Seòmar agus comataidhean

So the UK budget and spending review have an impact on 2021-22 as well as on 2022-23.

Before I bring in the other witnesses, that leads me on to another thought. The point has been made that one of the Christie principles was about more joint working, collaboration and so on. Out of that came the health and social care partnerships or integration joint boards, whatever they are currently called, but from my perspective, those are just another kind of new body. Professor Mitchell talked about ensuring that we do not simply add more institutions, but now, instead of a situation in which I either write to the chief executive of the health board or the chief executive of the council, I have a third option, as I can also write to the chief executive of the integration joint board.

My question for you all is whether that kind of thing—not necessarily IJBs specifically, but more generally—has been a mistake or has not worked in the way that it was meant to. If so, why is that the case?

The discussion has been very interesting and has covered a lot of ground; I realise that I am the last questioner.

Coming from an accounting background, I want to pin down some numbers, especially with Professor Mitchell. You said that we should be bolder, so I was going to ask whether we should, for example, take 10 per cent off the hospital budget and put it into primary care. However, you then said that we can do things only incrementally. Would it be useful to have some fixed concept over the next few years, whereby we give, say, 1 per cent less than we might have to secondary hospital care and 1 per cent—or the equivalent figure—more to primary care? That might give us something solid that we as a committee could agree on and then put to Parliament. After all, as everyone has pointed out, we have not made the progress that we might have done.

On that point, before I come to Mr Boyle, you are arguing that, just as there has been a need for extra tax for care services, we could put in place—we would have to choose whether we wanted to do so—a tax for extra preventative spending. That could be done to launch it all, in a sense. We all seem to have said that we cannot cut anything, so we will wait until we have extra money, and once we have that, we will put it into preventative care, and that is never going to happen.

Mr Boyle, you can comment on that, too. I was interested that you said that it would be better to measure how safe people are rather than how many police we have. As an auditor, do you think that that would be practical? I did a tiny bit of auditing earlier in my life and I know that measuring the number of police is easier than measuring people’s safety. If we were safer but had fewer police, what would Liz Smith, the Daily Record and everybody else complain about? [Laughter.]

That leads me to where I was going next. I understand that more venues in Wales, including cinemas, will require people to have a certificate. I have been enthusiastic about the certification scheme, including the fact that it is limited to what I would call extra activities or things that are not a major part of people’s lives. That has been a good way to deal with it.

However, it is clear that the scheme is beginning to expand—we can call it creep or whatever. I think that Professor Leitch said that more places are requiring certification. For example, I am going to a COP26 meeting on Monday night where they want to see my vaccination certificate. That event is important to me. I do not go to big football matches, as members know, so I have not needed to use my certificate much. Are you worried that organisations could be using the scheme excessively? How do you see the scheme working, moving forward?

What about employers who want their employees to have a certificate? Does that take it to another level of pressure?

Does Professor Leitch want to say something on that?

I will build on some points that have already been raised, one being the question of when we will stop using vaccination certificates. I take it that, because the scheme is part of a package and we cannot tell what specific impact it is having, it will continue along with mask wearing and the other restrictions. Its use is linked to the overall numbers of cases and of people in hospital. Is that what you are saying?

If we are okay for time, convener, I will aim my next question at Professor Noakes. I want to follow up on what she said to Murdo Fraser. She talked about air-cleaning technologies and high-efficiency particulate filters, which I am trying to get my head round.

I have an issue with ScotRail, our railway operator. This might be slightly different from the situation with buildings, but ScotRail has some trains with locked windows. They could be opened, but they are not. I asked ScotRail whether it would be better to open the windows, but it said that its artificial air-circulation system is just as good as having the windows open. Is that likely to be true?