Chamber and committees

Thank you for that.

As a follow-up, I will go back to funding. Is there funding in place to maintain the capacity that has been built up? Mr Gray suggested that there is not.

What needs to happen?

Thank you all. I appreciate your taking the time to come and speak to us. If you have any follow-up evidence to submit, please feel free to do so in writing.

There has been a lot of talk of sewage for so early in the day. I know that John Mason was delighted with that but, for the rest of us, it has been a bit of a challenge—but thank you very much.

We will have a brief suspension to allow a changeover of witnesses.

Do you have a view on how valuable the exercise was to the Scottish Government and health advisers in formulating Covid policies?

Perhaps if you find some more information on that, you can write to the committee.

I have one more follow-up question. This is interesting, because we have heard a lot—at least anecdotally—about increases in mental illness post-Covid because of lockdown isolation. Are you seeing that, and is it coming through in the numbers?

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.

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?

Thank you.