 Dyma ni'n gael, yn cybadol, ond y mae bwysig, dros gyfer variousu i jethau a gweithreithiol rainedyn, felly mae'n cyfnod yn gweithreithiol, a'na byddai hynny'r gymaint, mae'n cael Yng Nghymru, ein bod yn ôl yn cael ei ddaig i chi hynny i'r cyfleidiau mewn cyfrydd, mae'n gweithreithiol siad wedi'i medd薰 i'r cyfrydd, mae'n gweithreithiol yn cael ei ddiffynnwysur i'r cyfnod, dweud rhywun yn cyrraedd yma. I'm very pleased to open this afternoon's debate about the committee's inquiry into the health and wellbeing of children and young people. We all want the best for children and young people. We want them to flourish and to lead healthy and happy lives. We, as a committee in particular, thought that, post-pandemic, the health and wellbeing of our children merged special attention and we're glad to have cross portfolio evidence to support this very wide-ranging inquiry. Before discussing our findings, I want to thank everyone who's engaged in the inquiry, whether it's through the call for views or as part of an evidence session. Committees could not carry out their work without you. In particular, I want to thank the children and young people who shared their personal experiences with us in informal settings and the organisations who supported them to do so, including Barnardo's, Who Cares Scotland and Cares Trust Scotland. Our inquiry considered the key issues that have the most significant impact on the health and wellbeing of children and young people, and in particular, we looked at the impact of inequality and adverse childhood experiences, issues that impact the health and wellbeing of care experienced young people and issues around mental health, including access to support and treatment. We also considered the importance of early intervention and the critical roles that schools play in that. As I've also indicated, the committee was conscious that this policy area is relevant to a number of other committees in the Parliament and other Scottish Government portfolios. I want to thank those other committees, notably Public Audit, Social Justice and Social Security committees, for their helpful input. I'm pleased that we've got so many speakers from across various committees today. I want to also thank the Children's Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Local Government and Housing for giving their perspectives and outlining the action that they're taking in their work to improve the wellbeing of children and young people. Poverty was highlighted as having an overriding impact on the health and wellbeing of children and young people, by an overwhelming amount of those who gave us evidence. Poverty is a key driver of poor health and wellbeing outcomes, adversely affecting our child's biological, social, cognitive and emotional development. We heard about the impact of the stigma of poverty on both mental health and presenting barriers to physical activities, as well as the obvious effects that hunger has on children living in deprivation. The committee welcomes the Scottish Government's on-going focus on tackling child poverty, but we must acknowledge that the rates of material deprivation are likely to continue to increase as a result of the current cost of living crisis. Much of what has been done by the Scottish Government has been swallowed up by fuel and food cost increases. The UK welfare system and austerity policies come in for a particular and significant criticism from those who gave us evidence. In addressing the overarching impact of poverty, we would like to see greater detail on how the new child poverty delivery plan by the Scottish Government will help to improve the health and wellbeing of children and young people who are currently living in poverty. We also want to see continued concerted efforts to help families to access the cash that they need to provide an adequate standard of living in the face of the challenges that I have outlined. On to the impact of the pandemic, the Covid-19 pandemic has clearly had a significant impact on children and young people's mental health. The closure of schools and nurseries and the challenges around homeschooling and care and reduced opportunities to stay active and socialise with peers have all had significant impacts. Certain groups within the young adult population have been particularly exposed to problems with their mental health during the pandemic. Those include young people with pre-existing health conditions, those who receive additional support with their learning, young carers and disadvantaged groups, such as those from minority ethnic backgrounds and LGBTQ young people. As we emerge from the pandemic, we have yet to understand the full extent of the impact of the pandemic on children and young people's mental health, physical health and wellbeing, or how long-lasting that impact will be. I therefore report on the Scottish Government's calls to ensure that the long-term impact of the pandemic remains a key consideration in the future design and development of mental health services and support. I am grateful to Gillian Martin for giving way. Gillian Martin cites the pandemic as a massive cause of mental health, but also to the acute mental health needs of Ukrainian refugees finding safe harbour in Scotland, many of whom will be children. Can she speak to their plight and how we intend to fit them into the existing waiting list that we have for child and adolescent mental health services? Gillian Martin will appreciate that I am speaking on behalf of the health and social care and sport committee. I am not a Government minister. I am certainly not a Government minister with that portfolio. It might be a good idea for him to address that to the Government, and maybe our Government representatives can pick that up. That was not factored into our, we took evidence probably just before the situation actually happened, so it is not included in the report. I hope that he understands that. As with other aspects of health and wellbeing, poverty is a key driver of poor mental health amongst children and young people. It impacts negatively on family relationships with parents who are anxious and stressed about their money situation and therefore feel unable to offer safe and secure home environment. Many young people experience shame and stigma from poverty, further impacting their mental health. That was put across to us very strongly by young people that we spoke to. Waiting times for CAMHS are a long-standing issue that predates the pandemic, and there have been recent investments to increase capacity. In some areas of the country, the pop problem persists, and there is variability across Scotland. A report concludes that reducing CAMHS waiting times must be a short term in the immediate priority, either by accelerating the implementation of a new mental health workforce plan. We appreciate that there are serious challenges across health and social care in staffing and recruitment, but we also recognise that maybe bringing a separate short-term action plan to expand the workforce to meet the existing high demand is something that the Government should look at again. We heard good examples, where waiting times are coming down, like in the Grampian area. We ask that good practice, where it exists, is communicated and replicated where appropriate across Scotland. Longer term, we need to continue to pursue a more preventative approach that further eases pressures on CAMHS by reducing the number of children and young people who reach crisis point with their mental health. On that note, prevention, schools and youth services play a critical role in the life of every young person and supporting their health and wellbeing. That includes opening up opportunities for them to be physically active and eat healthily. The committee was particularly struck by the important roles of school counsellors and how welcome that intervention is by so many people that we spoke to and other wellbeing practitioners in supporting the health and wellbeing of young people. We welcome the roll-out of school counselling services to every secondary school in Scotland. We look forward to a detailed evaluation of the impact once we have a few years behind that intervention to analyse. However, the committee did hear evidence that teachers can struggle with the necessary skills, time and resources to do any kind of effective monitoring of wellbeing of the pupils that they engage with. The wellbeing of teachers has suffered during the pandemic, because it has in so many sectors further impacting the capacity to support children and young people. A report calls for a dedicated plan to support teachers with targeted training so that they can continue fulfilling their responsibilities and giving them the necessary tools and skills to do that. Our report also highlights the growing number of children and young people in Scottish schools with additional support needs and the particular challenges that they face in their health and wellbeing. In that context, we have requested an update on the implementation of the Scottish Government's additional support for learning action plan and, in particular, its impact on the health and wellbeing of children and young people with additional support needs. During that inquiry, we heard many encouraging examples of close collaboration with youth workers and schools and the positive impact that youth workers can have in helping to mitigate some of the bigger impacts of the pandemic and supporting young people towards positive destinations and reducing pressure on services such as CAMHS. Often, youth workers can be more accessible to young people who might not want to speak to a teacher for any reason that they might have. We encourage the Scottish Government to bring forward a follow-up on the national youth work strategy to continue to embed best practice more widely across the country. I look forward to hearing the Scottish Government's response to the committee report and to listening to other contributions to this afternoon's debate. Across this Parliament, we share a commitment to improve the health and wellbeing for young people. For our part, the Health and Social Care Committee will continue scrutinising progress in this area so that all children and young people in Scotland are given the support opportunities that they need to have long, healthy and happy lives. I invite those who wish to press the request-to-speak buttons as soon as possible. I thank the committee for its inquiry and the opportunity to give evidence to the committee on the cross-portfolio report. I am grateful to the committee for its focus on the health and wellbeing of children and young people and for the opportunity to speak about the Scottish Government's work in that area. I and my ministerial colleagues place huge importance on the wellbeing of our children and young people. They are our future, and it is vital that we do all that we can to support their healthy development, their relationships and the relationships that they build and their overall wellbeing. The committee's report highlights the adverse impact of the pandemic on the health and wellbeing of our children and young people. As we recover from the pandemic, it is important that we get it right for every child and young person. That is why improving the wellbeing of children and young people is one of the three key priorities that are set out in the Scottish Government's Covid recovery strategy. The strategy sets out key actions that we are undertaking to improve the wellbeing of children and young people, including action to support more active lives, healthier lives and targeted investment in our communities and schools. We are also committed to delivering, over the course of this Parliament, the £500 million whole family wellbeing funding, which will enable the building of universal holistic support services, available in communities across Scotland, given families access to the help that they need, where and when they need it, for as long as they need it. The wellbeing of children can also be supported and promoted through the simple act of play, giving our children the fun, excitement and friendship that can support healthy development as they grow through life. In 2021, I was delighted to see so many exciting projects and activities that are funded by the £20 million Get Into Summer programme, offering enhanced opportunities for all children and young people to socialise, to play and to reconnect within their local communities and environments. I am pleased that a further £10 million has been invested into a targeted summer 2022 offer, designed to reach those school-aged children and their families who can benefit most from access to free holiday childcare, activities and food. Holiday childcare, especially over the long summer break, can be a cause of concern for families. Going forward, we will build towards embedding a holiday childcare offer into a year-round school-aged childcare system, which will help to reduce the inequality of access to a wide range of activities around the school day and in the holidays. Scotland is seen as a world leader in play through the publication of our play strategy in 2013, which has helped to deliver major improvements in how Government and our partners deliver play opportunities in our communities. We are further reinforcing that commitment to the importance of play by providing £60 million to local authorities for play part renewal over this parliamentary term. The funding will support the acceleration of local plans to improve play opportunities for all children in Scotland. £10 million of that funding has already been allocated, underpinned by a set of national principles, which ensure that we prioritise engagement with children and young people in order to meet their needs. We also recognise the huge importance of our partners in the third sector, who are delivering vital work to support the wellbeing of thousands of children and families across Scotland. Since 2016, we have been providing £14 million of core funding to this sector via our children, young people and families early intervention and adult learning and empowering communities fund. Last year alone, 117 organisations received funding as supporting over 2.4 million people. As recognised by the committee report, schools play a key role in supporting children and young people's mental health and their wellbeing. We have continued to support them to deliver this vital role. We have committed to continuing funding of £16 million per year to local authorities to provide