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I have done my daily mile this morning.

I absolutely agree that we need to increase the investment. That is why we are doubling the investment in sport and physical activity in this parliamentary session, with a particular focus on inequalities. We want to reach those communities. We also want to reach women and girls, who we know are not participating in sport, and disabled people, and we want to see more people from black and minority ethnic communities participating in sport in Scotland. We recognise that that is an area in which inequalities have an impact.

We are doubling that investment and looking to improve participation and offer opportunities. Over the course of the pandemic, active schools co-ordinators have been redeployed into schools to lead physical activity, and physical education has been prioritised. Through that universal offer, there are ways that we can ensure that children and young people still have an opportunity to participate.

As we came out of the pandemic last year, there was investment in a summer of fun or a summer of activities. Active school co-ordinators made a real effort to support children and young people to be active. Again, that was targeted at more deprived communities.

There are discussions to be had—I have those discussions on a regular basis—about whether there is support for the school estate in all communities in Scotland, for example. There are arm’s-length trusts in some local authority areas, and there is a challenge in hanging on to the sporting estate in some of them. In some communities, that has been quite welcome. Sports clubs have stepped up, taken over the running of facilities, and improved how they meet the community’s needs. That is community empowerment in action, but that is more challenging in some communities.

There will not be a one-size-fits-all solution. We are looking at the issue very closely to ensure that whatever is done in each community meets the community’s needs and people are not left behind.

There is another thing that I need to work on, which is difficult because we still have Covid in this country and we are not out the other side of the pandemic yet. Despite the fact that we dipped under 6,000 cases yesterday, we still have reasonable levels of Covid in Scotland.

We need to ensure that children can access the school estate. We need to work towards that, and there are good pilot programmes. Last time I was at a meeting of this committee, I talked about some of the work that is going on in Dundee to ensure that children can access the school estate for sporting and cultural activities. Both have good evidence bases to support protection and mitigation against adverse childhood experiences. We need to work with our local authority colleagues to ensure that we are all absolutely focused in the same direction and are improving the situation for our children and young people.

I will ask one of my officials to comment on that, but I reiterate that the whole purpose of the framework is to prevent disputes from arising. The point is to enable close collaboration between the four UK nations and to enable policy divergence, should that be a choice. It respects the devolution settlement, so the circumstance that you describe, with the need for dispute resolution, should not arise. The point of the framework is to prevent that from occurring.

The dispute avoidance and resolution arrangements that exist are robust, as you would expect. Formal processes are in place through the appropriate intergovernmental structures to resolve disputes at the lowest possible level. If that is not possible, the matter can be escalated right up to ministers. However, I ask one of my officials to comment.

No. It is an incredible gift that people give when they donate their organs and I reassure them that we are grateful for that and will use organs all over the UK to help people who need them.

I am not aware of any concerns being raised, certainly on the specific frameworks that we are discussing. There is a general concern about the way that the frameworks operate and the powers that were repatriated from the EU, and the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 certainly causes all the devolved Governments real concern. It was not given consent in Scotland or in Wales. There are some general discussions, but I am not aware of any concerns being raised in the specific policy areas that we are discussing. In fact, it is in our interests and everyone’s interests for us to work together closely in order to meet the needs of our citizens on this front.

I cannot think of a specific example at the moment. It is important that the option is there, because I do not have a crystal ball and I cannot see into the future. One example might be a situation where EU law changes, given that Scotland generally wants to align itself with the EU. We have an intention of returning to the EU when we are an independent country, so we want to remain aligned with EU legislation. That might well be an area where policy divergence occurs, but I cannot foresee it at the moment.

we are aiming for a transformational shift in how this works. Work is going on right across Government on that. The Deputy First Minister’s Covid recovery role is a cross-cutting and cross-portfolio role, and children and families are being prioritised in the recovery. That illustrates the way that we are trying to work at a Government level. There is an investment of £500 million, which is a substantial amount, given the challenges that we are facing economically at the moment. Behind that aim to shift and transform the way that we work, there is the work of the Promise that is also driving and holding us to account on that work.

One of the things that we hoped would come from the incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—we are still committed to the policy outcomes, even though the legislation has been contested by the Westminster Government—was a shift in culture so that, instead of people looking at a child in front of them and gatekeeping the various funding by asking what it was that they needed, they would look at that child and ask “What are those child’s rights and how can I support and respect those rights?” Crucially, we hoped to bring about a situation whereby, if those rights were not supported and respected, it was a justiciable matter, so people could be taken to court for not respecting those rights. That would have changed the culture.

