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Active schools co-ordinators are good at collaborating with the assets that already exist in the community and they make those links between the sports clubs in each local area. I know that Emma Harper’s part of the country is big on curling and ice sports, and my part of the country is big on shinty. We need to think about making links between the sports that are already being played in communities in order to give children and young people opportunities to join with assets that are already there. That is an important part of getting it right.

That is a real focus for the Government, and we have committed to double the funding for sport and physical activity in this parliamentary term. We are determined to focus that extra funding on tackling inequalities. You are absolutely right that there is pre-existing inequality in participation across the board.

Football, to give it credit as our national game, is the one sport where there is equal participation across all the socioeconomic groups. Every other sport favours the wealthy, so there is a socioeconomic divide for literally every other sport. How do we tackle and improve that? We are speaking to all the sports governing bodies about that. There are some amazing programmes in place. For example, Scottish Athletics is doing some great work going into communities where it would not normally operate and targeting those groups that might not naturally participate in athletics. That is gaining it participants from those particular areas of socioeconomic deprivation, but it is also gaining athletics a more ethnically diverse participant group. That is an example of specific work that can be done.

Socioeconomic issues should not be ignored. Women experience inequalities generally because of inequality in wealth, in power and in status—when I was the Minister for Public Health and Women’s Health, I used to talk about women experiencing health inequalities for those reasons. Women also experience inequalities in sport because they do not have as much money as men.

One of the basic things that we can do about that is to encourage those sports where money does not matter and make things such as participation in the daily mile integral to the school day in Scotland. That is a really important way to target absolutely everyone, so that boys and girls can participate in the same way. There are no economic barriers to participating in that activity every day.

We have 1,000 schools participating in the daily mile across 32 local authority areas, which is really good, but that is still only about half the children in Scotland—so about half of children are not doing the daily mile. It is just 15 minutes of exercise three times a week. I do my daily mile every day, let me be clear, but the recommendation is 15 minutes of exercise three times a week. For that, you get such a bang for your buck. You get measurable improvements in children’s fitness and a decrease in body mass index and body fat—all the physical changes—but you also get cognitive changes. Children are more able to learn, more confident, happier and calmer. The cognitive and mood impacts are huge for a very small investment in time and no money. It is about the most inclusive programme that we have for exercise in Scotland and we are pretty keen to expand it further. Everyone should do their daily mile.

It is a really challenging area and that is an excellent question.

I am absolutely passionate about sport. I want sport to be well funded but I want sport to be healthy and inclusive. There are two groups who are particularly vulnerable to alcohol sponsorship and alcohol advertising. The first group are children—there was a very dismaying study a couple of years ago that looked at the Calcutta cup in 2020 and found that children saw an alcohol prompt every 12 seconds as they watched that match on television. The other group that is particularly affected is people who are in recovery; they are particularly susceptible to advertising.

I believe that we can strike a balance. We have to start from a place where we acknowledge how much alcohol harm there still is in Scotland. Over 1,000 people a year, or around 24 people a week, die of drinking alcohol in Scotland. Although we have made some progress in recent years, it is absolutely essential that we continue to make progress.

There is a perception that the people who are dying of alcohol are a distinct group that you can somehow target with your intervention. There is some truth in that—there is no doubt that the socioeconomic divide appears here as well. If you are living in poverty and drinking excessively, you are more likely to die than somebody who is wealthy and drinking excessively. However, alcohol and alcohol misuse and harm from alcohol know no bounds; we saw that over the course of the weekend, when a couple of colleagues spoke up. Miles Briggs and Monica Lennon, both of whom lost parents to alcohol, have spoken very powerfully about the stigma of alcohol dependence and misuse.

It is important for us to have those conversations about what we can do, at population level, that would shift the curve somewhat, so that fewer people find themselves in a situation where they are drinking hazardously. A discussion around sport sponsorship, promotion and advertising is a really important part of that national conversation.

I certainly try to make that link all the time. I regularly talk about sport and its benefits for physical health, mental health and social health. I think that, since the pandemic, when we were all restricted from participating in physical activity and sport and found ourselves walking outdoors to socialise because that was the safest way to do that, there has been a general, population-level recognition of the benefits of physical activity and sport for social health. I would absolutely love it if Scotland became a nation that socialises through exercise.

Andy Sinclair might want to come in on the national outcomes in particular.

At the moment, one of the Government’s core missions is tackling poverty, particularly child poverty. It is recognised that poverty impacts all of people’s life opportunities, and participation in sport and physical activity is just one of the areas on which it impacts. It is important that we do not lose sight of that whole-system approach and the fact that, instead of just thinking about ways to fix a problem—such as getting access to sports bras for young people—we must also think about the bigger picture and how on earth we can tackle poverty and make a difference on that. That is a really important thing for us to do.

There are really good programmes that provide kit libraries. Again, the young people’s sport panel came up with some brilliant work on that. That is being led by young people who have volunteered for leadership roles in sport and been supported by sportscotland to develop ideas and projects. A kit library is one of the ideas that they were working on, so that people could access and share good-quality items of kit. We need that work to happen at scale all around the country, because there is absolutely no doubt that it is a barrier to participation.

