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It is challenging, but there is precedent in that area. Tobacco—or certainly smoking—advertising has been restricted. Last year, I had the absolute privilege of meeting Billie Jean King, who talked about the Virginia Slims circuit, which was a big tennis tournament in America that was sponsored by a cigarette company. We have made strides in reducing the appearance of tobacco and smoking in sport.

Unusually, our sports minister in Scotland is part of the health department. I am a junior health minister, and I absolutely recognise the health benefits of sport and physical activity. The benefits are not just for physical health; they are for mental health, too. I am sure that we will get on to that.

It is really important to remember that when we consider how we fund sport. The challenge is in getting the balance correct. As Andy Sinclair has said with regard to getting access to sponsorship in Scotland, there is a relatively small pool of companies to fish in.

It is important that we consider those issues, particularly for those groups that are particularly susceptible to advertising, which are young people and people who are in recovery.

I think that everyone would acknowledge that we are in challenging financial times at the moment. Things are challenging for central Government—the Scottish Government—and for local government. This particular cost crisis has come on the back of over a decade of austerity politics, which has undoubtedly had an impact on our public services for more than 10 years. We therefore face a challenging situation.

The Scottish Government has not only maintained funding to local government; we have increased it in real terms, and we are very keen to continue to prioritise local government spending in our budgeting. We recognise how challenging things are. We all see that in the press at the moment. In particular, a small number of local authorities in Scotland are making decisions on the closures of particular individual facilities. Just last week, we had a debate in Parliament about the challenging situation that is faced by Perth and Kinross Council with regard to maintaining the Dewars facility. Thankfully, it has managed to maintain the funding for the Dewars facility, and it is secure for the next few months.

We are working with local government colleagues day in, day out to try to rise to meet that challenge and see what we can do to support them. Much of the current challenge is being precipitated by energy costs, so it is the energy-dense sports that use things such as swimming pools and ice rinks that are particularly struggling. Continuing to put pressure on the UK Government, which has many of the cost of energy levers, is an important strand of trying to tackle that particular challenge.

In the short term, things are challenging. In the medium term and the long term, there is work that we can do together to try to improve the estate so that there is less energy consumption in those facilities. That is not an overnight fix, but we have to do that. We have to make that transition anyway in order to meet our net zero targets. The Government is more than happy to work alongside local government on that.

We will certainly be able to interrogate it to an extent with the individual sports governing bodies. However, as I said, it is a challenging area in which to coalesce all that data and to draw conclusions, because there are so many individual aspects to the sport and to the ethnicity. It is really important that we do not make assumptions, but I am absolutely open to conversations about how we improve BAME participation. There are all sorts of immense programmes around the country that are trying to do that, so it is really important that we have the data to support them and to support investment to tackle some of the exclusion that is apparent.

As I said, conversations are going on between us and local authority partners about how we can ensure that we are able to invest in the estate in a strategic way to ensure that participation is maximised.

The challenge is that we will have consequentials from the allocation—I think that we get about £6 million in consequentials from the spend that came from that Westminster decision for England—but it goes into the block grant and the general allocation of our budget. Just because it was spent on swimming and swimming pools in England does not necessarily mean that it will be spent on swimming and swimming pools in Scotland.

We make all sorts of different decisions, not least the decision to fund the Scottish child payment, which is a uniquely Scottish benefit. It is game changing—as commentators tell us—and is clearly having an impact on the level of poverty that is experienced by children and young people in Scotland.

We will work hard with local authority colleagues to try to see what can be done, but it is certainly not automatic that because the decision was made in Westminster to invest in swimming pools we will make the same decision in Scotland. The Scottish child payment is a classic example of a different decision that we made in Scotland that is making a difference in the same area.

You are absolutely right that we do not need to wait for a national care service to make improvements, some of which are needed urgently. However, in the medium to long term, we have to consider the sustainability of our services.

