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You will not be surprised to hear that many of my questions will be focused on prevention and a whole-systems approach. Once again in the budget, we see a cut to sportscotland’s budget and a cut to active healthy lives funding, which seems to have been a consistent theme throughout my time in the Parliament. That is at a time when we do not have a good health record in Scotland; indeed, it is increasingly poor. Do you not recognise that cutting the opportunities that are available to our young people and to the public in general only increases the strain on our medical centres, hospitals and general practitioner surgeries? Is it not time that we took preventative health seriously?

If you measure obesity levels, type 2 diabetes levels and other such issues, I would have thought that that would give you an answer.

When I spoke to the health board and the local council in Ayrshire recently, they both said that we need to stop talking about delayed discharge and start talking about flow through the hospital. In Scotland, generally speaking, people spend too much time in hospital, and we need to deal with that. Surely that is a job for AI, which can be used to predict when people will come in the front end and out the back end. Is it not time that we looked at that, rather than just keeping on talking about delayed discharge?

The information that we have is that sportscotland’s funding is down by 2.3 per cent in real terms, and active healthy lives funding is down by 2.3 per cent. I recognise that you share an interest in getting our population active, cabinet secretary, but the reality is that, as the health budget has increased in proportional terms, at the same time, the proportion of investment in local councils has decreased and the health of the nation has decreased. The cabinet secretary recognises that many of the solutions to our poor health record in Scotland lie outside the health budget, because a lot of them are delivered by councils.

Do you recognise that there is a huge reduction in the opportunity that is available to our population because of the closure of many facilities and the decrease in physical activity opportunities in our education system?

Just as a follow-up, what we are discussing and describing are penalties for breaking the law, but the flipside to that is this: how do we educate our kids in such a way that they decide not to go down that route in the first place? Is there any complementary way in which this legislation will be backed up?

Good morning, minister and guests. I want to go back to the question of how we enforce the legislation. When I pick my daughter up from school, I am always shocked by the number of kids who are openly vaping. If you talk to the on-site police officer, he will tell you about the amount of product that he takes off kids daily—bags full of the stuff. If it were down to me, I would take a much harsher approach and ensure that the products were used only for smoking cessation.

Given, in particular, the disparity between Scottish index of multiple deprivation 1 and SIMD 5 areas when it comes to smoking, how will we ensure that the legislation is enforced under the new LCM? After all, it is not being enforced just now.

Could you, through the LCM, create further restrictions on access to the likes of vapes and who can retail them?

Good morning, minister and colleagues. My questions follow on from those asked by my colleague, Mr Sweeney. The fact that 95 per cent of people are registered with a dentist does not mean that 95 per cent of people are getting access to a dentist. We should recognise that.

What we have heard anecdotally about waiting lists and the amount of time that it now takes to get an appointment with a private dentist is another indicator that we still have a wee bit to go.

On inequalities, we read that there is a 23.5 per cent difference between the most deprived and the least deprived in the rate of obvious decay. Before the pandemic, there was a significant rise in the number of children with extractions, which is really worrying. You will be aware of my fascination with preventative medicine. On top of that, we have had Covid, exacerbating a significant problem. How are we monitoring that? Are we measuring the impact that childsmile, which is a significant intervention, is having on inequality?

I think that we would agree that investment in prevention is probably the greatest investment we can make. Is there potentially a way to expand oral health checks into secondary schools? Has any work been done on what the impact of that would be?

First, I should say, as a slight aside, that I have a wee morality issue with our trying to draw people from other countries.

I want to follow up what Dr Gulhane was saying about 40 per cent of people not having access to dentists in the past two years—or, I should say, that 60 per cent have had access—and about that being an improvement. My concern would be, as Emma Harper has said, that 40 per cent would include a high percentage of people in rural areas as well as in Scottish index of multiple deprivation 1 and 2 areas. With regard to the point that Mr Ferris made, it is important that we make policy based not on hearsay but on strict data, so how are we measuring that? Given the importance of our being able to measure where that 40 per cent of people are, so that we can target them, how is that happening?