counselling support services in all secondary schools in Scotland. The PSE delivery and implementation group have already made good progress in delivering the recommendations of the personal and social education review. We remain fully committed to ensuring that the recommendations are delivered and full. That will help strengthen our excellent education system to help to support our children and young people with the issues that they face as they grow up. The Scottish Government is acutely aware that households across the country are facing a serious cost-of-living crisis, exacerbated by the UK Government's approach to Brexit, which will, in turn, impact on the wellbeing of children and families across Scotland. Those in the lowest incomes are being hit the hardest, with many of those households likely to then carry an increased burden of debt. The recent measures announced by the UK Government are welcome, but they fall far short of what is needed to help the poorest household struggling now with the cost-of-living crisis. UK Government welfare cuts imposed since 2015 have eroded the support for people that need it most. If those cuts were reversed, that would put an additional £780 million in the pockets of Scottish households in 2023-24, helping to lift 70,000 people out of poverty, including 30,000 children. By contrast, this Government has declared tackling child poverty a national mission, and we set out wide-ranging and ambitious action through our best start brighter futures, our second tackling child poverty delivery plan. Since publishing the plan in March, we have already doubled the value of our Scottish child payment to £20 per week for every eligible child under the age of six and have increased the value of a further eight Scottish social security benefits by 6 per cent, including our three best start grants. By the end of 2022, we will roll out the Scottish child payment for eligible children under the age of 16 and will further increase the value of the payment to £25 per week for every eligible child. That will further enhance the already unparalleled financial support that we provide across the early years. By the end of this year, the support will be worth a maximum of over £10,000 for a family's first child by the time they turn six. That is over £8,200 more than is available elsewhere in the UK. Our plan commits to £10 million this year to mitigate the UK Government benefit cap as fully as possible within devolved powers, supporting up to 4,000 households with children, and we have also committed to investing up to £81 million this year to deliver a new employability offer for parents, focusing on providing holistic wrap-around support that they need to access and progress in work. Taken together, the action set out in best start of bright futures could help to lift 60,000 children out of relative poverty in 2023-24. We remain committed to incorporating the UNCRC into Scots law. In May, the Deputy First Minister set out in Parliament how we intend to address the Supreme Court judgment, bringing an amended bill back to Parliament and secure royal assent. I am delighted that we can now move forward with legislation that will require all Scotland's public authorities to take proactive steps to ensure the protection of children's rights in their decision making and their service delivery. The health and wellbeing of children and young people is a key priority, not just for the Scottish Government but for our whole society. That is something that I am passionate about, and I will continue to work with everyone to ensure that Scotland's children grow up healthy, happy, safe and loved and achieve their full potential, recognising that we need to support whole families to achieve that ambition. I have a constituent who wrote to me in desperation. It was about her 13-year-old granddaughter. She can't sleep and has regular, massive bouts of crying at home and at school. She is suffering so much from mental health problems that the family is at a loss to know what might become of her. Her teachers believe she has ADHD. It took nine months for her mother to get a virtual appointment with CAMHS. Only to be told, they had to wait to be seen by another specialist, probably in eight months' time. This young person and her family are struggling to get by. They have tried calling the crisis teams but find it is only concerned about suicide. They have also offered to go private to see a child psychologist but are told that their education board can only act on recommendations from an NHS CAMHS specialist. I thank a committee colleague for taking an intervention. I wonder whether that was part of the evidence that we took in the report, because I thought that we were supposed to be speaking about the committee's report today. Gillian Martin is here to talk on behalf of the committee. We are here to talk about not only the report but what we have been told and what we find out as we are working. As I am telling you about, somebody who wrote to me because of what work our committee was doing. This grandmother signed off her email with these words, please help, please help, we are desperate. This is June 2022. The SNP Government's own standard states that 90% of children and young people should start treatment within 18 weeks of referral to CAMHS, but this target has never been met since it was first introduced in December 14 over seven years ago. You could be forgiven for thinking that by now it would be a priority for this SNP Government, but given Tuesday's fanfare announcement to the media, it clearly isn't, is it? As we drill into today's debate, it is important to be clear that when we hone in on failures, we mean systemic failure, strategic failure, failure to plan, resource and protect people and services. We are in no way pointing finger of blame at families, professionals in schools and healthcare teams. Those working tirelessly on the front line recognise the hard work and dedication of so many at the forefront of guiding and caring for Scotland's children and young people. Our country's pediatricians, mental health professionals, campaigners, teachers, parents and guardians. These past two and a half years have been particularly tough. Many of them themselves are suffering with poor mental health, exhaustion and burnout. We need to take stock of where we're at and move forward. This Parliament must step up and do its duty to look after our young and those who support our young. We are all aware of the significant impact that the pandemic has had on the mental health of children and young people, but as our committee's report highlights, the full extent of this impact and how long lasting it will be has yet to be fully understood. However, as so many parents and teachers know for sure, waiting lists for camps are far too long by anyone's yardsticks. Notwithstanding recent investment to increase capacity, our committee has heard the extensive evidence of persistently long waits and the negative impact that it is having on the mental health of those children and young people affected. There is an ongoing need for the SNP Green Government to prioritise investment, so it is to further increase the capacity of camps and reduce waiting times. Our committee calls on the Government's— Dr Bill Hennig. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Long waits are unacceptable and we remain committed to meeting the standards that 90 per cent of patients start treatment within 18 weeks by March 2023. Can I point out to Dr Bill Hennig that the number of children and young people beginning treatment under camps is at an all-time high? The latest national performance data is showing that over 5,000 children and young people began treatment in the last quarter, the highest ever recorded. Dr Bill Hennig, I can give you that time back. And yet our waiting lists are the longest ever. And this is the problem. This is the problem with the SNP Green Government. They pat themselves on the back instead of thinking what can be done for the people of Scotland, what can be done for the children of Scotland. On this note, I am pleased that the Scottish Conservative councillors are keen to introduce trained mental health leads in every school to help improve children's wellbeing. We are also worried about poor mental health among girls. The Government do not seem to have a strategy. Neither is it tackling issues around poor body image, which really bothers so many teenagers, boys increasingly, but particularly girls. Viewing digitally altered body shapes on social media is impacting children's self-esteem. As many as one in three teenagers in the UK feel some shame about their body, with 94 per cent of girls aged 11 to 21 believing that more needs to be done to protect young people from body image pressures online. Members may wish to take a look at our campaign by Dr Luke Evans MP. Dr Evans's body image pledge calls on brand charities and organisations to promise not to digitally manipulate a person's body proportions in any of their direct images, and a bill going through Westminster would require advertisers and influencers to label images that have been digitally altered. I am keen to hear what representations he has made to the UK Government in terms of amendments to the online harm's bill that is currently going through Westminster. I am supporting Dr Luke Evans, as I have just asked the entire chamber to do so, and that is what we need to do. We need to do actual practical things to help people. The Scottish Government's commitment to increasing funding for sport and physical activity over the course of this Parliament needs to be accompanied by a national strategy with clear and measurable goals for achieving increased physical activity and improved physical health of Scotland's children and young people. The status quo is not good enough. Scotland continues to face a significant challenge from overweight and obesity, with 29% of children at risk from obesity and being overweight. This leads to significant problems. In my GP surgery, we are seeing a rise in a number of children developing type 2 diabetes, and this is related to obesity, poor diet and a lack of exercise. We need to make healthy foods more affordable and available for families, particularly those on low-income households. We also want funding commitments over the course of this Parliament to remove barriers to access sport and physical activities for these families, including play, as the Minister said earlier. I am pleased to say that the Scottish Conservatives Council is keen to reintroduce P5 swimming lessons and deliver more support for children and youth groups. Finally, the SNP Green Government really needs to tackle new and growing threat to the health of our young people. It is estimated that 10,000 Scotland children now suffer from long Covid. Those are victims of the pandemic that the SNP Green Government has forgotten. I have been calling for long Covid clinics since the summer of 2021, but we have all heard from the SNP Green Government the announcements of money, but little in the way of action. Last September, 10 million was pledged, but last month it was revised down to 3 million for this year. We understand that there is now a pilot project in Lothian involving 70 patients of all ages, which is aimed at courting support for these. It is a start, but with 150,000 Scots struggling with long Covid, we urge the Government to get a grip faster. Health and wellbeing of our children and young people have fallen by the wayside. Yes, the situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic, but we are on a downward trajectory well before March 2020. For sure, the issues to base today are complex and multifaceted, but let us not forget that our country's young people are our country's future. Finally, if I may be indulged, we all need to be aware of the fact that more and more school-aged children are using drugs. In a BBC report this week, a Glasgow-based PE teacher said that he sees at least one student every day turning up in class after taking cocaine, cannabis or amphetamines. This was echoed by a teacher in Ayrshire and also a unison representative who represents classroom assistants. Few teachers are trained in how to deal with children under the influence of drugs, but they are having to deal with growing numbers who pose a safety risk to themselves, other pupils and school staff. We need to provide help to our teachers and schools, and the declaration of interest is a practicing NHS doctor. I am pleased to open this debate for Scottish Labour. We welcome the committee report into the health and wellbeing of children and young people. It is an often overlooked and important subject that requires much greater attention, especially as a cost of living crisis looks set to grasp hold of many families for months, possibly years to come. Let us hope that it does not continue for years, but let us hope that today in this Parliament we all commit to take the necessary action to ensure that if it does, it does not affect our young people and that we must do that in every way that we can. The evidence is overwhelming. There are not just too many children in poverty in Scotland, even one is too many children, but we have as many as one in four children living in poverty. I will say that again—one in four children in this country live in poverty. In a great number of cases, those are not homes where no one works. The right-wing media sometimes would like to paint this as a picture, but those are often working families who simply cannot put food on the table. There are many factors why this is the case, but above all for me is a matter of people being underpaid and abandoned to insecure work that simply is not enough to raise a family. Change that and the mental and physical health of young people across Scotland will begin to improve year on year. Young people cannot wait for all Governments to get their act together, so we must reflect on the marked effects of deprivation on mental health as well as physical health right now and do all that we can to prevent inequality and to ensure that prevention strategies are properly funded so that our young people's health is protected right now. The committee recognised that we need to look at CAMHS services. Over 10,000 children and young people were waiting for CAMHS treatment at the end of March 2022. I know that it is said in the chamber and to the minister every week, but it appears not to be heard. Those figures are unacceptable and clearly demonstrate the SNP's long-term inability to