Meeting of the Parliament 14 January 2015
The cabinet secretary says that it is not a problem. I welcome the fact that 600,000 people—98 per cent—have been treated within 12 weeks. However, that is a completely different matter from the Government’s having given a legal guarantee. We said at the time that that law was a nonsense, and it is still a nonsense. It should be abandoned because it is a bad use of the law. As the Government’s amendment says, most people who required treatment were treated, but it was not us who promoted the guarantee. Every breach of the guarantee is not a number but a person whose experience is poorer.
Another crucial Labour decision was the decision to initiate a move to a largely consultant-led service. Cabinet secretary—am I allowed to say that?—it takes 10 years, post graduation, to train a consultant, so the maths is clear: not a single consultant has been trained and taken up a post under the SNP—they all began their training under a Labour plan.
Workforce planning is never easy, but it has to be done for the medium to long term. Let us look at what the SNP has done. Under SNP plans that were announced in 2011, specialist training grades were to be cut by 40 per cent and foundation year 1 and 2 posts were to be cut by 20 per cent, at a time when implementation of the European working time directive was going to require more junior and middle grades.
There have been several consequences of that. First, we have the largest number of consultant vacancies that the NHS has ever experienced—the number is now 339, or 6.5 per cent; in some specialities, it is 20 per cent.