You are absolutely right. One of the reasons why women suffer health inequalities is the reduction in sport and physical activity. Before puberty the levels of sport and physical activity among children are pretty similar for boys and girls, but after puberty young women are less likely to participate and less likely to exercise. That has an impact on their physical health and, of course, on their mental health. We are determined to improve that. The doubling of investment in sport and active living to £100 million by the end of this session of Parliament is focused on tackling those inequalities.

There are a couple of things that we are doing. Again, we cannot think of this issue without thinking about the reality of the world, which is that, as we have just highlighted, women and girls face sexual discrimination and gender-based violence from a very young age. Sport alone will not overturn that, but it can be part of the solution among a whole programme of Government efforts to tackle the environment that enables that.

We are looking at things such as sports sponsorship to try to ensure that women’s sport is supported equally with men’s sport. We are hoping to hold a summit about media coverage of women’s sport. One of the challenges is the focus on men’s sport. We all know that you cannot be what you cannot see, so one of the reasons why young girls stop participating in sport is that they do not see it reflected in the world around them. We have some ideas on how to do that.

I meet a lot of stakeholders as well. Just in the last week, I have met the SFA to discuss the power of football. Fiona McIntyre, the head of women and girl’s football, was at that meeting. The cabinet secretary, Mr Yousaf, and I were blown away by the work that the SFA brought to us. Football is the most popular sport in Scotland and, if we can work together to tackle some of these inequalities, I think that it will be a powerful force.

That is a good question, because one of the most important measures is a very long-term one: how people flourish into adulthood. It is difficult to measure very long-term investments.

When I was the Minister for Children and Young People, we looked at the investment that went into providing 1,140 hours of free childcare, which is one of the biggest social infrastructure investments that the Government has ever made. We expect that investment to provide a transformative opportunity for three and four-year-olds, with the quality of education that they are offered enabling them not only to thrive at that age but to seize the opportunities that they are offered later on in school.

Evidence from other countries shows that, if you deliver high-quality early learning and childcare, which we strive to do in Scotland, you will see a benefit not just when a child is in education and in their early life but when they reach early adulthood, with there being a measurable difference in the quality of their parenting. Some of our investments are truly long term. I consider the provision of 1,140 hours of childcare to be one of the greatest long-term investments that we have made in our children to enable them to thrive.

How do we measure the impact? We have evaluation programmes in place to measure the short-term impacts, but it is difficult to have a grasp of the long-term impacts. An entire generation of children have not yet experienced 1,140 hours of childcare, which makes it more challenging to measure long-term outcomes, but we keep an eye on a lot of short-term data. We collect data on all sorts of measures that we think will have an impact.

For example, we collect data on breastfeeding. We recognise that breastfeeding is an important public health intervention. Milk from breastfeeding is the best kind of food for infants, and we want to support women to breastfeed when they make that decision. Breastfeeding rates have increased among women involved in the family nurse partnership programme because of that intervention. Across the board in Scotland, we have the highest breastfeeding rates that we have ever had. In relation to socioeconomic circumstances, there are higher breastfeeding rates in wealthy areas and lower rates in areas where there is more poverty, but that inequality gap is starting to close. We collect lots of data on how things are going and monitor it closely.

From a public health perspective, there are two challenges. The first is that we are looking for very long-term effects, and the second is that all sorts of things can skew what happens. Over the past 10 years, we have made huge efforts to improve the situation for our children and young people. We have introduced all sorts of programmes that will support them to flourish, but the Westminster Government has pursued an agenda of austerity and welfare reform. Agencies from outside the United Kingdom have looked at the level of poverty in the UK and have said that the welfare reform has particularly targeted disabled people and has made poverty worse for children.

We have a two-child cap, for heaven’s sake. We have children growing up in Scotland who, we think, are entitled to support from the state because they are living in poverty, but the Westminster Government pursues a policy that says that children cannot have support if they have two or more brothers or sisters.

There are challenges in gathering data and in ensuring that our interventions lead to the desired outcomes. Those challenges relate to the long-term nature of the work and to the impact of not only Scottish Government processes but Westminster Government ones.

Excuse me. Can I finish? Early on in my evidence, I said that Scotland has some of the best quality improvement methodology in the NHS; I do not think that I said that we had some of the best data. Certainly, data collection has been impaired by the pandemic over the past two years. We have not been able to ask front-line staff to collect data with quite the same rigour and effort as normal over the past two years while they have been on an emergency footing.

In terms of the data on obesity, we have certain points at which we measure children’s weight. I talked about the data that came out at the tail end of last year—in December 2021—which has given us a very worrying concern. It showed that 15.5 per cent of the children entering primary 1 were at risk of obesity, which is a 5.1 per cent increase on pre-pandemic levels. You do not need to be a data analyst to be concerned about that increase. We have data, and I think we have enough of it to recognise that there is a problem. What we need to do now is to enact policies that make a difference—quickly.