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That is good to hear.

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?

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?

It is interesting to follow the conversation around sex-segregated sport, in particular in educational settings, and the context in which misogyny can come into it, especially in team sports with the introduction of the element of competition.

I was reflecting on your point about public facilities such as parks and accessibility in that respect within a feminist town-planning perspective. One initiative that has been quite positive, certainly in Glasgow, has been the parkrun initiative. It has been quite successful at seeding community-based sporting activity in otherwise sterile public spaces. In that context, it is a mixed-sex activity.

You made an important point about the appropriate context depending on the type of sport that is involved, and you talked about the idea of tasters for different sports that are perhaps not traditionally female oriented. With gender, there is a bit of nuance needed about what might be more appropriate in different contexts. For example, a mixed setting might be appropriate for the parkrun, but there might be other instances such as swimming—Glasgow has traditionally had female-only swimming evenings—where nuance might be needed. Have you identified certain areas where a mixed setting might be more appropriate than it would be for others? Is that something that you have looked at?

That is helpful. Are particular messages needed to offer reassurance around managing diet and activity, so that those things are not seen as some sort of self-flagellation exercise to chase an unobtainable image, but are instead about the person taking control. Is there a powerful public health message that we could push more?

I have previously mentioned in a debate on vaping in the chamber the iconic public health advertisements in the 1990s. I wonder whether we can revisit the ideas behind that, because the advertising was highly effective.

During our evidence-taking session with Dr Henrietta Hughes, the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, we discussed the issue of escalation. She was emphatic about the need for collaboration and a culture of openness, rather than for an inquisitor who would come in and berate people for failures. That is an important insight to note.

However, where there have been egregious problems, there will need to be very clear recommendations that ought to be implemented. In situations in which there is an area of injustice or an issue that needs to be urgently addressed and which could not simply be left to collegiate encouragement, perhaps there is a need for an escalation process. In responding to my question about that, Dr Hughes said that it was quite early days and that she would not necessarily be clear about what the next step of escalation would be in that instance. Obviously, the reporting line in this case is to Parliament rather than to ministers. Does the minister have a view on how the bill might better define that process of potential escalation, if there is such a lack of co-operation in the future?

I raised the point about data with the English commissioner and asked her about the

“huge risk of data inundation”

and having to make sense of large streams and volumes of information that might have been collected for completely different purposes, might not be comparable, might not have the same baselines and might as a result have accuracy risks. In response to being asked how “meaningful conclusions” could be drawn from the different streams of data being fed into her office and how they would be processed, the commissioner said:

“Having a data and digital function in my team so that we can use and manipulate that data in a way that can bring fresh insight that will help the system to attend and listen to things that it may not have been aware of in the past is key.”

Moreover, Dr Duncan, the chief of staff, said that the commissioner was

“right to say that, without a data analytics function, the novel insights that a commissioner could have would be limited.”—[Official Report, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, 21 February 2023; c 39.]

Do you agree with that assessment?

Thanks for that. Minister, the point that you hinted at earlier was important. We often hear qualitative insights from patients, as we did in relation to the mesh scandal. The Public Petitions Committee unpacked a lot of that because the system did not respond. Doctors were dismissing patients saying that it was psychosomatic or imagined. A data signal was not being transmitted through the healthcare system to illustrate that there was a problem. That sort of case might be an opportunity for the commissioner to instruct the gathering of data.

Thank you, convener.

Rather than simply take a laissez-faire approach to social media influencing, should the state have a more active role in promoting positive messaging through influencers to direct people in positive directions, particularly through targeted advertising to young people?