Health, Social Care and Sport Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Official Report 756KB pdf

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Female Participation in Sport and Physical Activity

This is the second evidence session in our inquiry into female participation in sport and physical activity. The session will focus on community sport and physical activity.

I welcome to the committee Kate Joester, who is policy and influencing co-ordinator for Scotland, at Living Streets Scotland; Patrick Murphy is a senior manager at South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture; and Cecilia Oram is head of behaviour change at Sustrans Scotland. We also have two panel members online: Kirsty Garrett is sports development and physical activity manager at Glasgow Life, and Euan Lowe is chief executive officer of Scottish Swimming.

We have a number of themes to cover, so members might want to direct their questions. Some questions might be more general, in which case we can go round the panel. However, with five panel members, not every panel member will be able to answer every question—we would be here until next week.

I will kick things off. A number of you pointed in your submissions to a lack of female role models in sport and physical activity. It struck me that there are lots of females in sport and various physical activities who are probably a role model within that sport. However, it is not so much about that; it is about cutting through to people outwith that sport and people seeing them as role models in the media and so on. It is also about a lack of women in leadership roles in sport.

Being completely hypocritical after what I said about focusing questions, I would like to go round everyone and ask what could be done to encourage more women into leadership roles in sport and how we promote those female role models, which would make all the difference.

It is funny talking about role models when we are talking about everyday walking. We know that a lot of importance is attached to role modelling within the family and family habit forming. It is important that walking as a means of transport and as a pleasant thing to do happens within families. It is less to do with celebrity role models; there is less evidence that that is a factor.

However, we need women in leadership to create the structures within which women walk. It is important to see more women in the places where we talk about planning and transport planning and that sort of thing, because our transport and places are, broadly speaking, planned by male-dominated professions, which is sometimes very obvious. Sometimes you can see that transport is planned around a very typically male commute, which goes from home to work and back again, and not around more typically female trip chaining, whereby women might drop the kids at school before they go to work and then do the shopping or drop in on a relative they care for on the way back. Transport does not support that.

It is also about the ways in which we see paths being planned, for example. Women pay closer attention to safety, and we often see that that is not supported by the places that we are walking through.

That certainly chimes with me, as a rural person. The idea of a radial journey into the centre of town does not take into account the fact that you might have to go elsewhere before you even get to your work.

As our submission reflects, there is a lot of good work with females out there just now, especially for young leaders. There are programmes such as active schools, and programmes in local authorities in and around the scenario for care-experienced young people in particular. We will see that work bleeding into the narrative, as females come in and become role models and leaders in their local communities. It involves everything from sports leadership sessions in primary schools through to walk leaders and leaders in sport in positions of influence, so I am quite positive about it.

I echo what Kate Joester said about the need for more female leaders and female perspectives in transport and urban planning. Sustrans ran a campaign called AndSheCycles, which was based on workshops with teenage girls across the country and looked at the barriers to their becoming more active physically in their local environments. That has progressed to a social media campaign, in which young women are leading on content about being physically active. That proves that locally based initiatives that empower young women to be physically active can have a good impact, and it showcases what is possible.

As you were speaking, I was reminded that I asked a teenage person in my life why girls do not do as much physical activity, and she said, “It’s because your pals don’t.” There is that peer pressure. The kind of thing that you are talking about, in which it is seen to be okay to take your bike to school or whatever, might mean that more girls will do that.

I will go online and speak to Kirsty Garrett.

Hi there—thank you for inviting me along.

With regard to role models, we have an example from 2019, unfortunately just prior to Covid and lockdown. We established a programme called Energise-Her, and the brand was “Aye She Can”. The programme was about insight, training and support to engage and attract a wide range of females to a variety of activities in their community. It also included the Ment-Her initiative, in which female mentors would share their skills and knowledge to empower others and excite young women and girls to get involved in sport.

As part of the programme, we also had Activate-Her, in which people came forward from different sports clubs and organisations and we trained and supported them to deliver projects and activities in their community. There was a small fund attached to that, to the value of about £1,000. We definitely saw the need for role models in communities, and that is why we went out to our network of clubs and organisations to take that project forward.

A real mix of women came forward. The programme was co-produced, with involvement ranging from women from what we might call the performance end of sport right down to women who were not involved in sport or physical education when they were at school, so there was a genuine mix. It carried on into 2020, but unfortunately Covid arrived. We are now trying to go back and reinvigorate that programme, but we already have it in place.

Another aspect of role models relates to the fact that this year we are celebrating Glasgow as the European capital of sport 2023. During February, we celebrated women and girls in sport month. We celebrated all the activities that were happening in our city in sports clubs and organisations during that month, in order to enable them to raise awareness in their communities of all the things that were going on. We put out regular tweets and newsletters. The hope was that young women would know about what was happening in their community and would therefore take part. We are really keen on role models.

We are also looking, as part of the European capital of sport, at a “meet your heroes” initiative, so that women and young women can identify people whom they look up to or aspire to be and meet them. For example, we had a young woman meet her hero, the Scottish football player Jen Beattie. We are trying to develop opportunities for women to get involved in activity throughout the year.

With regard to leadership roles, I am a sports development and physical activity manager and I am a female. I am pleased to say that I have roughly just over 100 members of staff, and there is quite a nice 50:50 split between males and females. Within our own organisation, I am comfortable that we have a split of male and female staff with strong roles, who are in communities helping people to get involved with sport and physical activity.

Good morning, everybody, and thanks for inviting me along. To pick up on that very last point that Kirsty Garrett made, I am conscious that I am a male speaking on this subject matter; we were very conscious of that even coming into this committee meeting today. There is another member of the team we would have liked to bring along to the meeting, but they are committed elsewhere, so you are having to put up with me today.

However, when it comes to leadership, I am part of a senior management team in which three out of the five people are female. Our board has 10 members, and three of them are female. Also, the Scottish Swimming organisation is just about to have a female president, which is a fairly prominent role.

From a swimming perspective, you need to be able to see it, understand it and believe it to be able to want to participate in it. We are quite fortunate in that swimming is a popular activity and there are probably more females than males participating in it recreationally. About 64 per cent of our members are female. If we look at people with leadership roles who have influence over that membership base, we see that 63 per cent of the workforce, 62 per cent of officials and 62 per cent of coaches are female, so there is a female drive across the sport.

