Chamber and committees

I put the same point to either of your public health colleagues, to see whether they have any comments on the impact on public health in the NHS, should the same thing occur.

That is helpful, and leads me on neatly to the question that I was going to ask about public sector reform. The convener quoted from “Investing in Scotland’s Future: Resource Spending Review”, which is the background to all this. I will direct this question first to Richard Robinson from Audit Scotland—just so that you are aware, Richard; it is coming to you.

A couple of quotations from the RSR identify that there has been substantial growth in employment in the devolved public sector. The review states that

“continued growth of the public sector away from frontline services is not sustainable”.

It goes on to state that the Scottish Government recognises

“the need to reset the public sector following the COVID-19 pandemic, including by returning to a pre-pandemic size”.

From Audit Scotland’s perspective, how realistic is it to return the public sector to its pre-pandemic size? From a practical point of view, how quickly could that be done and what are the implications of that?

Would any of our NHS colleagues like to come in?

Thank you. That is very interesting.

Right. What is it, then?

Very good. I am very impressed. [Laughter.]

Good morning, minister and colleagues. There are a couple of issues that I would like to pursue.

Minister, at the start you talked about information here being easy to understand; I think that that was true of parts, but there were other parts with which we struggled. The Scottish Government early in the pandemic produced the FACTS acronym. I know that Jason Leitch will know what FACTS stands for, but I do not know many other people who do. Minister, do you know what FACTS stands for?

I was going to ask you about what follow-up you have done, but you have already answered that question for me.

One of the other issues that we have looked at is trying to counter disinformation, which we were talking about earlier. To put that in context, we have all seen that the vaccination programme has been a great success—there is no doubt about it—but a segment of the population is still resistant to vaccination. When we see the segmentation, quite a lot of that is among particular ethnic minority groups. The Polish community is one example of a group that, for whatever reason, whether that be cultural reasons or something else, is resistant to taking up vaccination. Do you think that enough was done in terms of public health messaging to try to counter disinformation about the effect of vaccination?

“Hands, face, space”.

Thanks for that answer. I am sure that all the MSPs here are very familiar with the situation of being bombarded with queries from constituents asking, “In these circumstances, can I do X, Y and Z?” We were not equipped to answer those questions, and it was a difficult and time-consuming process for us to get answers.