Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2015
I welcome the cabinet secretary’s remarks about the 2020 vision, which, as she knows, Labour has supported from its inception. I also give a cautious welcome to her remarks about the 10 to 15-year plan. Members on these benches will need to see a lot more detail about the plan’s scope and whether it is an extension of the 2020 deadline or something different. As she concentrated on the proposal only briefly at the end of her speech, I hope that she will come back to the chamber in the next couple of weeks with more detail on it.
During yesterday’s debate on the budget bill, Labour asked the Scottish Government to invest £100 million of its consequentials in a front-line fund for the NHS. I am grateful that this afternoon’s debate gives me the opportunity to talk about the proposal a bit more and to outline how it fits into the 2020 vision for the NHS as a whole.
I hope that the cabinet secretary will forgive me and Malcolm Chisholm for pressing her on the timing of the task force, but I think that it was justifiable, given that our budget ask of £100 million for a front-line fund is actually based on the recommendations of our civil servants and her own Government. It has published several position papers and plans that say that evening diagnostics and weekend surgery would be a great boon to our health service and would free up capacity. We are completely on the same page as the Scottish Government on this matter. Given that the health service is such a priority at the moment, we are simply asking it to spend the £29 million in health consequentials, which she has yet to allocate from the November consequentials, and indeed the general consequentials, on this.
I know that the cabinet secretary will forgive me and Malcolm Chisholm for pressing her on the timing. After all, in a Scottish Government press release from October 2013, Alex Neil announced that the task force was to meet early in the new year, which would have been last January—a whole year ago—to drive this forward. As we have not yet seen the report from the task force, she will understand why we are pressing her on a date in that respect.
Scottish Labour has always supported and will continue to support the 2020 vision, because it sets out a person-centred and well-integrated vision that I would like to see for health and social care in Scotland. Unfortunately, however, it seems that especially in the last few weeks and months, that vision is further and further away from the reality that patients in Scotland face. I do not think that the Scottish Government is taking enough tangible, on-the-ground action to deliver it. Perhaps it is the prerequisite of not being fully challenged until 2020 on its targets that is allowing the Government to take its time, and I am slightly concerned that the plan that the cabinet secretary has just announced simply extends the target. There is not enough action or progress happening in our NHS at the moment.