Picking up on comments that have been made, one aspect that I am mindful of is first impressions. Getting people involved in the sport—or even interested in activity and leisure and sports more widely, full stop—comes from quality experiences. The active schools programme was mentioned earlier as quite a prominent activity to get people introduced to leadership roles. We have taken it a step further with our young volunteer programme, which is about not just gender but ability and ethnic minorities. We try to get a range of people involved in the programme to develop our leaders of the future. Quite a high percentage of females are involved in that programme and it is driven by a female.

We are also mindful of other aspects of that “see it and do it” piece. Some of the names that people might be familiar with include Hannah Miley, a prominent and successful Scottish swimmer who has an MBE for promoting services for girls and women’s sport and is very active in the world of promoting all the values of being interested in activity, and others coming through, such as Katie Shanahan—Kirsty Garrett will know Katie’s name. They are role models, along with Toni Shaw from Aberdeen, a para-athlete who is an ambassador for our learn to swim programme to encourage youngsters to get involved. That is about not just the female aspect but the disability aspect. It is about saying that anybody can get involved in this activity. We are working on that where we can, but we are conscious that there is more to do, given the challenges of getting any part of society involved. Participation is an on-going challenge but particularly in relation to girls and women.

Thank you. Paul Sweeney has a couple of questions on this.

I recently met people from Boxing Scotland, which is based in Glasgow. They told me about their work in trying to get women and girls into sport, particularly into sports that are traditionally male dominated, such as boxing and football. There was a feeling that, if you do not get young people into a sport early in life, it is harder to encourage that engagement once they are young adults. Do panel members have a view on what steps can be taken to encourage women and girls into sport at a young age, especially in ways that encourage them to participate and stay involved in physical activity in the longer term, and how you can make that introduction to sports that are traditionally male dominated such as boxing?

I do not know whether to answer that—

I will maybe bring in specific people on that because it was about sport rather than just physical activity. I will bring in Kirsty Garrett first.

Thanks for that question. We actively work with any sports governing body that wants to work with Glasgow Life. For example, we would work with Boxing Scotland and introduce it to our colleagues in the active schools programme, which is run by Glasgow City Council, and we would try to arrange activities that can happen in school or create links from the school to the club. We have examples of that going on in the city. We would openly work with any governing body that wishes to work with us, and we would support them with getting into the school environment or support young people in the school to move into a club environment. That is basically what the club development team does; it tries to ensure those connections. We would ask for the person to contact me, and then we would take that forward.

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In Glasgow, we also have a physical activity finder, and we encourage all sports clubs and organisations in the city to sign up to it. If a person puts their postcode in, all the clubs in their area will become visible, or if they put in that they want to do boxing or another activity, all the opportunities in boxing and other activities will pop up. We try to ensure that people are aware of the activity finder and therefore can find a certain activity or sport that is on their doorstep.

We actively encourage boxing organisations to support the active schools programme to try and encourage young women to get involved.

I think that Kirsty Garrett is right. There is another element with females, specifically in the sport that Paul Sweeney mentioned, which relates to the teenage drop-off at the age of 13 or 14. That applies especially in specific sports, and it is very difficult to combat. Again, the leadership role plays into it.

However, it is critical to recognise where sports and clubs are in their state of readiness as they approach their communities. Quite often, they can be intimidating places that are not ideal for people who are vulnerable or not confident. It is as much about the sports and clubs addressing their state of readiness as it is about the issues of convergent access and the teenage drop-off.

Those are really helpful insights. There is a balance between passive advertising of availability versus engaging with groups of people—young women, in particular—who might not feel comfortable and who could feel intimidated by a sport such as boxing, and encouraging them to do a taster of it and have a go at it. Maybe the active schools programme could be looked at as an opportunity; it certainly sounds interesting.

We have heard stories about young people in physical education classes being split into groups to do stereotypical sports. The girls would go off and do dancing and the boys would go off and do football. That stereotypical streaming of different sports can be extremely counterproductive. Have you observed that happening, and how do you think the active schools programme could address it?

I will use football as an example. At the moment, the Scottish women’s game has never been in a better place. I think that all of the players in five of the top premiership teams are full time. That is a positive, and some seriously good role models will come out of it.

PE has work to do in the co-production collaboration about where people’s positive destinations are, and that is a challenge. There are also some really positive things happening, such as the transition to girls playing football and boys playing netball. We are in a good place.

That is good to hear.

I would also like to give an example. We have boxing clubs in Glasgow Southside—Southside Boxing Academy, for example. Our support and funding through the club and officials award meant that Antonia Quayle was able to secure a Boxing Scotland level 1 course qualification, and therefore she was able to start delivering boxing coaching in the Southside Boxing Academy. We support females who want to become coaches and so on, and there are opportunities through our funding to ensure that more female coaches are visible in our communities.

I would like to move on to talk about safety and harassment, which have come up in many submissions. Those issues can put many women and girls off doing physical activity and sport.

I have three questions, the first of which is for Patrick Murphy. How could sports environments and changing facilities be improved to ensure that women and girls feel safe?

At the moment, one of the main roles of my job is around efficiencies and our shrinking estate in relation to delivering all the sports and physical activities that we provide across swimming pools, golf courses and everything else. There is a second challenge, which relates to the part of your question about the physical environment.

The situation is extremely difficult at the moment, especially given that we have an ageing estate. In some cases, the estate is not fit for purpose for certain groups or for certain diverse elements of the community. I think that we face a real challenge in that area with regard to funding and finance.

So that is a huge issue.

It is massive.

I direct this question to Euan Lowe. At the weekend, a swimming coach told me that a huge issue at the moment is the fact that girls do not feel safe in mixed changing rooms, particularly because of the use of mobile phones in those spaces. He said that girls are being put off swimming, including at elite level, because pictures are being taken of them in mixed changing rooms. What are you going to do to keep women and girls safe in swimming?

That is interesting. I would be happy to follow up on that outwith the meeting and to get a bit more detail. However, it is important to keep in mind that we put the safety and wellbeing of all participants at the heart of everything that we do, particularly in the light of the Whyte review of gymnastics across the United Kingdom, which encouraged people to come forward and discuss any issues or concerns that they had. To help to facilitate that at local club level, we operate a system whereby each club must have at least one wellbeing and protection officer in place to promote safe environments. That covers the point that you made about the use of mobile phones.

