I have a couple of points, convener. Going back to what Alison Johnstone said, I echo the point about what evidence it is that we think we are missing. We know that, in our nation, 2,500 people die every year because they are not active enough. For a developed nation, that is a staggering figure. What evidence do we not have about that?
We know the benefits of taking part in sport and being active. Everybody will tell you. The former chief medical officer called it the
“best buy in public health” .
What is it that we think we do not know, from that point of view?
We have a suite of evidence. Mark Munro has already given some of it, and we have given evidence to the committee about the benefits of the great work that our members, the governing bodies, are doing. We also know that, in terms of creating a difference in the Scottish household survey—the information that tells us whether participation is increasing or decreasing and how we measure it at a Government level—we had a 5 per cent increase across the population of people being active to change that figure.
Do we understand what is happening? I do not know. Do I know the great work that our members are doing and what that counts as? Yes. How does that impact on evidence-based policy and budget setting? I do not know. I can tell you that I have figures that our members are giving us about people who are benefiting.
We know that 900,000 people are members of sports clubs. Going back to the great point that Ian Murray just made, I think that there are so many sets of benefits that people receive. There are benefits across the governing bodies of the 13,000 sports clubs, where people can tell you about people’s lives being changed. Some of the stories, particularly from Scottish Disability Sport, would make you cry at the lives that have been saved—not just the lives that have been changed—by the power of that. We know the impact that clubs have. We know that they are the fabric of society. We know the benefits of volunteering, which Mark Munro talked about.
I think that there is a fundamental question about the culture. Going back to another point that was made, are we about investing in numbers or in values? If we are talking about people living longer, healthier and happier lives, we know that taking part in sport and physical activity, as Julie Clark so eloquently put it, will help people find that. However, do we know that we are talking about a set of benefits that are about values and not necessarily numbers?
To return to another of Dr Clark’s points, we know that evidence shows that people who participate in sport in clubs participate for longer and more often than people who participate in other environments. To return to Mark’s point, are clubs the fabric of society? Yes. If we get more people involved, they will get so many extra sets of benefits.
On Donald Cameron’s question about capacity—absolutely. Mark’s point would be echoed across a huge number of governing bodies. How are we failing the people who want to take part in sport, for whatever motivational reasons? They want to get involved, but we do not have enough facilities, we cannot afford the facilities that are available or we do not have enough people who are able to get involved in volunteering as coaches, even though they want to be, for whatever set of reasons. Facilities are a barrier from that point of view.
The school estate continues to be a challenge within that issue. The last report on it was done in 2013, I think, at which time only a fifth of the school estate was being used in holiday time and a third in term time. Schools are local facilities that are a known, safe environment for local people that they can access, yet we know that they are not being managed, programmed or used to the extent that they could. A huge number of opportunities are available to people in local communities, but they do not know about them. How do we connect the dots, so that people know where their local jogscotland group is—where all the different sets of activities are happening across 52 sports and 32 local authority areas? People do not know. If they knew how good it was for them, how many different kinds of opportunities there are and the diversity of opportunities available for the diversity of the population, maybe people would take part.
We need to challenge those sets of waiting lists, but we also need to consider how we increase capacity by addressing the challenges that many local authorities face. However, there are school estates and ways to use what we used to call a sleeping giant. There are many sets of opportunities; we need to try to stretch things a bit further. It comes down to whether we are investing in numbers or in values.