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I am confident that the women’s health champion will be in place by the end of the summer. In “Women’s Health Plan: A plan for 2021-2024”, which was the first such plan to be set out in the UK—I was really privileged and proud to launch it last year—are a number of short, medium and long-term outcomes that we hope to achieve. There will be an update to Parliament in the autumn, but we are very much on track to achieve and surpass all our short-term outcomes. We have made huge progress in improving the information that is available to women on a variety of conditions including endometriosis, menopause—

But I have not finished yet, Tess—

That is actually a standard way of delivering all sorts of education—there is an intake on certain dates of the year. It is how education works in Scotland: if your child turns four, you will be able to send them to school only if their birthday falls before a certain date. If they are not four before that date, they will have to wait a whole year before they go into primary 1.

It is a function of delivering the policies, and it makes things manageable for local authorities, because they know how many children will be coming into the system over the year. Of course, some local authorities have used discretion and will fund a child’s ELC place from their third birthday, while others have chosen not to do so. I am sure that my Conservative colleague will be supportive of ensuring that such local decisions are made according to local priorities and that those powers are not taken away from local authorities.

I also emphasise that children in Scotland who are particularly vulnerable—the eligible two-year-olds who make up about 25 per cent of children in Scotland—are funded from the age of two.

It is simply a function of the delivery of education in Scotland. Local authorities can exercise flexibility; many, but not all of them, do.

So you are clearly not interested in the steps that we are taking to implement the women’s health plan.

We are working with officials to ensure that the specification for that recruitment is absolutely where we want it to be. As you will know, the national women’s health champion will have to liaise with the individual board champions who will also be put in place, and will, I think, make a significant difference with regard to the women’s health plan. We have set that out as a medium-term ambition. As I have said, we are working on the job specification and we are looking at how it will be funded and what the level of funding will be. We are considering what sort of people we think might apply and are tightening up what will be required before we advertise the position. As the First Minister set out in Parliament last week, we expect the person to be recruited by the end of the summer.

I would be delighted to share that.

Absolutely—self-sampling will help. There are a number of reasons why people do not engage in the cervical screening programme. Sometimes there are disability issues, which make it very difficult for women to access somewhere that they can actually get a smear. There are sometimes cultural issues that make it less likely that women will come forward for a smear, and more likely that they would do it at home. A big factor, which we do not often talk about, concerns women who have experienced sexual violence and how hard it is for them to undergo such an invasive test. Of course, we know that many women in society have experienced sexual violence.

There are a number of reasons why women do not come forward for cervical smears. I absolutely believe that self-testing at home will improve the situation, but it is not the entire solution. For example, our bowel screening programme is all done at home, and it is easy to do and not invasive, but we do not have 100 per cent uptake for it. We have more work to do to make it easy for people and to help them to understand why it is so important.

We now have an opportunity to eradicate cervical cancer because of the advances in smear sampling and in vaccination. The World Health Organization is very keen on developing a programme of work on that, and I am very keen that Scotland should participate in that. I would love to see cervical cancer eradicated.

Tragically, however, one of the associations that we see is that the very people who are less likely to participate in the vaccine programme are those who are less likely to come forward for a smear. That makes it very difficult. I am seeing that in my work on blood-borne viruses too. We have to work extra hard to understand why some people do not participate, and we have to go to extra lengths to reach them. Eradicating blood-borne viruses and hepatitis C, and the transmission of HIV, is within our grasp, thanks to advances in technology. We just have to work hard to find those people and ensure that we get them into treatment.

Thank you for inviting me here to discuss the regulations, which make supplementary provision to the legislation that created the no-smoking perimeters around hospital buildings. Today, I seek your agreement to giving designated officers of local authorities the power to issue fixed-penalty notices in respect of two new offences relating to the ban on smoking outside hospital buildings.

There are three new offences relating to the ban. Without this Scottish statutory instrument, local authority officers such as environmental health officers would be able to issue fixed-penalty notices only in respect of one of those three offences. The regulations will enable local authority officers to issue fixed-penalty notices in respect of the other two offences, too.

As the committee previously noted, the prohibition on smoking outside hospital buildings requires effective enforcement to ensure compliance, especially during the introduction of the 15m boundary. It was the intention that local authority officers would lead on the enforcement of the ban, much as they led on the enforcement of the indoor smoking ban. However, as drafted, the provisions for enforcement of the ban do not fully reflect that intention. That issue was identified only after the Prohibition of Smoking Outside Hospital Buildings (Scotland) Regulations 2022 were made earlier this year.

The ban on smoking outside hospital buildings will come into force on 5 September 2022. On that date, section 20 of the Health (Tobacco, Nicotine etc and Care) (Scotland) Act 2016 will amend the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Act 2005. The 2022 regulations will also come into force.

The 2005 act, once amended, will contain three new offences relating to the new ban: knowingly permitting people to smoke in a no-smoking area; smoking within a no-smoking area; and failing to conspicuously display no-smoking notices at the entrances to hospital buildings. The 2005 act will also give the police and local authority officers such as EHOs powers to issue fixed-penalty notices in respect of those offences. However, only the police will have the power to issue fixed-penalty notices in respect of all three offences. EHOs will have the power to issue fixed-penalty notices only in respect of the first offence: allowing people to smoke in a no-smoking area.

As the intention is for EHOs to lead on enforcement, it is critical that EHOs also be able to issue fixed-penalty notices in respect of the other two offences, particularly the offence of smoking in a no-smoking area. Giving EHOs that power will ensure effective enforcement of the perimeter ban.

I am sure that we all agree that hospitals should be places of health promotion where healthy ways of living are demonstrated. They should be environments in which people are protected from harm and supported in making positive lifestyle choices. The sight of people congregating near doorways to smoke outside our hospitals is incongruous to that. The no-smoking perimeter will reduce the risk of exposure to second-hand smoke near entrances and windows. It will prevent smoke from drifting into hospital buildings and protect people who use hospitals, particularly the vulnerable.

The regulations that we are discussing will help to deliver the effective enforcement of the ban that committee members called for during passage of the Prohibition of Smoking Outside Hospital Buildings (Scotland) Regulations 2022 earlier this year. They provide local authority officers with the same enforcement powers as are granted to Police Scotland, which has indicated that it would be operationally difficult for the police to be solely responsible for enforcement.

This is a team effort. We have been working with health boards, local authorities, Police Scotland and others to bring the ban to fruition. Without the additional powers, we limit the effectiveness of the restrictions even before they come into force. I urge the committee to pass the regulations and help us to stop smoking near Scotland’s hospitals.

I think that there is systemic racism in every aspect of society—to be frank, it would be foolish to deny that. Over the past couple of years, the Black Lives Matter movement has shone a light on systemic inequalities. In addition, the experience of the pandemic highlighted that members of black and minority ethnic communities were more likely to work in jobs that meant that they were exposed to the virus, more likely to live in housing that meant that the virus spread through their families, and more likely to live in poverty. Those are all systemic issues to which we cannot close our eyes—we have to acknowledge them.

That does not mean that those issues are easy to tackle. Every society has to focus on ways of tackling the systemic inequalities that have built up over centuries and sometimes—in the case of women—millennia. There is not one society in the world that does not have a challenge with inequality for women. We have to acknowledge how difficult it is to tackle those things, acknowledge that they are there, and have our eyes and minds open to ways to improve the situation.