From a societal point of view, mobile phone use is a challenging area, given that there are apps that encourage youngsters to take snaps and photos at any opportunity. That is a challenge for any sport, not just swimming, to deal with. To mitigate that, we have a mobile phone use policy, which we ask clubs to adopt. Many of them do that, and they reinforce the message on appropriate use of mobile phones through their committees and with their members. At a swimming venue, that relates particularly to the inside of a changing space. We are doing what we can to promote the need to make sure that mobile phones are used in the right way, where at all possible.

On the changing side and the changing village aspect, as Patrick Murphy outlined, sport and leisure at all levels are facing a challenge with upkeep maintenance and the ability to run a good-quality service, given the funding situation and the problems that we face with rising energy costs and the workforce issues that we have, which many of our partners are contending with. Those financial burdens make it a challenge for any council or trust to provide as good a quality of experience as they would like to, and that includes the changing environments.

The changing environment is not something that we typically support sports and/or local authorities and leisure trusts with, but there is sportscotland guidance to refer to on the design and build of changing spaces. The more modern approach, which has been around for a good number of years, is to have changing villages that are open to all. That is done with the right intent of making those facilities as inclusive as possible. I am aware that, in some circumstances, depending on the authority, there are options to be able to secure or lock down particular sections of those changing villages for particular user groups if that is required and needed, but it is very much up to local operators to be able to manage those situations.

There are mitigations in place, and many of those things probably come down to local decision making. I do not mean that in a negative sense; I mean that we need to understand the communities and how best to work with them on the mitigations that are in place in order to provide the right experience.

It was not pleasing to hear your earlier comments, and I am happy to pick the issue up at a later date.

The answers from Patrick Murphy and Euan Lowe do not fill me with trust and confidence. It was a very simple question with a very long answer, which did not really get to the nub of the problem.

My next question is for Cecilia Oram. What measures could be introduced to improve the reporting and investigation of harassment, bullying and abuse in community sport?

We work on physical activity in communities. With regard to reporting and investigation, we would like to see incidents being reduced. I am not sure that I can speak for—

I am just asking about improving reporting. Do you have any thoughts on how to improve the reporting of harassment and bullying in community sport?

We can follow that up separately afterwards, if that is okay.

It is possible that, coming from Sustrans, Cecilia does not have much to say on that area.

Yes. We do not work with community sport as such. We promote physical activity, such as everyday walking and cycling.

I just wondered whether you personally had any views on the issue.

Perhaps we can go to someone who is more involved in sport. Kirsty Garrett, might have some thoughts on this.

Euan Lowe might have thoughts on it, too. We try to ensure that clubs and organisations are as inclusive and safe as possible. Sometimes, it is very difficult to do that, but we have training and education in place, whether that is through the governing body, the local authority or organisations such as Glasgow Life. For example, we provide the “In safe hands” training, and training on child protection and safeguarding vulnerable adults.

Ideally, you expect the club to have good governance and good finance structures but also a good code of conduct. Therefore, if an incident were to happen, the person would know exactly who to speak to and the club would take the incident down an appropriate route. That might require the involvement of a governing body or Glasgow Life, depending on the circumstances.

We expect our sports clubs and organisations to have a code of conduct, best practice, fair play and so on within their structures to ensure that issues can be dealt with at a local level. If they cannot be dealt with at a local level, as I say, it can be escalated to the governing body or us.

I want to ask Kate Joester and Cecilia Oram about the fact that a lot of women and girls who are not necessarily involved in structured physical activity might cut out the few bits of physical activity that they get by opting not to walk to some places for reasons to do with safety and harassment. I count myself as one of them. I have very few opportunities for physical activity, but when it comes to the winter months, we make a choice about whether we walk home or to a particular place, or whether we do something that feels safer. I will go to Kate first to ask how we can tackle that.

We all know that, in general, women are less physically active than men. Everyday walking is one of the things that have the potential to be absolutely transformational, in the sense that it can move a huge number of people from a position of not being sufficiently active to get the mental and physical health benefits to a position of being sufficiently physically active. It is something that we can do every day as part of our routine. It does not take a lot of time, it does not require equipment and it does not require new learning. However, we have the problem that women feel less safe simply walking to work and girls feel less safe walking to school.

The issues around that are very complex. There are a lot of issues around perceptions of safety and actual safety, and the way that, as women and girls, we are trained to take responsibility for our safety and to be blamed for any lack of safety. Therefore, there is a lot to be said about changing how we talk about women’s physical safety in public spaces. However, there is also a lot to be said about changing the facts of how we as women and girls experience public spaces.

Harassment needs to stop and to be taken seriously at every level, and that is work for men and boys to do, as much as it is for women and girls.

I will come back to another point—every time that you come to me, I will talk about design and planning.

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That is why we invited you. [Laughter.]

That is superb.

When we choose whether to walk or not, we make an assessment of the space that we would be walking through, and different people make different assessments. Women and girls look not only at who in that space might be a problem, but at who is there to safeguard them. That includes passive surveillance—if you are walking through a space where people are looking out of their windows, they could see anything bad that might happen to you. For women and girls and others who experience disproportionate harassment, that is extremely important when they are making an assessment of the safety of the spaces that they are walking through.

We need that lens to be represented every time a new street, development or active transport route is planned. We need to make sure that the people who are doing the work are competent to make that assessment, whether that is through training or rigorous consultation, or through adequate equality impact assessments. In this area, adequate equality impact assessments are absolutely not done. There is a huge amount of evidence that equality impact assessment in planning is appalling and not adequate enough to meet basic standards.

Harassment in public places can be built in and we can build it out, but we also need to talk about behavioural change around how women are treated. We are entitled to be safe in every space that we want to go to. There is work for women and girls to do in asserting that right and, for example, reporting harassment, but it is primarily for those who carry out the harassment to stop doing so.

I will mention some of the things that Kate Joester mentioned about safer infrastructure. More women report that cars pass by more closely when they are out cycling. There is quite a lot of evidence about that, and segregated cycling infrastructure would help that situation.

We also need better lighting in public spaces where women and girls might be walking at night. Kate mentioned passive surveillance, which means eyes on the street. Where it is possible, places should be overlooked by buildings, so that there is more natural vigilance in the area.

I will come to colleagues in a minute, but I am just thinking about the one time that I took my bike from my village outside Aberdeen into the college that I used to work in. The cycle paths were really not meant for a commute; they were meant for leisure, so they went down by the river. There are no houses in that area and, in wintertime, you would not put yourself in that situation. That speaks to what you are saying about paths being built not just as part of segregated cycling infrastructure but in places where there is other infrastructure around them. I see that in Aberdeen city, and you must see it across Scotland.

