Meeting of the Parliament 17 January 2024
I congratulate Dame Jackie Baillie on the honours that she received today. I am disappointed that she did not wear the hat to the chamber.
When Opposition parties debate those great pillars of devolved government, health and education, as we have done so well today, I think that they generally do so for good reason. The points that are made in such debates are often backed up with statistics and facts and informed by stakeholder evidence. I say gently to Mr McKee that they are not talking points; they are about facts, and they are worth debating in the chamber.
The Government’s response to such debates is predictable. There is little sign of contrition or acceptance of any of the criticism that is directed towards it; there is denial of the scale or extent of the problems that we face; and there is a huge amount of whataboutery, of the kind that we heard from the cabinet secretary. Today’s debate is a fine example of that.
Labour rightly pointed out that 80,000 people have waited for more than a year for planned care. It rightly raised the years of missed targets and the growing workforce problems that are faced. In our amendment, we highlighted the worrying cuts to drug and alcohol services and raised the plight of the 1 million people who have waited for more than four hours at A and E since 2020-21.
The Lib Dems raised issues around NHS staff, who are at the core of such debates, and the Greens did not even bother to turn up this afternoon. That says so much.
Immediately, in its opening line, the Government’s feeble amendment—it is a feeble amendment—seeks to remove the phrase “is alarmed” from the motion, because it is clearly not as alarmed as we or, indeed, our constituents are. The Government goes as far as to congratulate itself on the fact that fewer patients are waiting more than two years for an appointment to be seen. Its amendment seeks to remove all references to the drug and alcohol deaths, to A and E waiting times, to mental health waiting times and, frankly, to anything else that seems to embarrass it. In fact, the only defence in the Government’s amendment is that all devolved policy makers seem to be doing a terrible job at managing health. In other words, it is all relative. That is mediocrity at its very worst.
All too often, the bad news is buried away rather than being publicly available. For example, in doing research for the debate, audiology waiting times could not be found. From a response to a freedom of information request, we learned that that data is not published,
“following agreement with the Scottish Government”.
What a surprise.
Yesterday, speech therapy figures were released not by the Government but by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. It, too, had to FOI the data. From that data, we discovered that 6,500 children in Scotland are currently on a waiting list for their first appointment. That is shocking. I have raised the issue because, in my area, the waiting list was closed because it was more than two years long. That is despicable.
What about mental health waiting times? One patient in Ayrshire and Arran waited 91 weeks for their first CAMHS appointment. Can members imagine that? We know that only because we FOI-ed it. We know such things only because we submit FOIs and ask written questions. We never hear such information from the Government, and we certainly never hear it in its debates.
I am afraid that the Government’s amendment is sheer brass neck. It has been parroted repeatedly today that the NHS in Scotland is free at the point of need. Well, here is a reality check. Someone who wants to see a dentist this week in Greenock will get an appointment only if they offer to pay for one. That is the reality of the NHS in Scotland. The same goes for people who want a hearing aid or who are desperate for a knee or hip replacement. They will have to borrow the money, cash in their savings and go abroad or go private. That is the reality of the health service today, in 2024.
With the Government’s amendment, the only people that it is fooling are themselves. Fixing the problem requires admitting that there is a problem. It is not creeping privatisation that we need to worry about—it is creeping ineptitude in Government, and there is plenty of that going around.
16:48