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We carried out a CRWIA screening in February 2021. The Government has adopted a consistent approach to rights and equality that has been used across all the protected categories when assessing deliverables in the mental health transition and recovery plan. Our mental health, equalities and human rights forum is central to that.

Crucially, we continue to involve children and young people in all aspects of our focused actions on mental health and wellbeing. As Ms Todd and I have reiterated again and again today, lived experience should be at the heart of all that we do.

For example, the involvement of members of the Scottish Youth Parliament enriches the work of the Scottish Government and Convention of Scottish Local Authorities children and young people’s mental health joint delivery board. We have attached to that two participation officers who focus on children’s and young people’s engagement.

We will write to the committee regarding a publication date, but I would say to all members that we have an ambition and we will meet that ambition. Folk have to recognise that we have had two years of a global pandemic. That means that some of the work that we want to undertake has been put to one side in order to deal with the real crisis that everyone has faced because of coronavirus.

We are making moves to improve. The new national data set for psychological therapies and CAMHS, for example, will provide individual level data for the first time, including experience and outcome measures. I think that that is a major move forward.

Can I add to that because—

The project that Ms Harper has talked about is not one that I am aware of. If she furnishes me with further detail, I will have a look and see what work it is doing. I am sure that it is very good work. I have said to the committee previously that there is good work in destigmatising mental health going on in communities across Scotland. Nationally, we have provided £5 million over five years for See Me to give it the comfort of knowing that that resource is available over a longer period of time. It has done some immense work, but we still have a way to go.

There are some areas of mental health that we have to destigmatise further, such as self-harm, which it is much more difficult for folk to talk about. I have met representatives from the Labour Party and the Green Party about our ambition to create what is I think the world’s first self-harm strategy. We will have to get folk to open up in order to be able to do that right and we will have to destigmatise. I am due to meet Conservative and Liberal Democrat representatives about this, too, in the near future. I hope that we can work cross-party collaboratively to help destigmatise that area, because there is a lot of work to do there. I hope that we will see collaboration and co-operation right across the Parliament on an issue that we have not done enough to tackle.

No, I think that we have to ensure that community-based services are as good as they can be in order to stop folk reaching acute services. That is the ambition here. As we move forward, we want to invest more in that preventative approach. That is why we have invested in school counsellors, that is why we are investing in primary care and that is why we are investing in community resources.

I would agree that we have a lot of work to do to reduce CAMHS waiting times and waiting lists. We get fixated about the statistics, but all of this is about people and their families, and I recognise that this is a particularly stressful time for folk who are waiting. I want to ensure that we have a service whereby we reduce those times and those lists.

There are lessons that have been learned pre-pandemic that have led to the modernisation of services in certain places, and we need to ensure that that happens everywhere. That is why we have put the standard in place to make sure that everybody follows that way. I will give Ms Webber an example—I may have given it before, so my apologies if I have. If we look at CAMHS waiting times and lists, we see that Grampian has done fairly well even during the pandemic. A decade ago it was not in a good place, but it has modernised the service. It is much more community focused, with much more emphasis on helping folk in communities, and that has made a real difference. We need to export that best practice and those models across the country. That will reduce lists and reduce waiting times.

Somebody mentioned data earlier. In some regards I get frustrated when we are comparing apples with oranges. We have to get the data right in all of this to ensure that we have all the knowledge at our fingertips to show what investment we will require in the future.

Finally, to show how seriously we take all this, I note that we have invested £40 million of the £120 million mental health recovery and renewal fund in CAMHS. That is how important we feel it is. This is a priority.

Ms Webber made an excellent point about team activity. I know that, during the first lockdown, which was very difficult for young folks, some teams coped by being able to gather online. At an event that I was at at St Mirren Football Club, which I have talked to the committee about before, I had a discussion with Paul McNeill, who is the excellent head of community development at the Scottish Football Association. He said that the kids in one of the teams that he coached were getting on grand online, but there was a much more difficult experience mentally for folks who could not get online, because they were not able to connect with their team-mates. It was very important that we made the investment in getting digital devices out there to folks who were digitally excluded because the team aspect has seen a lot of folk through.

We cannot overstate the value of team sport and the camaraderie that there has been, even though many people could not take part in activities in the first lockdown.

Can I just say one thing here? I have said this regularly, and it is not just me—a lot of the mental health professionals out there will say the same thing. Poverty is the main driver of mental ill health, and it is very difficult for some folk to engage in programmes if they have real concerns about how they will pay their bills, whether they will be able to feed their kids, or whether they will be able to buy that pair of shoes for wee Johnny or Jenny going to school. We cannot get over the fact that many of the powers here still rest with the UK Government.

As Maree Todd has said, we have a situation in which we are doing our level best to mitigate some of the policy decisions from down south, but as we increase the Scottish child payment, which is the right thing to do, the UK Government takes away all of that through a universal credit cut. Although we have mitigated the likes of the bedroom tax, the UK Government still has the welfare cap. We have to recognise that, although we will do everything that we possibly can on such issues, it would be much more helpful if those welfare policies, which have been enacted by the UK Government, were got rid of, because they are having a major impact on the physical and mental wellbeing of so many folk in our country.

May I say one thing before you bring in Ms Harper, convener?

It is important to put on record our thanks to the staff who work in mental health services, but particularly in CAMHS. I should say to the committee—we will provide more detail as always, because I know that you will ask for it after the session anyway—that the last quarter saw a record number of new patients starting treatment in CAMHS, as our NHS continues to remobilise and as demand has increased. That is a record number of new patients entering CAMHS, and that is down to the efforts of the workforce, who have increased in number, although we know that we have more to do there The staff have been amazing in rising to the challenge. I hope and know that they will continue to do that. We will send you more details because I know that the committee is always interested in the numbers.