Yes—there is evidence that some cycle paths feel very unsafe, and they are very unsafe if they are not being used by a lot of people. That applies late at night, in the dark, and in the winter months.

Euan wants to come back in.

I am going slightly off this thread, but I want to come back to the points that were made around dissatisfaction with our responses. Kirsty Garrett highlighted very well what happens typically in a governing body from a club and membership point of view. Clubs are expected to have codes of practice and wellbeing and protection officers in place. There are behaviours that are expected. Governing bodies expect clubs to have corporate governance in place, to make sure that complaints are handled appropriately and that concerns can be raised.

Those things are in place across governing bodies. From a club membership point of view, they exist. As Kirsty highlighted, on certain occasions when issues or concerns are raised, they are managed and dealt with by the leisure trust or the council, if that is appropriate. If that is not a satisfactory answer, my question back to the committee is: what do you expect?

I will come to Paul Sweeney on the issue of safety and harassment.

Planning is a major factor and it plays an important part in making women and girls feel safe. For example, I know that Sustrans’s submission indicates that just 39 per cent of women in Scottish cities feel safe cycling in their area. Planning can be a male-dominated space and it can often be confrontational and egocentric. Do Living Streets Scotland and Sustrans have any suggestions on how we can make sure that gender concerns are considered and that women are adequately consulted on planning decisions and on active travel, particularly with respect to the new development plans that have been drawn up by local authorities in the wake of national planning framework 4?

A little while ago, we did some research on the use of equality impact assessments in planning at a local level. The national guidance, which embraces equality, is great, but we found that the closer you get to street level, the less likely it is that adequate equality impact assessments will have been done. We looked at 20 examples, including plans for snow clearing and plans for specific developments, and we found four equality impact assessments that were available for those 20 projects. For example, a project had gone to a planning committee—I apologise; it was a regeneration committee—and although the answer to the question whether the required equality impact assessment had been done was no, the project went straight through the committee. At the moment, the stipulated requirements are not being met at even the most basic level. Planning committees could up their game and require that kind of work to be done.

Training people who work in planning will also play a role. That will take time to come through the system, so we also need to hit continuous professional development hard. We need to make a generational change in planning, as there is a lack of cultural competence in the sector relating to people’s understanding of equalities. The point of the public sector equality duty is that equality impact assessments should be done by the people who are doing each project. However, they are not being done and people do not demonstrate an understanding of what doing them would involve.

Are there any ways to try to codify that so that there are clearer rules on design for urban spaces? Are there exemplars that could be used to create national standards?

In many cases, the national standards are fine; the problem is that they are being ignored.

Okay. That is interesting.

Our figures show that only 13 per cent of UK transport professionals report that they always consider gender in their day-to-day work, 46 per cent of people never consider it and 41 per cent somewhat consider it. In Scotland, the transport sector has, at 6.25 per cent, the lowest proportion of women represented in senior positions in the public sector. The knock-on effect of that is that gender perspectives are not really being considered. Involving more women in transport planning is the way forward.

It sounds like it.

My question is for Cecilia Oram. I had a quick look at the Sustrans toolkits for creating better spaces. Safety is mentioned where it relates to reducing the speed of cars, but the toolkits do not seem to mention safety in the context of protection of and support for women. That does not seem to be mentioned in the information and the toolkits that you provide, or am I just missing it?

At the moment, we have some research under way on safety in public space, but it has not appeared in the toolkits just yet.

Thanks.

I want to ask specifically about the use of mobile phones, which was raised earlier. Now that more and more people are taking videos in the gym—and, I imagine, other places—and then posting them online, do you have a specific social media policy in your spaces? That sort of thing can make people feel very uncomfortable. That question is directly for Kirsty Garrett and Patrick Murphy—and, obviously, anyone else who wants to come in.

We do not have any specific social media policy, but we have a code of conduct and management rules on what is and is not appropriate and beyond that a reporting mechanism for child—and, indeed, adult—protection. That is in place.

However, it is difficult to manage, because there are always people coming in and going out, and what we are talking about is people’s own personal property and what they do with it. I think that what local authorities, leisure trusts and so on would say is that this is all about training staff and ensuring that they are challenging behaviours in such public spaces.

We have a social media policy, but it is for staff and employees of Glasgow Life, and it talks about ensuring that responsible social media content goes out, managing our comments and so on. I do not think that we have such a policy for the public, but I can look into that.

If you do not have something to hand just now, we are happy to take it as a follow-up.

I will stick with Sandesh Gulhane, who has questions on inequalities.

There is an issue that I am keen to hear about. If you do not know where you stand with regard to the number of people from different ethnicities, it is very difficult to make improvements. My first question, therefore, is a very simple one. Patrick, do you have a breakdown with regard to people from different ethnicities?

In some elements of our business, we do, but in others, we do not. I will break that down for you. In a number of health intervention programmes that are co-produced by health and social care, we have everything from which Scottish index of multiple deprivation zone people are in right through to their protected characteristics and so on. In some instances, then, the answer is yes, we have that breakdown.

In other instances—for example, with casual users of the gym or swimming pool—we will not have that information. Any approach in that respect would be based on the pretty simplistic theme of removing barriers to access, which would mean that, as a result, you would not be asking reams of questions—not even the most basic health questions, never mind anything on diversity. We therefore do not have that breakdown for our entire estate.

There are 319,000 people in South Lanarkshire; we know that 25,000 of them have memberships, but there will be a number of casual users, too. There is a real split in that respect.

Fair enough. I am particularly keen to hear about swimming, because I think that there is a bit of a problem with regard to ethnicity and people wanting to take up the sport. I do not know exactly why that is, but do you have an ethnicity breakdown for memberships? What policies are you putting in place to increase the number of people from ethnic backgrounds going into swimming?

I am assuming that that question is for me, so I will pick it up.

The challenge is getting meaningful data. Every year, we ask the membership to complete equalities data questions that would provide the sort of information on SIMD and protected characteristics that Patrick Murphy has referred to. However, although we have some information, it is not rich enough, I would suggest, to allow us to make informed views on particular measures that we might want to put in place. We have revisited the questions that are asked on the annual membership return—which is, I should say, coming back in at the moment—and the purpose of that redesign is to get more accurate information so that we can put measures in place.

Our approach to equalities is directed primarily at the first experience through the learn to swim programme and through working with our partners to encourage as many people as possible to get involved in the sport.