improve mental health services overall. For eight years, the First Minister has followed the same script about her Government's priorities to young people, but young people need action, not rhetoric. That includes, as the report highlights, dealing with the low capacity in our mental health workforce. We clearly cannot wait for the SNP Government's workforce plan to bear fruit. We have to train and employ a generation of mental health workers on good wages that can commit their working lives to help to tackle the problem. Scottish Labour is calling on real investment in mental health services to bring down waiting lists and put specialist and every GP practice. I reiterate that call today for the Scottish Government to prioritise this and do more. On those benches, we recognise that many young people often have unpaid caring responsibilities, as was mentioned in the report. Despite that being in the report, we see that there is no real strategy in Scotland for unpaid carers, particularly young carers, and we had heard a lot of evidence. Those young carers desperately need restoration and expansion of respite services, with entitlements to short breaks and wellbeing services as standard. Those young people are entitled to those, and we should press to make sure that they are available across the country. Indeed, it has been raised with me, and we must also continue to analyse and report on the impact of Covid-19, as has been mentioned, particularly the impact of long Covid on the health and wellbeing of children and young people. Consider what challenges this is already creating and will create in the future and make sure that we are introducing that to any policies that we bring forward. All of the reforms above will help us to focus on prevention and early intervention in the immediate term, although wider economic change is, I believe, inevitable and essential. The cost of living crisis is rapidly exposing how thin our safety net is, and in my opinion, the entire concept of employment and the way in which the state protects and assists its most vulnerable needs to be revisited to create something fit for the 21st century. There is no reason why a wealthy and prosperous country like Rowan should even have to worry about that problem. It should be the first order of every day in every Parliament across this country, yet, under successive Governments of all stripes, not enough has been done. That has to stop. We all have to do more. I am sure that I speak for my party and many people around the country, others in the Parliament, when I say that the current state of provision is well below that, which is acceptable, and we will not continue to put up with it. The last Labour Government did go some way to reducing child poverty, but our understanding and methods to combat it have moved on since then, certainly. I thank Karen Mocken for taking an intervention. We have been talking about poverty a lot and tackling poverty a lot. Helping salaries and supporting people is one of the ways to do that. Would she agree that one of the ways that we could tackle poverty was fully devolving employment law to this country here? Thank you for the intervention. The member will know that we have called for a number of measures to come into place, but, in actual fact, when we debate those issues, what I would like is for the Government, for the members on the back benches, to come forward with plans that we can actually do now, because you often tell us that change takes a long time, so let's use what we have here and now to do everything that we can to ensure that children and young people do not live in poverty. The last Labour Government did go some way to reducing child poverty, but our understanding and methods to combat it have moved on since then. We are not resting, which is why, in Scottish Labour, we have a focus plan, which is a child poverty commission at its heart, to develop real plans to tackle child poverty, we hope, once and for all. Let me reiterate, as I have said at the start of the debate, if we want to alter the trajectory of young people's health and wellbeing over the long term, the only solution is sustainable investment in services, and this Scottish Government must do more to commit to mental health services in particular. We must look at employing more qualified staff on good salaries. Again today, this Scottish Government must do more than that. Above all, wiping away this low-pay, insecure world of work that so many families barely earn a living on, all Governments must do more in that regard. I thank my colleagues from the Health and Social Care Committee for their work on their report, and I look forward to ensuring that the action recommendations within that are delivered. I hope that the committee members will see themselves in the important role of holding the Scottish Government to account. Thank you, Ms Mocken. We do not now really have any time in hand, so members will have to stick to the speaking allocations and accommodate any interventions within that. I now call Alex Cole-Hamilton for around six minutes. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. As I rise, can I extend my apologies to the chamber, as I will be called away briefly? I will be back for closing speeches, however. Presiding Officer, debates like this are why I am in politics. As a youth worker of 19 years and a children's charity worker of 13 years, this is really what keeps me up at night. I am very grateful to the Health and Social Care Committee for bringing this important debate to the chamber today. The committee's report offers much food for thought, but I would like to focus as many have already on the state of Scotland's child and adolescent mental health services. In recent months, there has been a notable uptick, as I am sure many other MSPs will attest within our mailbags on the subject of unfulfilled child and adolescent mental health needs. That is byproduct in large part down to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact of lockdown isolation, but it is also symptomatic of the fact that we have not been getting this right for a long time. Many have the same story to tell. It is a young person who is brave enough to ask for help and then having to wait an acceptably long periods of time to get it. Some of the stories are harrowing, and many of our children and young people are suffering terribly without the support that they desperately need. Problems that already existed before the pandemic have been heightened and exacerbated by it, and that is small wonder. Our young people have had to face the deep uncertainty about their future, whilst being denied normal access to education, prevented from socialising with their peers, all at a time of deep societal mass anxiety. However, while the pandemic has had an undeniable impact, it would be wrong to ascribe all the failures in the calm system to it. As Audit Scotland has highlighted, mental health care for children and young people was already struggling to meet and keep pace with demand before any of us had heard the word Covid-19. To illustrate how dire the situation is, and we have heard some of that already, latest statistics from Public Health Scotland show that the Government's own 18-week mental health waiting time target was being missed for almost 30 per cent of children, with 1,600 children and 4,400 adult waiting more than a year for treatment. I heard the Minister say that more children are being seen than ever before, but the unmet need is what we really need to debate and come to grips with, and this is where the Government has fallen woefully behind. Presiding Officer, I would ask you to think about that. What does that mean? That chunk of time in a young person's life I gladly give way to Gillian Martin. In our evidence, we found that it was a variable picture across Scotland. Would you agree that we really need to look at this health board by health board and where good practice and waiting times are coming down and actually replicate that good practice and actually share that so that we can learn from who's getting it right? Because there are areas of Scotland that are getting it right. Alex Cole-Hamilton Well, Gillian Martin is certainly right in talking about the geographical variability of this, but that isn't something to be pleased about. If we look at rural and remote areas, particularly the paucity of inpatient tier 4 beds for children anywhere north of Dundee, it's a scandal. It's really something that I think the Government needs to reflect on. In evidence, the latest CAMHS workforce figures show a fall in the number of staff working in vital specialist in patient settings, like I just described. The professionals charged with supporting young people are clear that the current system is inadequate. It's leaving children to suffer without the help that they need and parents heartbroken, powerless to help. It has a demonstrable impact on their wellbeing as well. While the reality of CAMHS is that you don't get a referral unless your need is deemed critical, which means that actually the demand for these services may well be being vastly understated. We are faced with an unprecedented demand for the services and fewer staff to meet that demand. Successive health secretaries have spent years trying to spin a positive tale even as waits for young people get longer and longer. They should take a long, hard look at themselves for that. I have challenged the First Minister about this on countless occasions, and yet we still find ourselves in this dreadful position. Presiding officer, this became a crisis many years ago, and it is sustained to this day as a crisis, one that this Government seems wholly unequal to coming to terms with. Liberal Democrats have long championed the cause of Scotland's mental health. We secured £120 million for it in last year's budget, and we put forward a motion backed by the Scottish Parliament to declare a national mental health emergency. We believe that everyone should have access to good local mental health services, and we have also called for mental health first aiders at every stage of education. That starts, Presiding Officer, with having a trained talking therapist, a councillor available in every school in Scotland. The Government should also lower the referral bar for young people from deprived communities, as we know that those at risk of multiple adverse experiences need access to early support. We still do not know who they are, we do not know where they are. We need to capture that information and get help and healing to them first. There are changes that should be made to the CAMHS system now. There should be a single point of contact for CAMHS waiting lists so that GPs and families can understand whether remaining on that list offers a real opportunity of timely care. The Government needs to act. As the committee report recommends, it needs to provide a detailed timeline to clear CAMHS waiting lists. We need action, batched up by fresh funds for mental health services and more local and accessible services and practitioners. Instead, in its spending review, the Government failed to provide any detail at all on how it intends to meet its manifesto commitment to ensure that 1 per cent of the front-line healthcare budget is spent on CAMHS by 2026, or how it will ensure adequate staff for CAMHS itself. Presiding Officer, what is most troubling about these delays in treatment is that some of young people's mental health will deteriorate unnecessarily while they wait for that treatment. Many of them are reaching a crisis point that could have been avoided, and that is heartbreaking. When it comes to the health and wellbeing of young people, Scotland has a chance to do things differently. In recent years, our young people have made serious sacrifices in order to keep others safe. It is time that we recognise that and met that with action. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Cole-Hamilton. We now move to the open debate, and I call, firstly, Siobhan Brown. For around six minutes, Ms Brown, you will be followed by Megan Gallacher. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Let me begin by thanking the Health and Social Care and Sports Committee for their inquiry and also bringing this debate to the chamber today. As my colleagues in the Covid-19 recovery committee will agree, the pandemic has had a massive effect across all areas of public life, and, as we have heard from the committee, children and young people's health and wellbeing have had no exception. On Monday, with many other parents, I attended my youngest daughter's first sports day, and I am pleased to report to the Chamber that she came first in the egg and spoon race. Needless to say, she doesn't take her sporting abilities from myself. My eldest also had her school-leading prom last week, and I can't tell you how lovely it was to attend both events and see some sense of normality return for our kids, but my point in bringing this up is that small events in a person's life like this contribute massively to their wellbeing. To be surrounded by friends and family and celebrating together, and that's unfortunately what our young people have largely missed out on for the past two years. During the pandemic, we asked Scotland's young people to do what none of us had done before when we were their age, give up all sense of normality. We asked them to stay inside, stay away from their friends and do their school work from home. This was necessary at the time, but it didn't make it any easier. We should all be saying a big thank you to our young people for the sacrifices they made for the greater good. Our children are our future. I welcome the committee's recommendation that the long-term impact of the pandemic remains a key consideration in future design and development of mental health services and support for children and young people. It's never been more important to look after our mental health and I welcome that the Scottish Government is providing record investment to improve the nation's wellbeing and improve our mental health services. The Scottish Government's mental health transition and recovery plan investment is £120 million, is the single largest investment in mental health in the history of devolution. I also welcome in the committee's report the mention of healthy eating and obesity, more specifically the link between poverty and poor diet. I don't think we should beat around the bush, but childhood obesity is too high in Scotland, and we do need to do more to combat that. I