Meeting of the Parliament 18 February 2020
I thank the convener for setting out the key points from the Health and Sport Committee’s report on the social prescribing of physical activity and sport. I also thank all committee members for their work on the inquiry and for the opportunity to discuss the topic today.
Social prescribing is a valuable approach that can enable people and communities to take more control of their health and wellbeing. I welcome the committee’s constructive and wide-ranging report,
Today, I will focus on two main themes from the report. The first theme is the importance of physical activity and sport for our physical and mental wellbeing and how we can ensure that everyone in Scotland experiences those benefits. The second theme is how the healthcare system can raise awareness of the benefits of being physically active and can connect people so that they can be supported and get opportunities to be physically active.
The committee has focused on physical activity and sport in its inquiry. As the convener mentioned, there are, of course, other activities that can help people to improve their physical and mental health. I will spend a little time on that point later.
As the committee highlights throughout its report, there is no shortage of evidence on the benefits of physical activity and sport for our physical and mental health. The benefits include reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, many types of cancer and depression. The flipside is that physical inactivity damages our physical and mental health, which puts additional pressure on our healthcare system. I therefore agree entirely with the committee’s overall conclusion that physical activity should be seen as an investment.
This Government is committed to making that investment in physical activity and sport. In the current financial year, we have increased the sportscotland budget to £32.65 million, with similar levels of funding proposed in our recently published draft budget. In 2018, we doubled the active travel budget from £40 million to £80 million, and in our draft budget, we have set out plans to increase that again, to more than £85 million.
Together with partners across health, sport, transport, education, the environment and other sectors, we are taking concrete action to achieve our shared vision of a Scotland where people are more active, more often. “A More Active Scotland: Scotland’s Physical Activity Delivery Plan” demonstrates the breadth of those efforts. The World Health Organization has welcomed the plan’s systems-based approach to working across sectors and has recognised Scotland as one of the forerunner countries in responding to its global action plan on physical activity.
The committee is right to highlight the importance of addressing inequalities between the most and least-deprived areas in relation to participation in physical activity and sport. We all know only too well how challenging it is to tackle health inequalities and, equally, how vital it is that we spare no effort in doing so.
Sport has a major role to play in tackling inequality and contributing to a more inclusive Scotland. Through sportscotland, we are working to achieve that through a number of our main delivery programmes. For example, sportscotland’s active schools programme provides free or low-cost opportunities for children and young people to be active. An independent evaluation of sportscotland’s work in the schools and education environment, published in 2018, found that
“schools with high levels of deprivation were more likely to have high levels of Active Schools participation than those with medium or low levels of deprivation.”
That is an encouraging sign of success, given the inequalities that are experienced in many other sport and physical activity programmes.