The challenge that we have is in understanding the needs of the user group and, equally, the needs of those who we cannot yet reach, particularly those with protected characteristics. If they want to get involved in a sport, it is about what activities we put in place. We work with a number of different leisure trusts and local authorities that support programmes that are put in place to pick up particular groups. Nonetheless, we have challenges ahead, for sure.

11:30  

Finally, I will go to Kirsty Garrett. What do you have in place to promote the participation of women from ethnic backgrounds?

I mentioned earlier that in February we promoted all activities around women and girls in sport. Obviously, that was also about including people from black, Asian and minority ethnic groups as well as people with disabilities.

We actively encourage the promotion of all activities for women and girls, in particular for black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. I am fortunate enough to have within my team a cohesion team that looks at inequalities and champions and leads on the equalities, diversity and inclusion agenda. We are very proactive in promoting opportunities for the black, Asian and minority ethnic communities in Glasgow. It is not perfect, but we are focusing on the issue as an organisation.

All local authorities and leisure trusts would also be able to tell you about the make-up of their workforce.

It is also important to note that, under the community planning framework, all local authorities and trusts will be working within neighbourhood planning areas on areas of interest to communities. That may be working with women or on the holiday hunger agenda; it could be any kind of agenda. Neighbourhood planning is a good way to find out what those communities of interest require.

Good morning to the panel. I will ask about socioeconomic issues for women and girls in sport. We had a response from Lanarkshire health and social care organisations that told us clearly that physical activity and sport are costly. That presents a challenge when it comes to targeting subsidy and access with reduced rates and things like that, which can make a huge difference. I would be interested in Patrick Murphy’s take on my question initially. In the context that we are in just now, in which local authority budgets are increasingly pressurised, how can we do some of that with a reducing resource?

With great difficulty, Paul.

We currently work with Lanarkshire health and social care partnership on social prescribing. Some people call it GP referral and some people call it physical activity prescription, but it is all the same thing. It involves health professionals, GPs, practice nurses and physios. At the moment, if someone presents to their GP, they get a four-week free pass. However, that simply knocks down the line the fact that, at some point, people will have to pay a bit.

It is also about working with my colleagues here and some of the other green space programmes, as physical activity does not need to cost anything, as we all know. That is a fairly obvious thing to say. Social prescribing is an excellent gateway or pathway into that.

There are concession schemes in which individuals are able to get some funding, or it may be that the concession scheme gives a discount. For an adult accessing our facilities today, it would be £25 a month to swim or to go to the gym every day. The concession price would be £12.50 a month, which is half of the adult price. Those are our current costs.

In a previous life, I served on the board of a culture and leisure trust, and there were certainly challenges. There was always a tension around reviewing charging and the eligibility criteria for concessionary rates. Have you found having to change the margins of that a particular challenge, with more people maybe moving outwith the opportunities for concessions?

Very much so. At the moment, our concessionary rate is 50 per cent but, given the challenges down the line that we have been talking about, it looks like the price will go up a bit from 1 April. That is a constant challenge.

I will pose a question to Kirsty Garrett on a slightly different topic. It follows on from Dr Gulhane’s points about black, Asian and minority ethnic women and girls. You mentioned initiatives taking place in February that tried to look at some of those areas. To what extent has Glasgow Life sat down and spoken to people from communities about their needs and what could be delivered that would help them? We will get the most acute and correct knowledge of the barriers when people who have that lived experience tell us about them. To what extent have you had engagement?

We have engagement all the time with our communities, especially sports clubs and organisations. For example, we have 21 community sports hubs spread across the 23 council wards in Glasgow. The hubs serve roughly 100 organisations or clubs with about 10,000 members. Our job is to go out and find out what the needs of the clubs are, as well as of the community—

Sorry, Kirsty, could you pause? Maybe I was not clear. I am speaking more specifically about women from a BAME background who are engaging, or not engaging, in sport. To what extent has Glasgow Life formed focus groups or engaged with Muslim women’s organisations, for example, so that they can speak about what their particular needs are?

As an example, our February initiative included Women on Wheels, which is a group that is predominantly for Muslim women.

As I mentioned before, we have a cohesion team that is tasked with ensuring that we engage with black, Asian and ethnic minority communities. However, the wider team does that work as well. We identify community groups and organisations, and then go out to the identified communities to find out what their views and aspirations are. We work with a lot of community groups; for example, we helped Glasgow Afghan United with a women’s empowerment programme. We have significant staff on the ground who are in the communities in the 23 wards to make sure that we can and do engage with groups that potentially do not take the time to be involved in sport or physical activity.

In terms of the socioeconomic challenges, you are absolutely right. We are moving into a difficult landscape because of the cost of living and so on.

However, we have activities that are free, such as health walks. We have 54 health walks each week. They are run by volunteers. The majority—73 per cent—of the walkers are female, and 74 per cent of the volunteers are women. We also have closed walks, during which we train organisations to take their own walks forward. We might train, for example, link workers in the health and social care partnership, Glasgow Afghan United or others. We train organisations that wish it so that they can do other walks with their communities of interest. We do that through our relationship with Paths for All, which has been established for a significant length of time.

There is provision in the city that is free, but it is challenging. Where possible, we also try to do targeted provision for people who have challenges because of their socioeconomic background. A bit like Patrick Murphy’s organisation, we have memberships, including full memberships and concession memberships. We have concessions for individuals on universal credit, income support, jobseekers allowance, a pension or carers allowance so that they can access our Glasgow club, which currently has 29,000 people as members. Funnily enough, of the people who pay monthly, the majority—57 per cent—are female. We have good information on our Glasgow club and our 29,000 members that we are happy to share.

Emma Harper has a quick question on this point before we move on to talk about infrastructure and town planning in more depth.

It might be a question for just Kirsty Garrett or Patrick Murphy. It is about wheelchair rugby. Rugby is becoming something that everybody plays; it is becoming important for women to take up, for example. Wheelchair rugby is quite a leveller because disabled folk can play with non-disabled folk and you can have mixed-gender teams as well. Is that something that is growing or can be pursued in order to level the playing field and encourage folk?

Yes, we already have a relationship with wheelchair rugby in the city and our venues have been used for it in the past, be it the Emirates arena or another venue. A member of our staff in Glasgow Life is also involved with wheelchair rugby. Under the cohesion team that I talked about, we also have a focus on disability sport to ensure that people with physical or learning disabilities are involved in any type of activity. We try to support everyone, be it young people or adults, so we have been involved with wheelchair rugby in Glasgow.