welcome that Scotland is leading the way to expand access to free school meals so that more children can feel the benefits of nutritional meals during the week. When I last visited South Ayrshire Food Bank, volunteers did tell me that some people who use the service needed a bit more information on healthy eating and cooking, so I think we could look at areas of improvement in our home economics in our schools to counteract this. We all know the impact living in poverty can have on the health and wellbeing of Scotland's most vulnerable and tackling poverty is one of the Scottish Government's priorities. Despite the rapidly rising living costs under the Tory watch, the UK Government plowed ahead with the cruel £20 cut to universal credit, which financially impacted over 60,000 families in Scotland and their children. This comes on top of a decade of enforced Tory austerity, changes to the benefit system and, as we are all aware, a rapid increase in the use of food banks. Best start, Bright Futures, is a Scottish Government's tackling child poverty delivery plan from 2022 to 2026, and it sets out a bold action to drive forward progress to tackle child poverty. A recent child poverty action group report shows that the cost of bringing up a child into Scotland is lowered by 31 per cent, equivalent to £24,000, once a child payment is doubled and the expansion of free school meals is delivered. Scotland has the lowest level of breakfast provision of all four UK nations, and the lowest number of pupils per school accessing breakfast provision on average each school day. Can you explain why that has been allowed to unfold under the SNP Government? Yes, I thank you for your scripted question. Could both members address points through the chair rather than addressing you? Yes, we are dedicated to expanding free breakfast throughout our school. The newly doubled child payment, together with the three best start grant payments and the best start food, will be worth more than £10,000 by the time a family's first child turns six and £9,700 for a second or a subsequent children. The actions that the Scottish Government is putting money in pockets of the families now, which, as we know, due to the cost of living crisis, is desperately needed. The policies and funding that the Scottish Government is putting in place across all areas are vital in achieving our goal of making Scotland the best place for children to grow up. Progress is being made, and I know that every MSP sitting in this chamber, regardless of political colour, shares his ambition. I just like to highlight today's news that South Asia leads Scotland with 97.6 per cent of school leavers going into positive destinations, which is work, training or further study. A 2019 report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF made an interesting point. No country in the world is providing the conditions for children to live both a healthy life and providing an environment that's fit for the future, meaning that, while the richer countries may invest into children's health, they're also producing record amounts of CO2, which will affect our children all over the world in years to come. Demonstrating that, as with everything else in politics, the health of our children must be a multi-faceted approach. We just can't tackle it from one policy area. It also shows that the challenges that we are facing in Scotland are not unique. They are being experienced all over the world, even before the pandemic began. If we continue to make children's wellbeing our priority, we can get it right for every child, making a country that is healthy, nurtured and active. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important committee debate, and I would like to offer my apologies in advance as I'll need to leave the chamber before the conclusion of contributions this afternoon. I can also thank the Health, Social Care and Sports Committee for publishing the report that makes 99 recommendations for this Government to consider to improve the wellbeing of young Scots. It now falls on the Scottish Government to seriously consider those recommendations and to make much neared improvements. In March of this year, the Scottish Parliament reinstated its commitment to keeping the promise and improving outcomes for care experienced young people. While that was welcomed, the SNP ignored calls from this side of the chamber to acknowledge the concerns raised by various charities and third-party organisations that work directly with young people in care. What I found upsetting was that, during the minister's opening remarks, there was no reference to care experienced young people, not one. That is by organisations and young people presenting evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee. The member will recognise that I have only a limited amount of time to speak, and what I did reference in my speech was the whole family wellbeing fund, which is specifically to fulfil the promise. However, given that the promise is one of the Government's flagship policies, and given that one of the recommendations from the Health and Sport Committee, you would think that more focus would have been given on that today in your opening remarks. On top of that, more concerns have emerged since the SNP's handling of the implementation of the promise, outlining the lack of progress made since the independent care review that was initially launched in February 2020. I recently had the opportunity to meet with Fiona MacFarlane, the head of oversight of the Promise Scotland, to discuss the work that the board is undertaking to ensure that the promise is rolled out. Fiona has been critical of the progress made by the Government in the last two years, admitting that young people's lives will not have improved, and in some instances may even have got worse. A study conducted by the Promise Scotland oversight board found that the pledge made by the Government in 2020 was more of a commitment rather than a true implementation plan. One of the main flaws within the Government's promise policy relates to the lack of meaningful data and a true understanding of young people in care. For example, the study shows that between 2019 and the first nine months of 2021 59 young people died comprising of 17 children in care, seven in continuing care and 35 in through care and after care. One death of a young person in care is one death too many, and it is heartbreaking that the data on the lives of these young people have not been properly recorded. Failure to understand young people not only makes recording data more difficult, it also fails to provide authorities with important information that could prevent future deaths. Although MSPs can accept that the promise has been described as a 10-year transformational change, those problems have existed for years. The SNP is failing young people in care by not urgently addressing the glaring issues of its implementation of the promise, and that must change. I have mentioned that before, but we are corporate parents and it is our responsibility to make sure that we are listening to young people who have experienced the care system to ensure that the promise can get back on track. I would be grateful for the minister's commitment today to ensuring that appropriate detail will be recorded for young people in care, as that was previously rejected by the Scottish Government. Before I move on this afternoon, I would like to raise a local issue that was brought to my attention by a campaigner of Who Care Scotland. Despite council tax being abolished for care leavers five years ago, South Lanarkshire Council does not provide any information on reductions per care leavers. It is not even listed in the Am I Eligible section of the forms. Other councils such as Highland Council have a whole section on exemption for care leavers, but no mechanism for people to select this option. The individual that I interacted with in social media stated that policies do not matter if they are inaccessible after four years, and if there is ever a quote to take away from today's debate, that should be one. I want to add that there are good examples of best practice such as Edwin Brinsterlin Council, who have displayed a clear page for care leavers, offering a 25 per cent discount to other household occupants. In Aberdeen City Council, they have gone a step further and extended offer to care experience young people who were in kinship care and may not admit the definition of a care leaver. However, that highlights the inconsistencies of support being offered by councils to care leavers and care experience young people. It should not be a postcode lottery and I do hope that COSLA and the Scottish Government will work together to ensure the health and wellbeing of care experience young Scots and proves across all levels of government. I was hoping to cover mental health and the mental health pandemic that is affecting our young people today, but I realised that I am quickly running out of time and understand that this has been articulated by many other MSPs in the chamber so far this afternoon. To conclude, the issues that I have covered today are just a few of the recommendations that are set out in the report published by the Health and Social Care Committee. It bears the feelings of the SNP Scottish Government and the necessary measures that it must take to ensure that young people across Scotland receive the necessary help and support that they need. However, the only way that the Scottish Government can fully focus on the day job is if it drops its obsession with breaking up the United Kingdom. Presiding Officer, I am very grateful to be speaking today. The health and wellbeing of our young people is central to our nation's future. Reflecting on the inquiry into the health and wellbeing of young people this year is important to ask the question, what does it really mean to be a healthy young person? Healthy can mean different things to different people, but generally it is a state of positive physical, mental and social wellbeing. Simply put, happy, thriving, flourishing. In this times where the Scottish Government is getting it right for every child, the GIFEC policy approach seeks to ensure that all the young people are safe, they are healthy, they are achieving, they are nurtured, they are active, they are respected, responsible and included. As a committee, we look to the barriers to achieving positive health and wellbeing. In time and again, we heard about how poverty harms our children and young people. So far today, much of the debate has already focused on poverty, and poverty will be my focus too, and I make absolutely no apology for that. During oral evidence sessions, Heather Conley, the British Psychological Society, among others, concluded that the biggest issue affects the health and wellbeing of children is poverty. That message was echoed again and again, with Aberlore highlighting the impact of poverty on families as a whole, and reminding us that children only spend around 15 per cent of their time in school. They said that that is why so much of the third sector of work to support children's learning is focused on family wellbeing, so help with challenges around family relationships, struggles with debt, domestic abuse—these are some of the examples. The committee heard worrying evidence on how poverty damages health and wellbeing, and that the pandemic has hit the poorest, the very hardest. Yet, despite all the evidence, how the UK Government plowed ahead with a deadly £20 cut to universal credit that pushed a further 20,000 children into poverty—a really callous and disturbing decision. As the cost of living crisis pushes even more families into poverty, it is our children's health and wellbeing that will pay the price again. Child poverty is a scourge. It means growing up without access to good, decent, nutritious food. It means missing out in sport and other healthy activities. It means saying no to fun with your friends. It means home-loving conditions that strain family relationships and make it really difficult to study and to learn. Hungry children from cold, damp homes with parents who are battling poverty every day will struggle to learn, grow and thrive in our classrooms and in our society more generally. Poverty is a clear and undeniable negative impact on the mental health of whole families, and it often leaves so many children feeling stigmatised and isolated, as we have already heard today. In many struggling families, with the heartbreaking situation of children that are looking out for their parents, they are effectively shouldering the responsibilities of poverty. We cannot ignore those stories of kids hiding their school triplets or avoiding social get-togethers with their friends because too often they have fun costs money and do not want their parents to feel like they are letting their children down. Those stories are a clear manifestation of the impact of poverty on our young people's wellbeing. Of the 99 recommendations that we made as a committee, today I am highlighting two, specifically, that I believe are the absolute cornerstones to enhancing children's health and wellbeing. Firstly, there was recommendation 32 that calls on the Scottish Government to further prioritise spending to mitigate the adverse impacts of poverty. Secondly, there was recommendation 42 that states how tackling poverty must break the heart of an effective strategy to improve the health and wellbeing of children and young people. During committee evidence, Heather Conley again from the British Psychological Society told the committee, and I am quoting here, if we do not target poverty and child poverty, all the other money that we are spending in services in early intervention will not work as well. People will not be able to engage with those services because they will still be too worried about getting food on the table or getting clothes for their kids in order to go to school. They will not feel safe and secure or a sense of hope that things will get better. Therefore, they will be unlikely to engage with services or professionals. That is why the Scottish Government continues to invest in actions to tackle the bite of poverty in 2022, as we have heard already today. I will highlight again that more than 100,000 children have already been supported by the Scottish child payment, and I welcome the further roll-out to 400,000 children by the end of this year. Briefly, it is also worth mentioning that this week there were encouraging figures that came out as