation that is faced by Perth and Kinross Council with regard to maintaining the Dewars facility. Thankfully, it has managed to maintain the funding for the Dewars facility, and it is secure for the next few months.

We are working with local government colleagues day in, day out to try to rise to meet that challenge and see what we can do to support them. Much of the current challenge is being precipitated by energy costs, so it is the energy-dense sports that use things such as swimming pools and ice rinks that are particularly struggling. Continuing to put pressure on the UK Government, which has many of the cost of energy levers, is an important strand of trying to tackle that particular challenge.

In the short term, things are challenging. In the medium term and the long term, there is work that we can do together to try to improve the estate so that there is less energy consumption in those facilities. That is not an overnight fix, but we have to do that. We have to make that transition anyway in order to meet our net zero targets. The Government is more than happy to work alongside local government on that.

We will certainly be able to interrogate it to an extent with the individual sports governing bodies. However, as I said, it is a challenging area in which to coalesce all that data and to draw conclusions, because there are so many individual aspects to the sport and to the ethnicity. It is really important that we do not make assumptions, but I am absolutely open to conversations about how we improve BAME participation. There are all sorts of immense programmes around the country that are trying to do that, so it is really important that we have the data to support them and to support investment to tackle some of the exclusion that is apparent.

As I said, conversations are going on between us and local authority partners about how we can ensure that we are able to invest in the estate in a strategic way to ensure that participation is maximised.

The challenge is that we will have consequentials from the allocation—I think that we get about £6 million in consequentials from the spend that came from that Westminster decision for England—but it goes into the block grant and the general allocation of our budget. Just because it was spent on swimming and swimming pools in England does not necessarily mean that it will be spent on swimming and swimming pools in Scotland.

We make all sorts of different decisions, not least the decision to fund the Scottish child payment, which is a uniquely Scottish benefit. It is game changing—as commentators tell us—and is clearly having an impact on the level of poverty that is experienced by children and young people in Scotland.

We will work hard with local authority colleagues to try to see what can be done, but it is certainly not automatic that because the decision was made in Westminster to invest in swimming pools we will make the same decision in Scotland. The Scottish child payment is a classic example of a different decision that we made in Scotland that is making a difference in the same area.

You are absolutely right that we do not need to wait for a national care service to make improvements, some of which are needed urgently. However, in the medium to long term, we have to consider the sustainability of our services.

I am in the same position in the constituency that I serve, in that three care homes there have closed in the past couple of months, although none of those was a social enterprise—they were all private enterprises. A vast number of beds have gone from quite a rural area. Therefore, there has been a huge impact on the availability for local people, which has a real impact on where they can be cared for at the end of their lives. When a care home in the west Highlands closes, it means that a person is likely to have to take a six-hour round trip to visit their mum in the next-nearest care home. It is a really challenging situation. The real challenge that we face in the Highlands is with staff and labour shortages.

There is no doubt that social care faces massive challenges at the moment. We need to support and nurture our service, and we need to try to make some improvements right now. That is why I say that improving the pay and conditions for social care staff must be a high priority for all of us. How we achieve that improvement will probably involve us making difficult decisions over the next few months.

Ethical commissioning and ethical procurement—the ability to have an impact on the care that we obtain through the money that we spend centrally—is the way to ensure that we continue to get that social benefit, that pay and conditions are of a certain standard for everybody who is employed in social care, and that we have an impact in local communities. As you know, and as you have said, no third sector organisations currently provide that. We want everyone in social care to use that public money for public good.