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Yes, I can. I will take action and come back to you on that.

Link workers can be a really important and powerful tool for the holistic care that I talked about, given their understanding of the social determinants of ill health and their work on maximising income and ensuring that people do not fall through the net.

We also have to reflect on the systems that lead to that sense of people falling through the net as they move from secondary to primary care. I think that everybody will acknowledge that, at every interface in the health service—and there are many—there is a risk of communication failing and of folk being lost to follow up. As we build the social care system, we are looking very carefully at that and at how we can improve communication between health and social care. There is a recognition that such communication, even within health, is challenging at times, but we think that there are digital solutions that will make it simpler to transfer information from one area of the health service to another and potentially to areas outwith the health service—to social care and so on, and perhaps, with the individual’s permission, to third sector organisations. That said, we are definitely still a little distance away from such solutions.

Something else that might arise from those solutions is people being in charge of their own information, which would be an empowering experience. I have no doubt that, if he were here, my colleague Kevin Stewart would be talking eloquently about the many people whom he meets who are retraumatised by having to tell their story time and again. They cannot understand why, their story having been told once to somebody in the system, it does not follow them the whole way through. We are very aware of the issues, and we are working hard to improve matters and resolve them.

One of the ways in which we will build those systems better in the future is by putting lived experience at their heart. If lived experience is at the heart of policy development, we will be much more likely to get the policy right. That also holds us to account with regard to policy implementation, as we are more likely to find what is sometimes a gulf but is often a gap between what we have intended and what is actually happening on the ground. I think that the best way of ensuring that we achieve our policy aims is to be held to account on the basis of lived experience.

Does Michael Kellet have any more to say about that?

Data collection is a challenge right across the board, is it not? However, it is important to show how effective these policies are.

Community link workers are at the forefront of our efforts to tackle the consequences, and the determinants, of health inequalities. They work directly with individuals to help them to navigate and engage with wider services. We know that they are invaluable in supporting people with issues such as debt, benefits advice, social isolation and housing. They are important in connecting individuals to community resources—for example, in helping to ensure that individual folk find out about food banks and are able to take the first step to get that support, or in helping people into mental health provision—and they also provide people with on-going emotional support.

That is all quite hard to capture. We can say that we have employed X community health workers and that we have achieved the national aim but, as Tess White pointed out, that does not necessarily mean that we have national coverage. Therefore, we need to keep going back and looking at the data and the outcomes. We need to look at the differences around qualitative data rather than quantitative data and see whether we can capture the impact that community link workers are having.

I must admit that those people were a very impressive bunch, and I absolutely got the impression that there is a passionate army of social justice warriors out there, doing their best for Scotland. The presentations that they gave were really powerful. I met them shortly before the event, and I know that they are doing impressive work. They are really getting alongside people and helping them to flourish.

I guess that you and I will absolutely agree that the austerity politics that came in in 2010 has been severely detrimental to our local authority colleagues and to Scotland as a whole. Policy decisions have been made to cut the Government budget and, in turn, the Scottish Government budget. Some of those cuts have had to be passed on, but actually, when I look at the numbers, I see that local authority services have been largely protected from a lot of the cuts in comparison with local authorities in England, some of which have found themselves in a really precarious situation.

All of us—well, not all of us, but certainly you and I, deputy convener—will agree that austerity politics has been really harmful. I go back to David Walsh’s testimony to the committee, in which he said that we are paying the cost of the tragic consequences of decisions that were made some time ago. We went into the pandemic in 2020 on the back of 10 years of austerity politics, and there is absolutely no doubt that we would have fared better in the pandemic had we not been in that situation when it hit.

I am not sure that I have much to contribute on the vaping debate. It is clear that, for people who are choosing vaping as a means of smoking cessation, it is less harmful than smoking; there is absolutely no doubt about that. However, there are some concerns around the contribution to health inequalities and the attractiveness to children and young people, and there are real concerns around the role of vaping in the future, which we need to consider carefully.

The Scottish Government has a commitment to a tobacco-free generation, in contrast with the Government down south, which is committed to a smoke-free generation and is actually very pro-vaping. At the moment, I am quite open-minded, but sceptical and cynical about the role of the tobacco industry and how those cessation needs are portrayed. That is the Scottish Government view on vaping.

I move,

That the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee recommends that the Health (Tobacco, Nicotine etc. and Care) (Scotland) Act 2016 (Supplementary Provision) Regulations 2022 be approved.

Motion agreed to.

You are absolutely right. Those choices are not easy for any Government, and we see issues around health inequality affecting many countries around the world. However, the UK is fundamentally one of the most unequal countries in Europe. It stands out when we compare it to our neighbours—it is not a great record to have the second-highest gender pay gap or to have such high levels of in-work poverty. The policy choices that any Government makes will make a fundamental difference to the level of inequality that is experienced.

To pick up on your point around mitigation, the situation at the moment is that we are a devolved Government. The amount of money that we have is largely dictated by the Barnett formula—Scotland gets a population-based percentage of what it chooses to spend—so the choices that the UK Government makes on spending account for the bulk of our budget, which restricts how much money we have.

We have some levers over raising money in income tax but we do not have all the tax levers. We have no power over national insurance and, as some economists would say, it is pointless to have any power over income tax if you do not also have power over national insurance—the two almost always require to be balanced.

The other thing is that that money is for our devolved responsibilities. About 70 per cent of Scottish revenue spending is by the Scottish Government on devolved issues, and every time that we make a choice to mitigate a reserved issue, there is less money in the pot to spend on devolved issues. That is why the situation cannot go on forever—that pot is not limitless. We have devolved responsibilities on which we need to spend money, and we have limited means of raising extra money, should we choose to do something different from the UK. It is a difficult situation for any Government to be in.

Another issue, which came up time and again during the pandemic, is the inability to borrow. Most Governments around the world are struggling to balance their budgets now, but most Governments have the opportunity to borrow. The Scottish Government has to bring its budget in bang on the money every time.

I cannot give you that number at the moment.

The Scottish Government welcomes Professor Marmot’s work. We are very interested in his approach and his thoughts on how we tackle these thorny issues, which, to be frank, are not easy for any Government to tackle and resolve.

You said that the powers are largely in the hands of local authorities and the third sector. As I mentioned in my introduction, we need to work closely with partners, because it is significantly important that we all work together on the same aim. I always think of tackling health inequalities as being a golden thread that should run through all our work in the public sector.

Professor Marmot is meeting Scottish Government officials today, and I will let my colleague Michael Kellet say a bit more about that. As we are interested in Professor Marmot’s work and keen to learn from him, we have asked him to spend some time with Government officials.

We have committed to further increasing the payment to £25 by the end of the year, and we are also extending eligibility and making the payment available to all children up to the age of 16 by the end of the year. That is a further increase.

I agree that that is an extremely helpful way of getting money into pockets, but a relying on social security alone is not the only thing that we can do. Again, however, I am frustrated at our not having all the levers that could be available to us. For example, we would really benefit from having some powers over employment law, because that would allow us to ensure that work paid. As we saw a few weeks ago in the Government’s white paper on Scotland’s place within the UK, which compared us with a number of near European neighbours, we live in a very unequal country with a large income gap and a very large gender pay gap. Indeed, only one of our close neighbours has a larger gap. We have a high number of people—and a really high number of children and pensioners—living in poverty, as well as a high level of in-work poverty. It is extremely challenging to tackle and change some of those structural issues when you have only one effective lever. It is, as you have said, a very effective lever, and we will use it, but it has only a limited impact on the whole-system problem.