well for positive destinations for school leavers. The gap is narrowing. Presiding Officer, as a devolved Government, in absence of fiscal autonomy, we are confined to balance in public finances without the ability to borrow. However, as Audit Scotland's recent report acknowledges, the Scottish Government has successfully delivered existence to social security benefits and introduced complex newbans. That includes the Scottish child payment, child disability payment and adult disability payment. That is in challenging circumstances amid a pandemic. Audit Scotland highlighted that as a significant achievement, and we must continue to step up to such challenges because our young people are counting on us to make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up. Finally, Presiding Officer, the First Minister fired the starting gun on a new campaign for Scottish independence yesterday and will set out a vision over the coming weeks and months. That vision will have to tackle poverty and inequality at the absolute centre, and it is a vision that could dramatically improve the life chances of our young children. I can think of no better case for independence than finally being fiscally free to invest in strategies that will lift all children out of poverty and thereby enhance their health and wellbeing. I now call on Paul Sweeney, who will be followed by Emma Harper, for around six minutes. It is a pleasure to contribute to today's debate, and I would like to start off by paying tribute to all colleagues on the health, social care and support committee. It is not a committee that I sit on, but it is one that I keep a close eye on due to the importance of their work. I do not intend to take the full time available today, and I would like to try to keep my remarks focused on the crisis facing our child and adult mental health services. In Scotland, by highlighting the real-life challenges and consequences that many of our constituents live with as a result, the report on the health and wellbeing of children and young people highlights many challenges, but the starkest of all for me was the pressures being paced on CAMHS services across Scotland. The most recent public health Scotland data shows that, at the end of 2021, there were almost 10,500 children and young people waiting to be seen by CAMHS. Of that number, 46 per cent were waiting over the 18-week target set by the Government. That is an extraordinary number of children and young people who are frankly being failed by the system. We know that that target is vitally important, with social work Scotland stating in its submission to the inquiry that long delays in accessing treatment can lead to more entrenched difficulties by the time a child or young person is finally able to access the service. There is no denying that the impact of the pandemic has been hugely significant. The report acknowledges that, but that, if anything, makes it all more important that we get on top of it and ahead of this problem now. We can talk about statistics all day, and I am sure that it will be done with the best of intentions, but we cannot shy away from the fact that there are real-life consequences to these CAMHS delays. Indeed, I was recently happy to take an intervention. I am very grateful to Paul Sweeney for taking my intervention. Recommendation 11 points to an area where there has been a turnaround in dealing with the waiting times in Grampian. I made a similar point to Alex Cole-Hamilton. We need to look at where there is best practice. There has been a turnaround and replicate what is working elsewhere across the country. I absolutely recognise that, and I think that we need to have much more robust mechanisms in place to recognise where performance is good and how that can be quickly cross-pollinated into different health boards and in different areas. There is an administrative lag in the bureaucracy across Scotland that is fragmented. That is definitely a constructive suggestion about how we move forward. I completely commend that idea, and I encourage the committee to take that up and press that with the minister. I hope that the minister will hear the member's comments and address that in the closing speeches. I refer back to the particular constituent case that troubled me so much. I was contacted by the constituent regarding his 13-year-old daughter, his daughter's care experience and was adopted by the family around eight years ago. The pandemic has had a profound effect on her. The lockdown, lack of school routine and normal socialising led to some challenging behaviour at home. So much so that the family sought a CAMHS referral on 2 June 2020. Over two years later, there is still no timeline or indication of when she will be given access to the services that she needs. In April 2021, the family's GP made another referral due to deterioration in her mental condition and a perceived increase in risk. That particular crisis led to an emergency CAMHS appointment, but the assessment was that she should remain on a routine waiting list. Heartbreakingly, she wants to engage with CAMHS and simply cannot understand why she is being made to wait so long. As the chamber will appreciate, this is not only having an adverse impact on my constituent's daughter, but the challenging behaviour that she continues to display at home means is having an adverse impact on the whole family, one of whom has been sitting her in that five exams in recent months. My constituent is just one of the parents who find themselves in this position, and his daughter is sadly one of thousands of kids waiting for vital treatment, and it's clear that in many circumstances this 18-week target for treatment is nothing more than a cruel pipe dream. In this case, that 18-week target has not been missed marginally. We are now 106 weeks down the line, almost six times longer than that 18-week target, and the family are no further forward, no light at the end of the tunnel. Deputy Presiding Officer, the longer we continue to shirk this issue, children and their families will continue to be failed by the system. I would ask the minister to engage with this issue constructively and would request that they look closely at my constituent's cases as a matter of urgency, and I'm happy to share the details with them if they agree today to intervene and insist that this case is resolved with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. Fundamentally, we need to do much better, because we are failing thousands of children across Scotland who desperately need our help. As a member of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, I welcome the opportunity to speak about how important it is that we value the health and wellbeing of our young people here in Scotland. I thank colleagues and everyone who contributed to the inquiry. Our committee's report speared or inquired into our range of issues and a number of areas that we covered. It is worth reading the report, but I will focus my contribution specifically on three of the areas that I have actively been involved in—supporting, folk experience and eating disorders, health and wellbeing support for young people in school and education settings and on poverty. A number of submissions to our inquiry highlighted a recent rise in the demand for young people with need and support with eating disorders. The pandemic has exacerbated that with a reported increase of 86 per cent in referrals to specialists between 2019 and 2021. People with eating disorders typically develop severe physical health problems and overall qualitative life has been estimated to be as low as in symptomatic coronary heart disease or severe depression. Access to the right treatment and support is life changing and early intervention provides the best chance of recovery. In our report, we call on the Scottish Government to outline what it is doing to respond to the recommendations of the national review of eating disorder services, including details of any funding that is put in place to support their implementation. I welcome that. During the member's debate that I led on eating disorders awareness week, the minister did outline the Government's response to the recommendations. The minister outlined that the Scottish Government's transition and recovery plan is backed by a £120 million recovery and renewal fund that will help to transform eating disorder services with a renewed focus on the prevention and early intervention. Additionally, the Government has announced £5 million to implement the recommendations of the national eating disorders review, as well as providing over £300,000 of funding to the fantastic beat eating disorder charity to help support them to continue in their vital work. I welcome those steps and I ask the minister in closing for a commitment that the Government will continue its support to beat going forward. Turning to health and wellbeing support in schools, in our report, the committee recognises the central and pivotal role schools have to play in coordinating a whole systems approach to supporting the health and wellbeing of children and young people. Counseling can help children and young people to explore, understand and overcome issues in their lives to improve resilience, as well. In Dumfries and Galloway Council, in my south Scotland region, it has received national recognition, including from young Scott, for its innovative approach to school councillors. The local authority has provided access to counselling education to the youth inquiry team, de-stigmatising the language used around the word councillor and encouraging more young people to access the support that should they require it. I welcome the action and encourage other local authorities to look at the example of DNG council, which seeks to improve services with the aim to achieve the best possible health and wellbeing outcomes for young people. I will follow up on the outcomes and the measurements of the goals and aims of this adopted approach. Against the backdrop of a cost of living crisis, the pandemic, Brexit and harmful UK Government welfare policies, the Scottish Government continues to mitigate cruel Tory cuts that harm our young people. We know the impact of living in poverty and that it can have really severe issues on health and wellbeing, which is why tackling child poverty, as our committee asks for, is rightly a national mission for the Government. Indeed, our committee notes in the report that we have been struck by the volume of evidence that it has received showing the overriding impact of poverty and deprivation that it has on health and wellbeing of children and young people. I suspect that the Opposition will not like to hear that, but it has to be accepted that this poverty is largely down to the UK Government, as Mary Glasgow from children first indicated during our inquiry. Despite the rapidly rising living costs under the Tories watch, the UK Government plowed ahead with a cruel £20 cut to the universal credit, pushing 60,000 Scots, including 20,000 children, into poverty. Scottish Government analysis found that reversing key UK welfare reforms made since 2015 would bring around 70,000 people out of poverty in Scotland, including 30,000 children in 2023-24. The total cost of reversing that in other reforms, including two-child limit, the removal of family element, the benefit freeze, the changes to the universal credit work allowances and the taper rate, would be around £780 million per annum. Finally, that is the words that my colleague Christine Grahame used in a recent debate in the chamber. She said that she was fed up talking about mitigating Tory policy. I am absolutely fed up of mitigating Tory policy, too. It is time that the independence announcement, the move towards it, the full fiscal autonomy that Stephanie Callaghan mentioned in her contribution, is time that we are basically taking forward the actions that will help support the mental health and wellbeing of all our citizens, including our children and young people in Scotland. I welcome the debate on the health and wellbeing of children and young people and would like to thank all those who gave evidence to the committee. During committee sessions, we heard a wealth of evidence about how the pandemic has impacted children and young people and the services that care for them. It has been a turbulent two years for young people who have seen their education disrupted, their social lives restricted and, unfortunately, in some cases, their loved ones becoming very ill. In the wake of multiple lockdowns, it is vital that we examine the many ways in which young people have been affected and what that means for their health. The committee report recommends that the Scottish Government and other key stakeholders should continue to monitor the longer-term impacts of schooling restrictions imposed by the pandemic on the health and wellbeing of children and young people, in particular those who have struggled with or missed out on important milestones in their education. That must be prioritised to reduce the risk of young people falling through the cracks and disengaging from services. During evidence, we heard from many witnesses about how Covid has impacted engagement with young people and their families and carers. In particular, we heard about the difficulties that schools have had in engaging with parents after remote learning, with schools and nursery staff reporting that they were not having the same depth of engagement with many families when communication was not face-to-face, and work must be done to re-establish those relationships. Alongside improving engagement, we need to ensure that services are there to help young people when they need it and that no one is turned away. Long waiting lists for CAMHS were frequently highlighted to the committee. With Mary Glasgow from children first stating that, and I quote, we need to fill that gap between universal services and very specialist services such as CAMHS, with that whole family support and community-based offer that any parent or carer without stigma or shame can reach out to and access quickly to get the support that they need. As well as improving waiting times for CAMHS, we need to expand provision in the community so that people can access support without referral to specialist services where appropriate. That is why the Greens and the Scottish Government, as part of the Beatt House agreement, committed to doubling the budget for community-based mental wellbeing services for children and young people to £30 million. It is