I think that most local authorities will have a sports council, which involves third sector committee members and volunteers. Most of them will also have a disability element—we do in South Lanarkshire. Our approach will be slightly different in that, rather than going right in there with rugby specifically, we will have a wheelchair multisport club. It could be wheelchair basketball or it could be another wheelchair sport. The sports council branches are funded by the local authorities and our branch will be funding the wheelchairs for that club. That will be in the local authority setting and it will be inclusive to all. Anyone can come along, including, as you say, able-bodied people. Often—I am thinking especially about the female participation scenario—there is an opportunity to bring along a sibling. That is great, because Emma Harper is right to say that it is an absolute leveller.

I remember that there was an advert on the telly showing people playing wheelchair rugby and, at the end of the game, an able-bodied person who was joining in stood up. Able-bodied people joining in and playing the game with siblings is something that can happen—maybe the need to highlight that is a question for the media folks when they come in front of us as well.

For the record, I will not be playing wheelchair rugby, because it is really rough.

I know. It used to be called murder ball and now it is wheelchair rugby.

Yes, that is right. You can count me out.

Our most heavily subscribed theme is next—oh, I am sorry; the clerk has just reminded me that I ignored Euan Lowe, who wanted to come in before we move on to the next theme. My apologies, Euan.

Thanks. I can share my view, from sitting outside a council or leisure trust, that probably the biggest thing that the leisure and physical activity sector will be facing from an inequalities point of view is around affordability and cost, as a result of the circumstances that we are having to endure as a country at the moment.

In our sport, swimming, we are picking up signals from our clubs that they are preparing for increased access costs to venues—10 to 15 per cent more for some and higher for others. Last week, we heard about a particular area that was going to increase the club let costs by what worked out at 107 per cent. The club fees would increase from £33,000 per year to well over £60,000 per year, which is just not affordable. Those pressures are coming to operators because they need to be able to afford the costs of providing the service. Unfortunately, those increased costs will be passed on to members of the community at some point and I think that one of the biggest challenges that we are going to face from the equalities point of view is affordability.

We are one of the country’s top participation sports, with a high percentage of females involved either through membership or through recreational participation. When pools start to close, that will have an impact on the health and wellbeing of communities and the country at large. We need to be mindful of affordability.

Euan, I am going to push you on that because we had a conversation offline about this; swimming is one of the physical activities and sports that women do in later years as well, so would you agree with me that this would be a particular problem for older women, who might not be doing high-impact stuff but might be swimming right up until their later years?

I would. The unique properties of water, such as its weight-bearing properties, make swimming genuinely accessible to all ages and abilities, from the elderly and infirm to those who are recovering from injuries. For those who are unable to access or take part in any other type of activity and have no alternative, being in water provides a number of unique and different properties that allow them to be physically active. In particular, the proportion of girls and women who take part in the activity is a concern, given that we are starting to see the threat of pool closures ahead.

11:45  

A lot of members want to ask questions on facilities, infrastructure and town planning. I ask everyone to bear in mind that we have only 25 minutes left, and we have another item to get to.

Good morning, everybody.

How can community sports facilities be improved to allow female participation? For example, on booking times, a lot of community facilities have long-term bookings from males, and as female participation in sports such as football has increased, women have found it very difficult to get into community facilities. How can we improve that?

I am not sure that I understand your question. For most facilities these days, booking will be online, so it is equitable.

It happens with a lot of clubs. I play walking football, and we have had a long-term booking at a time that is accessible to us all. Any other groups, especially female groups, that come in now are getting times late at night—the 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock bookings.

That is not my understanding of what is out there just now. As I said, if you are talking about club lets and casual bookings, it is very equitable. Anyone can book online to do that, so I do not see that as an issue.

I think that I know what you mean about the traditional bookings. We have 10 taxi drivers at the John Wright sports centre in East Kilbride—they have a 6 o’clock slot, and they have had it for 25 years, but they still need to try to book that on an annual or a 12-week basis.

I am thinking especially of local authority community centres. In many cases, they are shut at weekends and those groups find it difficult to get into facilities like that to participate.

I am sorry—I disagree. I do not think that people being able to get the slots that they would like is an issue for accessibility.

I would probably disagree when it comes to Fife Council. The best example that I can give is that, when people are off for summer holidays for seven weeks, all the community halls are shut.

Not in South Lanarkshire.

How would you get women to participate in sports, especially when there is good weather?

That is challenging if a facility is closed. However, in South Lanarkshire—Kirsty Garrett can probably speak to this in Glasgow—we certainly have a 52-weeks-of-the-year operation, from 6 in the morning until 10 at night at most sites. There is availability for people to book slots and go and do physical activity. I can speak only for our area.

Let us go to Kirsty Garrett and find out what the situation is in Glasgow.

In Glasgow, we have in place, as part of my team, a community of venue programmers. Ideally, if an organisation such as a women’s sports club came to us and was looking for a particular time slot, the programmers would look across the estate to try to find a suitable venue at a suitable time. That might mean that we move somebody else from one venue to another, because that space would be better used by another group or organisation.

We might say that if young men are playing football at peak time but that means that the kids are going to be playing at 9 o’clock at night, that is not a good use of the space and time. There would be negotiations and conversations with organisations to try to programme our venues more equitably. We have people who look at that, as it is important.

There can be challenges, because some people have had lets for a significant number of years and do not necessarily want to budge. We try to address that through our programmers to ensure that there is an equitable approach, but it can be difficult.

With regard to Glasgow Life, our sports venues are—as Patrick Murphy said about his venues—open for pretty much 52 weeks of the year, from morning to night, so we would hope that we can find availability for people.

Everyone else will talk about buildings and things like that, but I want to talk about the social infrastructure that we need for people to be able to have time to be active. That relates to Kate Joester’s point that, if a person is trying to drop kids off at school, do the shopping and come back, when will they actually have time to take a meaningful walk, go for a cycle or participate in a class in a local authority setting.

Not everybody might have an answer from their working experience, but I wonder whether anyone can reflect on what changes we need to make. For example, the Green Party is a big advocate of the four-day working week, which would allow people more time to focus on things that are important to them. We also need to look at caring time. Does anyone have thoughts on the social infrastructure that we need to facilitate women and girls having time to take care of themselves?

