Chamber and committees

Thank you.

I am interested in Rachael Clarke’s perspective from being a service provider down south. In a later session, we will take evidence from providers up here in order to get the perspective of staff. Obviously, one of the elements that we need to consider for the bill is the impact of protests on other people who are accessing healthcare services in the same setting and on staff in those settings. As we have you here now, and given that you are a provider elsewhere, I would be interested in hearing not only BPAS’s perspective on but your experience of the impact on your staff of equivalent protests and vigils down south.

Would anybody else like to come in on the question of the impact on other people in the facilities, such as hospital patients who access them for reasons other than reproductive healthcare?

If I may pick up on that—

Yes. If I may, I will pick up on a specific aspect of the points that Susan Quinn has made, and we can then bring in Mike Corbett. Peter Bain is looking to come in, too.

You can correct me if I am wrong, Susan, but, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that, as well as the level of resource, it is a question of having the correct resource. A member of staff in a school may specialise in a particular kind of support but, because of the nature of school, the children with that particular need will move on. A child in another school might have a similar need, but the local authority might not be flexible enough to ensure that the staff are in the right place.

While you were talking about that, I recalled that one of the very first meetings that I had after I was elected was with a 15-year-old with a hearing impairment. On her first day at high school, a member of staff was introduced to her and she was told, “This will be your one-on-one member of staff.” That person said to her, “Hi there. It’s lovely to meet you. I usually work with kids with autism, but I’m sure we’ll figure this out between us.”

I am interested in witnesses’ views on the relationship between the level of need, the complexity of need and the resources that are allocated, particularly in mainstream settings. For the purposes of this question, I distinguish between mainstream and special schools. I would be interested in Matthew Cavanagh’s experience on the latter issue, but my question is mainly for the other witnesses.

Is it typical in a mainstream setting for there to be an acknowledgement that more complex needs require and therefore get additional resources, or is there a tendency towards a more blanket approach that says that all kids with additional needs in a mainstream setting should get some kind of additional support, with no recognition that some needs are more complex than others? Is there a follow-through between the complexity of need and the resource that is allocated?

I will follow up on Liz Smith’s line of questioning around the public health levy. The Scottish Retail Consortium made the point that, from its perspective, the levy targets a particular sector of retail, and that sector is supermarkets that sell alcohol and tobacco. As you have explained, it is a public health levy, and alcohol and tobacco have significant public health impact.

You might not have the figure to hand, but do you have a rough, ballpark idea of how much the negative health effects of alcohol and tobacco cost our public services? How much do they cost the NHS every year?

Is it not the case that, with there being no public health supplement, the difference from the minimum unit price is being pocketed directly by the retailer? There is no current mechanism for that amount to be reinvested in public services to create an additional public health benefit. However, if we decided to introduce a public health levy, that would ensure that what is now just excess profit going straight into the retailer’s pocket is reinvested in the services that are used to support people who are suffering the consequences of alcohol and tobacco use.

Switching back to another area, I was quite concerned by what you said in your opening statement about the cut to financial transactions in the supplementary estimates. Bearing in mind that that cut is on top of what was already a very bleak picture on FTs, have you had any engagement from the UK Government on why that is its current direction of travel on FTs?

In a somewhat similar area, there have been reports over the past couple of days—I think that a question on the subject has been selected for this afternoon, and a question on it might be put to the First Minister later in the week—on the decision to freeze additional capital spend in the health portfolio for the remainder of the current financial year. Will that have a knock-on impact on the capital allocations in the draft budget for next year? Will you say a little more about the context and why that decision has been taken for the remaining few months of the current financial year?

My final question is on something that was touched on earlier by, I think, the convener—that is, the decisions on funding for the enterprise agencies. I completely understand the need, ultimately, for the budget to balance, which makes it challenging to take the most strategic decisions in each portfolio area. However, I am particularly interested in the funding for the enterprise agencies. I have been frustrated for a long time that Scottish Enterprise, in particular, spends money on the film and television sector even though the public sector expertise with regard to support for that sector sits not with that agency but with Screen Scotland, which is part of Creative Scotland.

In this year’s budget, Creative Scotland has an uplift, and Screen Scotland, as part of that agency, will benefit from that. On the other hand, Scottish Enterprise funding has gone down. We could argue that there is a level of strategic reallocation, given that we will get better value for money from the amount being deployed by Screen Scotland—where the expertise is—than from its being deployed by Scottish Enterprise. However, I do not get the impression that there was a strategic decision as such; it was more that somebody needed to be at the sharp end for the budget to balance overall.

Was there any discussion about that money? That is one example, but there are loads of other examples of public bodies with overlapping responsibilities for various sectors. Do cross-portfolio discussions take place to identify where we will get the best value from money that is transferred from the public sector to the third and private sectors?