also important that community services are properly equipped to help children and young people. For example, link workers play a vital role in GP surgeries, connecting people to local resources, and they must have the training and resources that they need to help children and young people and connect them with person-centred dedicated support, which takes account of the particular issues and challenges that they face. The committee also heard about children and young people being subjected to a postcode lottery, with the NSPCC highlighting that we need to urgently understand what local capacity is across health boards. As well, there are examples of good practice, as we have heard from Gillian Martin earlier. Levels of provision are variable, and there is no clear national picture. The committee report recommends that the Scottish Government commissions further research on the prevalence of mental health conditions in children and young people and maps the levels of existing capacity across mental health services. With some of the pressures related to the pandemic that I laid out earlier, we know that there is greater unmet need. We must determine the level of need and what support is already available if we are to properly plan services for the future. That leads me to my next point, which is about data on health inequalities. During an evidence session, Dr Mary Stark from the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health said, that the prevalence of mental health difficulties is probably much higher than we realise. We often see only the tip of the iceberg, but a lot of children could do with more support. We need a better understanding of the barriers to accessing support that young people face. We do not know, for example, whether marginalised groups are more likely to receive a rejected referral. Improved data on that will aid our understanding of why some people are not getting the help that they need. It is pride month, so it will be remiss to not mention LGBT young people's experiences. We need to ensure that health services are able to help LGBT young people with the particular issues that they face. Yesterday, it was revealed that hate crimes against transgender people rose 87 per cent in the past year. That appalling figure reveals the discrimination and hate that trans people, including young trans people, have to face every day, and it would be foolish to imagine that that will not take a toll on their mental health. We know that 40 per cent of LGBT young people consider themselves to have a mental health problem, compared with 25 per cent of all young people in Scotland. It is vital that services are properly equipped to deal with that and that there is an awareness and understanding of the specific challenges that LGBT young people face and how they impact their health. According to the Mental Health Foundation, being LGBT is not in itself a risk factor to developing a mental health problem, but that some LGBT young people are more likely to develop a mental health problem due to an increased risk of exposure to certain risk factors than their non-LGBT peers, such as discrimination, loneliness, homelessness and poor access to health services. The Mental Health Foundation also highlighted that the pandemic has increased waiting times for young trans and non-binary people seeking to access gender identity clinics, which could severely impact their mental wellbeing. Progress is being made to reduce waiting times and I welcome the Public Health Minister's commitment to improvement, but they are still too long. We need to ensure that trans and non-binary young people are receiving compassionate, informed and understanding support from health services while waiting for an appointment. To conclude, children and young people have had a very difficult two years and there is much work to be done to improve their health and wellbeing and ensure that they get the help that they need when they need it. The report sets out a clear way forward and I, too, would like to thank everyone who gave evidence and helped the committee with its work. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and many thanks to the Health and Social Care Committee for bringing this debate to the chamber today and for the report published in May, covering a wide range of important issues as part of their inquiry into health and wellbeing of young people across the nation. As we continue our trajectory to make Scotland the best place for a child to grow up, it is important to reflect on the critical work currently under way and to speak frankly of the many challenges that we face as we get there. Here in Scotland and in every country, poverty and social inequality are complex and multifaceted. It relates much more than just to income. Amnesty International's former General Secretary, Irene Kahn, sums it up as economic and social rights in security, discrimination, exclusion and powerlessness. In the committee's report, we see worrying evidence of the growing impact of the cost of living crisis on our children and young people. Bill Scott, chair of the Poverty and Inequality Commission, highlights that control over the vast majority of means-tested benefits, which are the most effective way of delivering support to low-income families, is held at the UK Government level. If memory serves me correctly, the Conservatives are more concerned with cuts than offering meaningful support to those who are most in need. New research, published by the Action for Children, sheds light on the devastating impact of the recent cuts to universal credit. Analysis of the Charity's Crisis Fund, which provided emergency grants for food, utilities and other essentials to people in difficulty, found that over half of the grants issued were awarded to those already receiving universal credit, suggesting that the payment is falling well below what is needed to meet even the most basic cost of living. Among the appalling statistics are stories of key workers doing all they can to help who find children arriving at school with children's blanes on their feet because their house is so cold, or helping a single mother of two who, despite working 37 hours a week as a finance officer, still needed food vouchers to feed her family at Christmas. By contrast, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport in the health committee's report stated in its never-ending attempt to mitigate the ripple effect of Tory austerity. The Scottish Government has worked hard to strengthen the financial support that is available to low-income families across the early years. The Scottish Government's package of five family benefits includes the best start grant, the best start foods and the Scottish child payment, which was doubled to £20 per week per child in April this year, all achieved as part of the Scottish Government's very first tackling child poverty delivery plan. Social security alone is not sufficient to tackle inequality, and it is crucial to recognise the indisputable link between deprivation and poor mental health and how that impacts on young people's ability to thrive and to reach their full potential. The millennium cohort study shows that poorer children are four times more likely to develop mental health problems by the age of 11 than those in higher income families, not to mention the physical and emotional strain that living in poverty places on parents, causing feelings of shame, of embarrassment and that invariably filters through to their kids and can alter the family dynamics. In the committee's report, Professor Hazel Borland from NHS Ayrshire and Arran touched on those feelings and says that poverty is incredibly stigmatising for families because it reduces choice, it reduces opinions and means that children, young people or the family cannot say yes to the things that they want to say yes to. Therefore, their world becomes much narrower and they begin to view themselves through a very limiting lens. In light of those points, I was pleased to see the Scottish Government's mental health transition and recovery plan. It was backed by a £120 million recovery and renewal fund over 2021 and 2022. That represents the single largest investment in mental health in the history of devolution, as some of my colleagues have already mentioned. I also welcomed the additional £15 million provided to local authorities to deliver locally-based mental health and wellbeing support for five to 24-year-olds in their communities and the announcement of five million plans worth of funding for CME, the national programme designed to eliminate mental health stigma and discrimination. As I sum up, looking forward and as part of the wider effort to ensure children can flourish here in Scotland, I would like to join the committee and call on the Scottish Government to set out in greater detail how the new child poverty delivery plan will contribute to improving the health and wellbeing of children currently living in poverty and, additionally, to commission further research on the prevalence of mental health conditions amongst children and young people so that we can build a better picture and allocate resources most effectively remaining cognisant of the fact that prevention and early intervention is key. No child, Presiding Officer, should be going to school hungry or battling the stigma that goes with it. I look forward to the progress that we will make together as a country. Presiding Officer, I am delighted to speak in this afternoon's debate. The Health, Social Care and Sport Committee carried out its inquiry into the health and wellbeing of children and young people before I became a member. I pay tribute to the convener, clerks, members, witnesses and stakeholders for such a substantial piece of work on a vitally important topic. The committee's inquiry was wide-ranging, a reminder that so much has a bearing on the health and wellbeing of our young people even before the significant impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is taken into consideration. I am especially pleased to see recommendations from the committee relating to the mental and physical health of young women and girls. I sincerely hope that we will see action in these areas. What happens during the formative years can hugely affect later life, so we need to get our approach and interventions right. The starting point of the committee's inquiry was the question, is Scotland the best place for a child to grow up? Based on the committee's 99 recommendations, there is still a long way to go, but that needs to become a reality. In the past few weeks, we have seen the education secretary and the First Minister at Odds over the timeline for closing the education attainment gap. The keystone policy commitment of Nicola Sturgeon's SNP Government has gotten worse on its watch. We have seen a real terms cut in the children and families budget by almost £15 million in the latest spending review, but predictably the SNP still managed to find £20 million to fund preparations for another independence referendum. Official figures published last Tuesday reveal that more than a quarter of children and young people are still not being seen within the target 18 weeks of referral for child and adolescent mental health services. In fact, the Scottish Government has never, I repeat, never met its own target in this regard. The SNP Green Government has found the time to commission and publish a paper, the first of many apparently, on building a new independent Scotland, another distraction from its woeful record on the delivery of public services. And if that wasn't enough, audit Scotland, which scrutinises how the public purse is spent, faces having its wings clipped for shining a light on government failings which have long predated the pandemic. In particular, the spending watchdog has repeatedly raised a red flag over the serious concerns that have existed for years about access to children and young people's mental health services. The committee's inquiry rightly looked at CAMHS and it has suggested a number of recommendations to address lengthy waiting lists and workforce capacity. The committee's report also commends the work that NHS Grampian in my region has undertaken to improve waiting times for CAMHS, but I would emphasise that this turnaround took roughly 10 years. That's the time that the system simply doesn't have. As the Royal College of Psychiatrists makes clear, at one stage last year, more than one in every 100 young people—that's one in every 100 young people—was being referred to CAMHS. We cannot leave Scotland's children and young people in limbo any longer. The committee also highlights the roles of schools in supporting health and wellbeing. I'm pleased that schools have started to embed counselling services, but I'm aware that there's a shortage of qualified and accredited counsellors in parts of the north-east, which means that some of these services may not be fully up and running for some time. We're constantly coming up against poor workforce planning by the SNP Government, and our public services are the poorer for it. The committee has called on the Scottish Government to set out how it intends to increase rates of physical activity amongst children and young people, and especially girls and young women. The Minister for Public Health, Women's Health and Sport said in her evidence that she cannot be what she cannot see in relation to low participation levels in women's sport. In my own region, there are some exceptional women who are leading the way in this area. The Montrose FC women who recently won the Scottish Women's Championship North League, Aberdeen-based cricket team Northern Lights, who won their debut match in the Women's Premier League and Holly Davidson, the first female to referee a men's six nations side in a test match. These are the successes that we must be celebrating and sharing to improve participation in women's sport and to achieve parity of recognition with men's sport. Presiding Officer, what is abundantly clear is that the SNP Green Government has the levers it needs to improve our public services from health to education. This is not a question of powers, it is a question of good governance. The SNP needs to get its own house in order and yet it is thinking about already thinking about building a new one. Let's rebuild Scotland, not divide it. I begin by thanking the Health and Social Care and Sport Committee for what I think is a very significant report and very comprehensive. One of the questions that we need to begin