That is an enormous question, and it involves addressing things such as the care burden and how households are structured—it goes to the very root of everything that we do every day. There are some simple things. For example, people can travel actively to work but only if they have time to get there via active travel or public transport. Actually, public transport is a huge facilitator of active travel, because very few people have a bus stop outside their house and their work. However, if someone has to drop off their kids at 8.50 am—which is when primary schools usually start—and has to be at work at 9.00 am, active travel is not generally feasible. Therefore, we need to talk about softer starts to the working day so that people can work more flexibly.

A lot of it is about making changes so that things are structured more equitably so that women and girls have the space in their lives that men often take for granted. We also need to understand that there will always be people who struggle to find that space in their lives because caring happens, and having children happens. We need to work out how we build that social infrastructure by considering issues such as how we should build the working day.

It also comes back to planning because, if shops are a five-minute walk from someone’s house, they will walk to them. Social infrastructure is important, but that is underpinned by physical infrastructure and, very literally, planning.

We need a fundamental change in how we do everything in society.

Just a small one for a Tuesday morning.

We currently have a programme with Clyde Gateway in the Rutherglen and Cambuslang area in which we are working with two local schools—we are not working in isolation—to help to deliver a childcare programme that allows individuals to work longer or search for work. That is a free programme, and it is just about to be scaled up to cover one of our more rural areas, because sometimes challenges are more exacerbated in rural areas than in urban areas such as Rutherglen and Cambuslang.

We provided a report along with our written submission to the committee, and there are some related statistics in that. I cannot quote them, but they are in the report.

I want to ask about making spaces for women and girls. We know that parks, play equipment and public spaces for older kids, teens and adults are currently designed around the default male. It is interesting to know about Glasgow’s feminist town approach. There was also a great motion in South Lanarkshire that was about recognising that unstructured play is for older children rather than just an activity for younger children.

My question is for Kate Joester, Kirsty Garrett or Patrick Murphy. Do you have any examples of older girls, teenagers and women successfully co-designing public spaces where that has increased use by women and girls? Feel free to send in any further examples you might come across, as well.

I should mention that I was a member of the sports council at South Lanarkshire, and that I have known Patrick Murphy for too many years to mention.

I am not sure who wants to answer first.

Not me—not after that!

It is a great question about examples of where there has been co-design. I will go to Patrick first, and then I will come to Kate.

I am not aware of any examples in planning. However, we have some good examples—as I mentioned in my first babbled answer—involving care-experienced children co-producing some of the programmes that I highlighted, such as the active schools programme and stuff on leadership. That is the only example that I can give just now, but I will check with regard to the co-production of green space and other unstructured play areas in South Lanarkshire.

It sounds like Stephanie Callaghan is already making some recommendations for the report that we are going to produce.

I saw that Kate Joester was shaking her head in response to Stephanie’s question.

I am not aware of any examples. I wonder whether Cecilia Oram might have more to say, because Sustrans does quite a lot more in the design space than we do.

The examples that I can think of are not in the United Kingdom.

So there is precedent elsewhere that we can potentially learn from. We may need to factor that into our recommendations on that subject.

We know that with street design it is economically much more helpful to get it right the first time, rather than having to go back and fix mistakes. Bringing in disabled people in particular to design spaces and to say, “Please don’t mess it up in the first place,” is valuable, and that would also apply when we are looking at participation in public space.

I come to a question from Emma Harper—or perhaps not.

No—I am okay, convener.

I will go to Paul Sweeney, then.

I am conscious that yesterday the leadership of South Lanarkshire Council called for the Scottish Government to consider the creation of a swimming pool fund, similar to that which was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer last week for swimming pools in England.

I go to Euan Lowe of Scottish Swimming first. Do you support those calls? Does Scottish Swimming have a view on how such a fund could be used to improve facilities and support the needs of women and girls?

In answer to your question on whether we support those calls—yes, we do, and I have actively written to the First Minister and the Minister for Public Health, Women’s Health and Sport to suggest that the Scottish Government considers following a similar route, with a two-phase approach. That would involve supporting providers and operators of swimming pools, in particular local authorities and leisure trusts directly, with some form of energy relief in the short term. Equally, over the longer term, where more active support is needed, it would involve taking a broader look at some of the current Government’s net zero requirements and ambitions in order to invest in infrastructure properly to secure leisure facilities and swimming pools.

I wonder whether Mr Murphy might have a view on why South Lanarkshire took that step.

It did so because of the current circumstances. Our operating budget is £38 million for everything that we do, from running the zoo through to the nine swimming pools and golf courses. Of that amount, we bring in about £18 million, and the other £18 million is the funding from South Lanarkshire Council, which is constantly reducing.

As I have mentioned, that will not work as we move forward, especially in the light of some of the aspects that Paul Sweeney talked about, and the pressures in and around our communities and how they want to access and use our facilities. It is about all those things coming together, so we would absolutely support the introduction of some sort of relief that would allow us to move forward and to keep people, especially women and those from vulnerable backgrounds, using our facilities.

I apologise to Paul Sweeney for coming in at this point, but I note that keeping those facilities open is also about making them sustainable, and I want to press Euan Lowe on that. We have seen that some areas of the UK are doing something different with regard to how they heat pools. Perhaps there is a potential opportunity there.

As I said, that links in with the issue of equalities. More women swim, right up until the end of their lives, than take part in any other sport, but it is very costly to keep pools open. If we do something in the sustainable space, we could keep them open. I throw that question back to Euan Lowe.

I will give the committee an example. I understand that in some areas, some operators are facing a doubling, if not a tripling, of their energy costs associated with swimming pools alone. It will probably come as no surprise to hear that, on the leisure side, swimming pools are currently one of the highest energy users, but there are rapid increases in technology and investment in renewables that may reduce costs.

For example—as you alluded to, convener—there is an example involving a data hub company that stores data, which exudes a lot of heat that is being put to good use to heat the water for swimming pools.

12:00  

It has been evidenced down south that that is working. There are a number of other sites where Passivhaus technologies have been developed, and there are examples of whole-pool and whole-building design with regard to energy use, from air temperature to air circulation to the plant room—to take that example of heating water—to filtration and the use of chemicals. Those technologies are all advancing to reduce energy costs. The technology exists and there is an opportunity to invest in it.

That is great. I wanted to get that on the record, because that technology is exciting, and it could be an answer to a lot of problems.

Tess, do you want to come in on that?

Thank you, convener. I want to build on that. The reasons why that is so important have been mentioned. Whether it is solar panels on the roof or examples such as the one that we have just talked about, can Scottish Swimming explore new technologies further?