One of the challenges with regard to participation in sport is that, if you are working three jobs and struggling to keep your head above water, it is very hard to get involved in leisure and recreation activities. Therefore, it is not just about the costs but how tough people’s lives are as they battle day in, day out, with an acute cost of living crisis, which is what we are experiencing right now. That makes life very hard for people.

That is a big challenge for the Government, and we are seeing huge efforts on that across the board. Yesterday, we saw statistics about the level of poverty being experienced by children. In Scotland, 24 per cent of children are living in poverty, but the figure for the rest of the UK is 29 per cent, so we are seeing huge efforts and some benefit, but it is not good enough. We need to do more, because living in poverty is all-consuming. It is hard to think about anything else if you are struggling to access food, heat and shelter.

Absolutely and, as I said, a lot of work is already on-going in collaboration across the board with sportscotland and local government colleagues to try to ensure that the sporting estate has adequate investment, and so that we can continue to support it. Swimming is a fantastic example of a very inclusive sport that is a brilliant life skill. Learning to swim—something that is so frightening—and succeeding at it is a brilliant educational experience, and I absolutely would not argue against investment in swimming. We have a lot of work going on to ensure that children at school can experience swimming lessons, but we are in difficult financial times and we are going to have to keep working together to ensure security for the future.

Curling is spectacular. I had a marvellous visit to Inverness ice rink, where I met a group of curlers. The sport nearly finished me off—you will remember that I said that I am a bit clumsy. [Laughter.] I did not find it easy, but there was such a supportive bunch of people and so many of them had stories to tell. Some were lifelong participants in the sport, whereas others had come to it very late.

Curling seems to be easy for older women, in particular, to get involved in. A couple of women spoke about having been widowed and said that their friends had invited them to come along. It is unbelievably social. Those women were pretty competitive, too. It was also a workout—I was sore for days afterwards. The advantages are endless.

Many of the sports are doing a lot of work on that themselves, and rugby is an excellent example of that. I am pretty sure that, as a fellow participant in the Parliament rugby team, Sandesh Gulhane will be able to contribute here, but each year we play an inclusive team, which I think is called Clan Rugby. Some of that team have hidden disabilities and some have less hidden, but the roles are adapted so that everybody can play together. It is absolutely fantastic.

Wheelchair rugby is also hugely inclusive. It is a game that men and women often play together, in mixed teams. I have a Twitter pal—I do not know her in real life; I have met her in real life, but we are mainly friends on social media—who is desperately trying to get me to go along to wheelchair rugby training on a Wednesday night. It has been a revelation for her. She has very severe asthma and has been prohibited from participating in conventional sport, but wheelchair rugby has given her the opportunity to participate again. There are ways of adapting sports so that everybody can be included.

One of the people who got a coaching prize at last year’s awards ceremony was a lady from the north-east—I do not know whether you remember her name—who does inclusive swimming coaching. She was just phenomenal; she was an absolute power who reached out to people to get them involved in her sport and who made sure that they could achieve their best potential.

There are loads of challenges and barriers, but some really incredible work is going on out there. I come back to the point about default settings and inclusion: we have to ensure that everybody can experience the benefits of participating.

It has certainly been a challenge in the past. I think that we have improved our data collection over the past few years; I will let Andy Sinclair give a fuller answer on how we have gone about doing that. However, certainly from a Government perspective, we are looking for ethnicity data as well as physical activity data in our household survey.

In relation to the data that sports governing bodies collect, we are doing a little bit better than we did in the past, when there was no data; we saw that in relation to health as well as physical activity. It was not really until the pandemic that we went out and routinely collected data that gave us the level of detail that we would like about ethnicity. Although anecdotally there were a lot of concerns about particular ethnic groups participating or not participating in the vaccine programme, we did not know the details until we got the data, so data is really important.

There is a balance to be struck around data collection—I will let Andy Sinclair tell you a little bit more.

I agree that it is frustrating that it has been 10 years. However, if you think about the taboo around menstrual blood, that has been in place for millennia. The idea that we could overturn some of the taboos and the challenges that women face around participation overnight is, frankly, wrong.

We are now having some really good conversations. I have never before known a time in my life when elite athletes have talked openly about issues such as menstruation, contraception, pregnancy and sport or menopause and sport. It is really healthy that this debate is finally happening.

In the same way that we have seen women’s health understudied, we have seen women’s participation in sport understudied. Historically, there has not been an understanding of the influence that our different physiology has on performance sport, for example, because that has not been looked at. First, women have participated less in sport. Secondly, we have been studied less, as we have been studied less in medicine.

There is now a great deal more understanding of those issues. Sportscotland is doing some particular work in the elite performance athlete field, which is really helpful. There are better conversations going on and there is more understanding and tackling of the barriers. However, it would be foolish to imagine that there is just one thing that would unlock sport and physical activity for women and girls. There are multiple barriers. As I said earlier, a sports bra is a pretty essential piece of kit and the fact that it can cost £30 to £60 is a barrier that many women and girls will not be able to overcome as they hit puberty.