with is why is the demand for mental health so high? Why is it so commonplace among teenagers and young people in their early 20s who need to turn to mental health support? We must try to understand why Alacl Hamilton talks at length about the long lists and rightly so, but it is also important as a Parliament that we try to understand and get behind that. I have raised before that I do not think that it is just simply an issue of resource, but it is also an issue of design. I have raised in those debates before, particularly in relation to the young people's mental health, that the system itself, certainly in the part of the country that I represent in Glasgow, seems to be the opposite of what people need—a service of which you have to opt into. If you do not respond within five days, you get knocked off a list. That is the opposite of what people who are struggling with their mental health need. I would like to think by the end of this Parliament that some of those issues will actually have been changed and tackled. Rightly so, as Carole Mawkins, Siwan Brown and Stephanie Callaghan have talked about, there are very complex reasons behind the growing problem of mental health. Poverty is obviously a very significant issue. Trauma of people's lives and, as others have talked about, the impact of the pandemic itself. Alacl Hamilton mentioned in his contribution that we begin to realise the impact of young children who have been isolated for so long. We have got to try to understand that so that we know how we should be responding. Furthermore, I have also raised the issue before in that the redesign of mental health services to me, although I am a relative newcomer to trying to understand mental health services, that we need to make sure that we are keeping pace with good practice and international practice, too. For example, E-M-D-R is not widely used, but some people think that it could be useful to have in the tools, if you like, of what is available. I want to focus on an area that I think needs some attention, and that is the mental health of girls. Tess White has talked about that, too. I argue that we have been seeing progress, but that progress has also been eroded. I was not surprised to read in the committee's report that the Association of Scottish Principal Education and Psychology identifies a recognisable downward trend in the mental health of children and young people in Scotland, but it is also saying that the mental health of girls is overall judged as worse than boys and that the mental health of adolescent girls is particularly poor. I completely agree with the assessment of NHS Grampian, which has had lots of mentions today. It was suggested that possible underlying causes of this disparity could be issues of body image and intense sexualisation of girls are impacting upon their wellbeing, as seen in issues such as harmful aspects of social media, sexual bullying, revenge pornography and so on. As we had discussions in many of these debates, the advent of smartphones and social media has meant that teenage girls are often under pressure from boys to send nude photographs of themselves. That has been widely reported in the press. That is not just an anecdotal comment, if you can make it really brief, if you do not mind. Julian Martin. We did not have time to look into that specific issue, but I am glad that Pauline McNeill has raised it. I think that it is a piece of work that really needs done and what more the social media companies can do to protect young women and girls. Pauline McNeill. I would like to thank Julian Martin for the intervention, because I know that she herself is very committed to that. I think that there are other committees that need to look at it, but we cannot ignore that as the longer-term look at the issue of the social media age. I know that it is not just a matter for this Parliament, the control of our Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, because we know that all of those platforms can seriously damage the mental health of many people and not just their children. I support that. It is alarming that boys as young as nine or 10 are viewing online pornography. Of course, it affects the way they view girls and understand sexual relationships. There is an urgency about that, because there is talk of something called rape culture in schools. Before we go any further, I understand where that is coming from. Of course, it means that we need to do that work in schools. In February of this year, the University of Glasgow's social and public health services unit published a report on sexual harassment in secondary schools in Scotland. The study found that sexual harassment is common. Almost 70 per cent of students reported having experienced some type of sexual harassment at or on the way to school within the last three months. Professor Christian Mitchell said that sexual harassment is common and often seen as normal among teenagers at school. There are many issues to address, but that is deeply concerning. If any young person thinks that that would be normal behaviour, it is our duty as leaders in communities and as politicians to put that right. We must seek to understand exactly what is going on in schools. In giving the girls support and courage not to accept this type of behaviour, we need a seismic shift in attitudes. I realise that I have only got 30 seconds left. I want to ask ministers, which I realise is a cross-cutting issue between justice and health. The Equally Saved programme is brilliant. I want to know from ministers whether there are plans to expand that beyond the 31 schools. I also want to comment on the same issue that Tess White talked about in sport, because recommendation 25 of the committee report recognises that the mental health of girls can be vastly improved by encouraging participation in sport and physical activity. It is sad to say after all those years that girls, when they leave primary school, are not taking up sport for reasons that are on the same theme. I conclude, Presiding Officer. There are many complexities to this. I thank the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee for some excellent work. As a previous member of the Health and Sport and Social Care Committee and now a member of education, children and young people, I am delighted to be closing this debate today. However, under the SNP, it is hard not to suggest that the health and wellbeing of our children and young people has fallen by the wayside. The number of children being referred for our mental health care in Scotland has risen by 22 per cent since last year. Yet only 73.2 per cent of children and young people were seen within the 18 weeks of referral. The Scottish Government said that it was committed to its 18-week target for 90 per cent of patients' beginning treatment, but that target has never been met. Those figures should remain a source of grave concern for our SNP ministers. The mental health crisis among our young people long predates the pandemic, yet we still do not see enough action from the SNP ministers. The Covid crisis has only aggravated those issues, and we must see an urgent plan that will deliver that support, otherwise the mental health crisis among young people in Scotland will only continue to grow. We have heard from Alex Cole-Hamilton that we have not yet been getting this right, and we have not done so for a long time. One of my constituents, a young boy, has been on the waiting list for the ADHD clinic since April 2021. As a result of that, his family has said that it has been left to them and his school to attempt to hold everything together until he can receive treatment. For them, the idea that they will be seen within 18 weeks of referral has been a pipe dream. Every piece of support that he has received has been sourced either by his parents or his school. He needs sleep medication, but the NHS cannot help until they have diagnosed him rather than being diagnosed privately. I highly doubt that he is the only one caught between this private diagnosis and an ability to access medication either. Paul Sweeney spoke of the CAMHS crisis and the extraordinary numbers waiting and the difficulties that are then entrenched into those young people by the time they access the service. Those are real people with real poor problems, suffering because of the failure to ensure that children and young people can access the vital mental health services as quickly as possible. One of the most distressing evidence sessions that we had in committee clearly indicated that we are letting young people in care down. Like my colleague Megan Galker, I would like to reinforce the promise, which includes a commitment that every child that is in care in Scotland will have access to intensive support that ensures that educational and health needs are fully met. It relates to that session that we were in, the informal session. One of the things that was mentioned in the session by Care Expansion on people is that there was actually some good practice that happened during the pandemic where they had support to telephone lines from mental health support and they would like to see that extended. Sue Webber. I thank Gillian Martin for that. Yes, it was a very empowering session and there was a lot of good practice coming forward but also laid bare some of the concerns that we have. More needs to be done to raise awareness among care experienced people of children of the support that is available to them and the committee has called on the Scottish Government to set out what measures it is taking to raise awareness among those young people. We also hear regularly that waiting times and calms are down to workforce pressures and the lack of planning and resource. Time and time again, we have asked for specifics and details on how this workforce crisis is being tackled and little information rather than big numbers and certainly no details have been forthcoming from the minister. But thankfully in a briefing last week from NHS Lothian, I heard about some of the targeted and innovative plans that are being rolled out in their mental health service to address the health staffing. I think that there is more so to do with the adult services but it is transferable. For example, they are working with the Open University to expand the route to a registered nurse qualification using a modern apprentice pathway. Staff will be recruited at band 2 apprentices and then progress through band 3 after 16 months and qualify at the end of four years as a registered nurse. Importantly, throughout this time, they will be paid to train. They have plans with the corporate nursing education team to introduce a development programme to encourage the retention of experienced staff. That is really important. Those experienced staff will stay in the front line and delivery of clinical services. They have also spoken about recruiting art and music therapists into additional roles. If those are successful, NHS Lothian is hoping that other specialities may benefit from similar approaches and other health boards. As Carol Mawkins stated, we should be doing all that we can now to help our young people. Devolved benefits that could improve the wellbeing of children and young people in Scotland are being rolled out too slowly. The young carers grant is being rolled out at snail's pace. Social Security Scotland is failing to properly roll out the Scottish child payment. The Scottish child disability payment has been processed slower than ever. Yes, I will. I thank the member for taking my intervention. I hear her criticism of Scottish Government's benefits, but does she recognise that the UK Government's benefit cap, the cut of £20 to universal credit, benefits sanctions, the two-child limit, the rape clause and a decade of austerity is contributing to child poverty in Scotland? I thank the minister for her intervention. I am not quite sure if I will thank it. £41 billion has been delivered to the Scottish Government to make its own decisions on how it spends its money. Somehow mitigating decisions that the UK Government has made is nonsensical, and it merely reveals to everyone in this chamber that the grievance culture that is at the very heart of the SNP drives everything and motivates every decision that they take. I can continue to list the SNP failures, but I am very aware of the time, but I want to highlight some of the proactive measures that Scottish Governments are taking. Dr Galhany reminded us earlier that Scottish Conservative councillors across the country are working to introduce trained mental health leads in every school to help improve children's wellbeing. In our 2021 manifesto, we pledged to introduce free school breakfasts and lunches. We have proposed legislation in Parliament that would ensure that every child gets at least one week of residential outdoor education through my colleague Liz Smith's outdoor education bill. The Scottish Conservatives will continue to work on delivering for our children and young people. I thank the Health and Social Care and Sport Committee for raising much-needed awareness of the health and wellbeing of children and young people through their work on the inquiry. I also thank members for their contributions to the debate, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to some of the key issues that have been raised in the chamber this afternoon. The range of topics that are covered today illustrates just how important those issues are. As Minister for Mental Well-being and Social Care, I am particularly interested in ways that we can further support children and young people's mental health and wellbeing, ensuring access to appropriate support at the time that it is needed. As a Government, we have made significant investments over the last year to improve mental health support and services for children and young people. Those include the continuation of £16 million per year recurring funding to local authorities to provide counselling support services in all secondary schools across Scotland, as has been mentioned by many members today. We have also allocated around £40 million to child and adolescent mental health services to reduce waiting times and to support the implementation of our national care service specification. We have also provided funding for a range of children and young people's organisations to create a suite of online resources, information and advice to support the emotional health and wellbeing of children and young people, such as the I feel hub. We have also invested £18 million in