Yes. We have just commissioned a company to not only understand the landscape of pool positioning across the country but map that against the needs of communities with regard to the right size and shape of pool for those particular user groups and communities. The third part of that piece of work is to evidence and provide case studies of examples of renewables usage or new tech that could reduce energy costs for swimming pools. We are trying to get some case studies to evidence to government in a larger sense that this is worthy of investment.

I am aware that this is a world and European problem, and our European partners are likewise investing in renewables for leisure centres to reduce the burden of energy costs for swimming pools. It is an advancing sector.

We are rapidly running out of time, but Evelyn Tweed and Sandesh Gulhane have questions on good practice and the ways forward. I am afraid that we will have to wrap up after that.

Good afternoon. My first question is for Euan Lowe. Emphasising the fun factor of sport is important, but given that women’s professional sport is not taken as seriously as men’s sport, it seems that there is a need to simultaneously work on access to elite sport, where that is desired. How can the two things be balanced and not occur in isolation from each other?

It is difficult to know where to begin in answering that question. To a degree, it goes back to role models and perception. In the sport that I am involved in, we are fortunate to have a number of very successful world championship and Olympic and Paralympic medallists who learned to swim in Scotland, have lived in Scotland and are performing on the world stage from a Scottish base. It is about empowering those role models.

I go back to the example that I used earlier of Toni Shaw, who is a world championship medallist and who is our ambassador for the learn to swim programme. Part of the point of the ambassadorial role is the fun and engagement and the early experience, because that is why people bother to get involved in an activity in the first place.

Toni is great at sharing her knowledge and experience. We are particularly mindful of that point about fun and engagement, and I go back to our young volunteer panel. We are listening to our youngsters, who are keen to show the other aspects of the sport—the less formalised or less competitive angles of the sport—and to encourage more of a “jumpers for goalposts” engagement in the sport and enjoyment of the fun aspects that go with that.

There are other examples from around the world of changing the profile of the activity itself. There was a television series called “International Swimming League”, which had a performance-based profile and involved elite swimmers. However, with that came razzmatazz, lights, cameras and a different kind of social media engagement. It brought to life some more of the fun aspects of the sport—the things that people loved best about being involved in swimming. We could perhaps look at opportunities on that side of things in the future.

My second question, which is for Kirsty Garrett, is about ensuring good representation of women in coaching. I think that Kirsty mentioned coaching in one of her earlier contributions. Do you have any examples of good initiatives to make pathways to coaching more accessible?

I mentioned our energise programme, which involved the provision of insight, training and support to engage with and attract a range of females to a variety of activities that they went on to deliver in a community setting. That energise programme was co-produced with the women who were involved in it. I mentioned the Activate-Her role—those people got additional training and support from my team so that they could deliver projects. We put funding towards that.

Another good initiative was the one that involved the Ment-Her mentoring role, through which we aligned people so that they could share knowledge, experience and practices in order to empower women and give them the confidence not just to take part in sport and physical activity, but to deliver it in their community.

There is a difference between sport and physical activity. With the traditional sports, there are coaching badges and qualifications, but we do a range of things around physical activity, such as our health walks, on which we provide training. We have coaches, officials and a training team, and we try to identify women—including young women—who could take part in physical activity and sport coaching.

With our active schools colleagues, we also deliver a modern apprenticeship programme that involves getting young women and young men involved in sports coaching and activity, and—we hope—putting them on a pathway to employability. There are opportunities for engaging with young people in the school setting with a view to getting them into coaching, as well as for engaging with people in the community setting.

However, I have to say that, in Glasgow, we are going through challenges of the kind that Patrick Murphy mentioned. The pressure on public sector funding and the reductions in that funding mean that all the fantastic things that we can do are at risk. It is really important that we continue to invest in those activities because, otherwise, we will see a huge increase in health and financial inequality, not only in Glasgow but in other cities. We must recognise that there is pressure on public sector funding for sport and physical activity, which is affecting not only our venues but other opportunities.

I will bring in Patrick Murphy for a quick comment, after which Sandesh Gulhane will ask the final question.

I have two concrete answers to Evelyn Tweed’s question. Every year, we have a dance festival, which all 18 high schools in South Lanarkshire come along to. The pupils are mentored by dance activators, who are young leaders—volunteers who are young girls—who go into the schools prior to the dance event and build capacity. That is a brilliant example.

The second example relates to an initiative on which, I am told, a parliamentary motion has been lodged. Through Euan Lowe’s organisation and our organisation, young people are identified to become swimming teachers. It is a great model, given the lifelong benefits that we have talked about. Those young people are given £550 to do a level 2 swimming teacher qualification, which allows them to teach. They go on to be employed while they are at university or college or whatever. That is a great model of practice.

This will be the final question before we move on to the next panel.

My question is for Kirsty Garrett. Even though £17 million was spent on upgrading Tollcross swimming pool, it is to be closed, along with eight other sites. What impact will that have on the community and on getting women and girls into sport? What are you doing to further improve access to facilities and to sport for women and girls?

As far as Tollcross is concerned, Euan Lowe and someone else mentioned the fact that pools take money to heat and maintain. Glasgow Life has also had a challenge with recruitment of staff to run our venues. Post-Covid, there has been a decrease in the number of people applying for jobs as pool lifeguards. As Patrick Murphy mentioned in relation to South Lanarkshire, we are trying to provide new opportunities for people to train to get pool lifeguard qualifications and then secure a job with Glasgow Life.

There are different factors at play. There is a financial side: it is challenging to run pools because of the cost. There is also the issue of recruiting staff to run our venues. There are two issues.

As far as improving women’s access to our venues and activities is concerned, I mentioned our Glasgow club, which has 29,000 members, 57 per cent of whom are female. When it comes to developing and refreshing our venues and sites, we engage with women to make sure that those are safe and welcoming environments. We also listen to women to find out what else they want to get involved in. We provide things such as group sessions and group activities. As well as being able to go to the gym or to take part in classes alone, there are group activities for women, which avoid them having to turn up on their own.

There are different factors at play. There is a financial side, which makes it challenging to keep our venues open, and a staffing side, which is also a challenge. When we improve our facilities, we engage with people as best we can to make sure that they are as inclusive as possible. I hope that I have answered the question.

We have run out of time; we could have spoken to you for a lot longer. If there is anything that you wanted to draw to our attention that you feel got missed, we are happy to receive information in writing. Thank you for your evidence.

I suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

12:11 Meeting suspended.  

12:13 On resuming—