Seòmar agus comataidhean

Again, I recognise that we should be providing that pathway, but the truth of the matter is that many clubs have waiting lists. That is a fairly recent trend. If there are children who want to participate but are being prevented from participating because of a waiting list, how does that play into the overall picture?

Thank you.

Ailsa Wyllie, Scotland is really good on the international stage in many sports, and we are very good at developing high-level performance. We have always been like that, but participation and physical literacy is declining at the grass roots. We have talked about investment and a commitment to doubling the sports budget, which has been on the decline since I have been an MSP. Guess what? There are outcomes from that. How do we develop policy to improve rates of participation among children and young people? It is not about developing kids for sport—developing kids through sport is probably the better expression. What polices do we need to put in place to tackle those issues?

When we read the household data, it basically tells us the number of people who are active; it does not break the data down into SIMD areas. My concern is that we are moving participation further and further up the SIMD groups—I have seen that during the decades that I have been involved in this area. Sport is almost becoming a middle-class activity, and the opportunity to participate in it is reducing across the whole country. However, the data does not tell us that. Is that something that you recognise?

Good morning. I thank the witnesses for coming. I will start by looking at the trends over time of participation in sport and physical activity. It is fair to say that the evidence shows that, on the face of it, nothing has moved, but I would make a strong argument that participation in sport and physical activity has declined, especially in relation to physical literacy. How would you reflect on what has happened over the past 20 or 30 years?

The frustration for me when we are talking about having significant restrictions on the ability to invest is that we do not have an audit of facilities, whether those be community or school facilities, therefore we do not know what spare capacity is available in the structures that we currently have. We keep talking about investing in new facilities, yet we cannot gather the data to say where the spare capacity might be. Surely that is where we should start.

I am pleased that physical inactivity has been mentioned. As Jillian Gibson said, the issue is having the data. Quite frankly, data showing that kids have participated in sport at least once a week provides a very poor data link when it is matched against physical inactivity, physical literacy and the rise in obesity. The trend shows that there has been a reduction in the number of times that people participate in physical activity. The data also does not show that a cohort of children will participate in several different sports in a week. Given the barriers and what influences participation, how do we change those trends?

I recognise that we want to have a pathway for getting kids involved at school, with links into the community, but the reality is that the figures tell us that that is not happening at the level at which we want it to happen. How do we change that?

On that point, one of the most dangerous phrases that we can use is “in my day”, but we can mark the decline of sport from the late 1970s through the teachers strike in the 1980s. Here it is—in my day, in Ayrshire, there were 36 teams playing rugby; now, there are six. That is a clear decline. We cannot go back to where it was, with teachers running sports teams and so on in their own time. It would be very difficult to go back to that, so we need to find another vehicle that gives kids the opportunity to be physically active and to participate in sport, if that is what they want to do. How do we do it?

I have been listening intently to what you have been saying. I want to talk about the role of sport. Jillian Gibson, you started the conversation about the impact that physical activity can have on the community and about the culture of being involved. I was interested in the figure that you gave of inactivity costing £77 million per year. I have heard that figure before and I think that it is a massive underestimation, given things such as the impact of the lack of physical activity on mental ill-health, which has exploded. Further, obesity costs the Scottish economy over £5 billion in musculoskeletal conditions, heart disease and economic inactivity. I am interested in that. I am always trying to work out where that £77 million figure came from, because I think that it is a massive underestimation.

We have also talked about sport reaching across portfolios. We know that being physically active will have a positive impact on health outcomes and a positive impact in decreasing the pressure on our health service. However, it also has impacts on education, welfare and justice—it has impacts on all those different things. Given that as a background, do the witnesses think that there is a policy vacuum in terms of the importance of physical activity? We have talked about that, and you have agreed that physical activity is important, but do you think that there is a policy vacuum in relation to sport in Scotland? Could we have more focused policy development in that area? I ask Jillian Gibson to answer first.