perinatal and infant mental health through developing services, increasing awareness and enhancing workforce and training. Through that investment, I am determined to ensure that children and young people are supported in the most appropriate way that meets their needs. We know that CAMHS is not always the right option for everyone and that early intervention is crucial to supporting children and young people's mental health and wellbeing. Young people and families have told us that they needed more support for mental and emotional distress and for their wellbeing and resilience that was delivered in a community setting. That is why we have provided an additional £15 million a year to local authorities, which has funded 230 new and enhanced community services for children and young people aged 5 to 24. I am pleased to say that, in the second half of 2021, more than 18,000 people accessed services that are spread across every local authority in Scotland. Services such as the Aberlour primary outreach service in Falkirk, which supports children aged 5 to 12 with emotional distress, and the LGBT Youth Scotland service in Dundee, which supports the wellbeing of LGBT plus people aged 13 to 25. Earlier this month, in fact, I visited a community service in Aberdeen. The Fit Like Hub provides whole family support at an early stage to support mental health and wellbeing, reducing the need for escalations to services such as CAMHS. I met with parents whose children had been supported by the hub, and it was clear that the strong relationship that they had with those delivering support in their communities was making a difference, particularly to their and their children's wellbeing. Establishing those services has been a significant step forward in supporting the mental health of children and young people, making sure that they receive the help that they need when they need it. However, we are committed to doing more. As a result, we will be doubling the funding for community-based mental wellbeing services for children and young people, as Gillian Mackay outlined, to £30 million per annum by the end of this Parliament. In delivering those policies, we continue to work closely with colleagues across NHS boards, local authorities and the third sector. Without their support and their hard work, much of that would not be possible. I am very grateful for their continued efforts to improve services and supports that are available across Scotland to our children and young people. There has been a large amount covered in the debate, but I think that, from those and Labour's benches, there is a lot of discussion about poverty. I do not think that we can discuss the issues of mental health and wellbeing without recognising that poverty creates a major strain for families, for young people and for communities. Poverty and the stigma of poverty has created a real difficulty on top of what has been experienced by young people during the course of the pandemic. Tory austerity, the cost of living crisis and welfare cuts have added to woes of young people and their families right across our country. That has been highlighted today by Stephanie Callaghan, Emma Harper and Gillian Martin and Carol Mochan. I agree with Ms Mochan about fair work, fair pay and fair conditions for workers that would make a real odds, but my disappointment with the Labour Party is the fact that it continues to refuse to call for employment law to be devolved to this Parliament, which could make a real difference to our futures. Ms McNeill wants to intervene. Ms McNeill, the microphone is still not on, just give us a moment. Thank you to the minister for giving me the chance to say that the Scottish Labour does support the devolving of employment law. I do not know why he is getting where he is getting his information from and repeatedly called for it. That is new to me and I am glad that Scottish Labour has called for that devolving of employment law, because I think that that would make a real difference in improving wages, increasing the minimum wage and getting it right for people right across our communities. I have to say that that is one of the many things that we need to take control of here in this Parliament in order to truly tackle some of the ills that face our society, including our young people, because we cannot continue to put up with Tory austerity, with the slashing of universal credit and with the continued attack on working people across this country by Tory ministers. We should have those powers here to be able to tackle the cost of living crisis and to ensure that we get it right for families across our country. Whoever said that we should not be mitigating, let us be honest with you. If we were not mitigating Tory cuts, we would be in an even worse place than we are. If we had not doubled the Scottish child payment to 20 pounds per week, we would have been in a worse situation, and if we had not increased benefits by greater amounts than the UK Government, we would have been in a worse situation. We know that the past two years have been exceptionally difficult for the mental health and wellbeing of many children, young people and their families. We are committed to getting it right for people right now. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to close this important debate on behalf of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee. As we have heard this afternoon, the inquiry has highlighted a number of key challenges and opportunities that we face as Scotland seeks to improve the health and wellbeing of all its children and young people. As the convener stated in her opening, we all want children and young people to be able to live happy and healthy lives. That was echoed by the remarks of Alex Cole-Hamilton when he said that this should be what keeps us all up at night, and we could all agree on that. It falls to me in closing, Presiding Officer, to build some consensus. The debate has found a degree of consensus at points, but it has, of course, been challenging in other areas as we exchange ideas and views. However, it is clear to me that everyone contributing to the debate today wants to see a better future for children in Scotland. During our inquiry, we asked witnesses where they thought policy action should be focused as a first priority to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for children and young people. Our witnesses were unanimous in their response that tackling poverty needs to be the overriding priority. I want to take this opportunity, like other members of the committee have done, to thank our witnesses and all those who gave evidence to our committee. That need for a primary focus on tackling poverty has been reflected across much of the debate this afternoon. We must acknowledge the evidence received and the minister's evidence to the inquiry, which illustrates what the Scottish Government is doing to tackle poverty in order to improve health and wellbeing outcomes of children and young people. However, as many have argued during the debate, I do not think that we should be under any illusion that there are not challenges in terms of the policies that are being delivered. I think that, particularly in... Thank you, Ms White. It appears to have ceased, for which I am grateful, and we will continue to hear from Mr O'Kane. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. As many argued during the debate, I do not think that we should be under any illusion that, in the face of the current cost of living crisis, there is a huge scale of challenge in terms of poverty and in terms of the issues that it is creating for children and young people across our country. In the evidence that we heard in committee, it is very clear that we need the UK Government and the Scottish Government to work closely in addressing this crisis. I think that we have heard an exchange today about some of the things that both Governments need to do in order to make that a reality. Witnesses told us, I think, about the devastating impact that many UK welfare reforms have had and reducing budgets in welfare has had for young people and families across Scotland. Witnesses pointed to the need for using the powers of this Parliament, going further on the Scottish child payment and providing more sustainable funding for local government services and third sector providers in order to tackle that cost of living crisis. I was particularly struck by recent evidence that was submitted to the Social Justice and Social Security Committee by the Poverty and Inequality Commission, which is included in our committee's inquiry report. Bill Scott, from the Poverty and Inequality Commission, put it quite starkly when he said that, irrespective of whether or not current targets on child poverty are technically met, poverty is deepening for real people at the sharp end and he concluded that that has a lifelong impact on children's health and attainment. There can be little doubt that this is a theme that our committee and others across the Parliament will return to during the course of the session. In particular, the conclusions of this inquiry have drawn about the overarching impact of poverty and the effect that it has on the health and wellbeing of children and young people have already been taken forward as part of the committee's current inquiry into broader health inequalities. On that topic of health inequalities and the relationship with poverty, I thought that Carol Mawkin and Emma Harper and other colleagues spoke very powerfully in that regard. Our inquiry and today's debate has highlighted a number of key areas where we may wish, as a committee and as a Parliament, to undertake further, more in-depth scrutiny in the future. I think that we have heard many of that today in contributions and exchanges across the chamber. I think that colleagues have highlighted issues such as those experienced by kids and young people, which we heard from Megan Gallacher, for example, or the cost of the school day, as Stephanie Callaghan highlighted, as areas that we must drill down into and look at in more detail in terms of getting into the granular detail of how we tackle much of the inequalities that we have found in our inquiry. The inquiry also heard about the intrinsic link between physical health and mental health and how participation in sport and physical activity has the ability to benefit both. Giving evidence to the committee, the Scottish Sports Association has described investment in sport and physical activity as the best buy in public health. They argue that encouraging lifelong participation in physical activity reduces the burden on the NHS and the need to intervene to address illness and other long-term health conditions. As part of the inquiry, we have welcomed the Scottish Government's commitment to increase funding for both sport and physical activity over the course of the Parliament. Of course, we will all want to scrutinise the delivery of that. It is quite clear that we need to find ways to encourage and support young people throughout their lives to engage in sport and physical activity. Just like Siobhan Brown spoke about with the joy that a child perhaps experiences on their first sports day in the egg and spoon race, how do we move that forward throughout their life and break down the barriers that often exist as children get older into sport and physical activity? That is particularly true for girls and young women. We heard a variety of witnesses tell us about the real challenges and barriers that can exist. That is something that the committee will look at in more depth. What are those barriers and how do we break them down? I think that we are also looking at other groups who experience barriers to participation in sport, not least Black and minority ethnic and LGBT plus people. I thank Gillian Mackay for exploring some of the particular issues for LGBT young people in terms of their broader health. Today, we have also heard a real focus on CAMHS and mental health services for young people across Scotland. We heard a large amount of evidence and committee around the need to continue to explore better ways to provide services to young people, to see where services are offered in communities and where they are offered in schools. Gillian Mackay and others have referenced the good practice examples in places like Grampian that we need to look at in terms of expanding the service provision and what is available. I thank my friend for giving way on this critical issue of CAMHS. Would he agree with me that it was unfortunate that the minister did not address specifically the case that I raised in relation to Glasgow and encouraged the minister to take a cognisance of that and respond to me in due course? I thank Paul Sweeney for his intervention. I was just coming on to reference the challenges that exist in CAMHS. I am not really keen to facilitate a conversation between two members in my summing up on behalf of the committee. I am sure that they may wish to take it up offline if the minister will forgive me. However, I was coming to the point that there are problems that persist in CAMHS. We heard that referenced by the cases of Dr Gohani's constituent and Paul Sweeney's constituent. We need to look at that in more detail in terms of how, when people are experiencing a crisis with their mental health, they are taken seriously and they are given a service that gets to the heart of the issue and seeks to support them in a holistic manner. I am conscious of time, so I will conclude by thanking everyone who has contributed to this afternoon's debate and by echoing the convener's earlier words of gratitude for all the contributions that we received during the course of the inquiry. As we have heard today and throughout the inquiry, while there are many challenges, there are also lots of opportunities and inspiring examples of good practice that we can draw on to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for children and young people across Scotland. I look forward to the Government's formal response to the committee inquiry's report and hearing how ministers intend to take forward our key findings and recommendations. Across this Parliament, I believe that we share a common goal to improve the health and wellbeing of all children and young people in Scotland. I hope that the debate has been a useful springboard for us on the way to achieving that. That concludes the debate on health and wellbeing of children and young people. There will be a very brief pause before the next item of business.