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In your opening statement, you said that yesterday’s budget did not give you the full £120 million that you had asked for. Will police numbers fall over the next few months and years as a result? You also said that you were going to restart recruitment, but that you are still going ahead with voluntary redundancy and early retirement. How will that affect police numbers?

I will come back to some of that in a wee bit.

During the third round-table evidence session, Public Health Scotland explained that it holds

“robust data on in-patient mental healthcare”.—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 23 November 2023; c 20.]

However, the equivalent data does not exist for adult mental health services in the community. Can any lessons be learned from the way in which data is currently gathered for secondary care, to improve the availability and quality of adult mental health data in primary care settings?

The report highlights a number of issues with the availability and quality of data and recommends that

“The Scottish Government and Integration Joint Boards (IJBs) should ... urgently progress work to improve the availability, quality, and use of financial, operational and workforce data”

to improve planning, information sharing and monitoring of the quality of services and patient outcomes. How is the Scottish Government addressing the gaps in data to enable more informed planning and decision making?

You spoke about all the information that comes from different bodies. Did you say that you have 900 or so GPs? Do they all feed into one system so that you can get a report, or does everybody have individual systems?

Is work being done to ensure that everybody uses the same system? One complaint that I have heard from consultants when I have been out talking to them is the fact that the boards have different computer systems, so if patients go between boards, they have to spend hours on telephones to get information. Is any work being done to ensure that everybody uses systems that speak to each other?

What, in the NHS England system, is different from our system that means that it can report the data just now?

You spoke about collecting a lot of data, and you mentioned the UK benchmarking. How readily available are all those reports for us to see how well we are doing?

I come to my final question. Has the Scottish Government provided funding to NHS Education for Scotland to develop the mental health workforce statistical publication? That was also mentioned in the report.

The report provides some detail about a piece of work that is intended to “significantly improve” the availability of mental health workforce data. There may, therefore, be implications for mental health if we do not put the money in. The phrase “spend to save” is being used just now. We need to ensure that the data that we get ensures that the money that we put in gives us the right outcomes. Are there implications if we do not provide the money for that piece of work?

Are there any timelines for when everybody will be using the same system? That would obviously help the mental health of GPs, consultants and patients.