I am in the same position in the constituency that I serve, in that three care homes there have closed in the past couple of months, although none of those was a social enterprise—they were all private enterprises. A vast number of beds have gone from quite a rural area. Therefore, there has been a huge impact on the availability for local people, which has a real impact on where they can be cared for at the end of their lives. When a care home in the west Highlands closes, it means that a person is likely to have to take a six-hour round trip to visit their mum in the next-nearest care home. It is a really challenging situation. The real challenge that we face in the Highlands is with staff and labour shortages.

There is no doubt that social care faces massive challenges at the moment. We need to support and nurture our service, and we need to try to make some improvements right now. That is why I say that improving the pay and conditions for social care staff must be a high priority for all of us. How we achieve that improvement will probably involve us making difficult decisions over the next few months.

Ethical commissioning and ethical procurement—the ability to have an impact on the care that we obtain through the money that we spend centrally—is the way to ensure that we continue to get that social benefit, that pay and conditions are of a certain standard for everybody who is employed in social care, and that we have an impact in local communities. As you know, and as you have said, no third sector organisations currently provide that. We want everyone in social care to use that public money for public good.

Yes, we are considering the social care providers and the third sector. I have no doubt that we will also hear formally from groups that represent the users of social care.

We are keen to hear from anyone and everyone who wants to engage with us and who feels that we need to understand their perspective. I am also keen to achieve consensus. There is an awful lot that we agree on. In my few short weeks in this role, I have found that nearly everyone agrees that the way in which we are delivering social care is not really working for all the people who are trying to access it. It also does not deliver for all the people who work in social care. Those are my two key priorities in terms of what I want to ensure that the national care service delivers.

Thank you for inviting me to discuss the proposals for stage 1 timetabling of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. I will explain briefly why the Scottish Government has proposed to extend stage 1 to after the summer recess.

The bill sets out the legal changes that the Scottish Government believes are needed to strengthen and integrate social care and social work. To make that happen, we are committed to the NCS and ensuring that the Scottish ministers are accountable for delivering consistency and quality of care and support throughout Scotland that meets people’s needs.

We have heard repeatedly from people with direct experience of social care and community healthcare that the system needs to change to address standards and consistency across the country. However, it has been very clear during the bill’s stage 1 process that, in order to deliver, we need to listen to the concerns of our key partners and stakeholders—which include, but are not limited to, local government and the unions—on part 1 of the bill. I am pleased to see that we have far more consensus on parts 2 and 3, because they cover key legal changes to support Anne’s law.

To achieve the next stage of our listening process, we will continue to work in partnership with local government, the national health service and other key partners. We are further expanding our efforts with a series of engagement events across the country this summer.

If Parliament agrees to the extension of stage 1, we will use the additional time to reach consensus and compromise on the bill. We expect the details of that to be available by the end of the summer. Therefore, I cannot comment now on what that consensus might look like or what impact that might have on the bill.

Change of this scale is unique. Additional time before the stage 1 debate will allow the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government the necessary time to consider all the evidence to best inform the development of the bill.

Of course, other NCS elements will need to be adjusted for any new timetable, such as providing the committee with a draft of the charter, which I now intend to do after the summer. An extension provides an opportunity to have a more detailed and in-depth co-design process that better reflects the needs of people with lived experience.

I will provide an update in writing to the committee before the start of the summer recess on what detail we have at that point.

In addition, I want to highlight that we are not waiting for a national care service to deliver positive change in the social care sector. As a Government, we will continue to drive forward improvements across the sector, including improving terms and conditions for our valued workforce, to make the profession attractive and bring even more talent into the sector.

I think that we still need to have the power—it still needs to be possible for people to move—but it is certainly not the wholesale aim to transfer people from local authority employment into national care service employment. If any transfer happens, there will be TUPE arrangements in place. We are also mindful of the concerns that have been raised about pensions and pension rights transferring. We are certainly keen to look at that area more closely in order to give people reassurance that they will not lose out by changing their employer.

That option is in the bill. Anna Kynaston can say more on that.

Absolutely; that is the hope. I think that I will be able to give more reassurance and more clarity on what we think the costs will be.