Meeting of the Parliament 18 February 2015
So the chief statistician decides to publish on a three-monthly basis and then on a one-monthly basis but, after pressure from the Scottish Labour Party, the chief statistician decides to publish on a weekly basis. If the cabinet secretary is saying that she had nothing to do with that decision, I suggest that she is not in control of what is going on in her health department.
Less than 24 hours after Shona Robison made her statement on political interference, the First Minister stood up and told us at First Minister’s question time that her civil servants had started to look into the publication of weekly statistics. I must therefore ask whether the health secretary was aware on 4 February that the Government’s policy on publishing A and E statistics was changing.
It is hard to believe that, if Shona Robison had instructed her civil servants to look at publishing the data, she would come to the chamber and forcefully say that such a policy was political interference. Perhaps she did not know what was going on in her department on 4 February. Is it the case that the decision to publish A and E statistics was not hers but the First Minister’s and that decisions are being taken on health that Shona Robison knows nothing about and has no control whatsoever over? The health secretary’s statements strongly suggest that she is not in control of decisions on health and that the First Minister is intervening, where necessary, to clean up the mess.