Meeting of the Parliament 27 March 2025
Absolutely. The visits that the committee undertook showed that it is not the case that there is one facility for each council—we are talking about shared facilities. The economic potential that exists for such facilities to benefit from visits by university students and team-building exercises is such that we can make the proposal work and put in place some fantastic new facilities across our country.
Throughout my time in Parliament, I have always championed the need to invest in mental wellbeing. If we truly want to bring about greater resilience and more positive mental health in the next generation, we need to invest in that at school. I have always been struck by the findings of the 2016 report on scout and guide participation, which is now almost a decade old. It found that people who were scouts and guides in childhood had better mental health in later life. That report, which was put together by researchers at Edinburgh and Glasgow universities, looked at data from a lifelong study of more than 10,000 people who had had outdoor education experiences as scouts and guides, and it found that, as adults, they were 15 per cent less likely to suffer from anxiety or to have mental health complications or mood disorders.