Meeting of the Parliament 11 January 2024
As I said, it is estimated that 90,000 fewer children will live in relative and absolute poverty in 2023-24. Notably, poverty levels are lower in Scotland than they are in England.
For more than 75 years, our national health service has been a universal public service, free for all at the point of need. We are resolutely committed to those founding principles and have a strong record of investing in our health and social care sector. For example, we have invested £193 million in our national treatment centres programme. We opened two new centres in Fife and Highland in spring last year, and two further centres will open or expand early this year. Together, the centres are planning to deliver more than 20,000 additional procedures by 2024-25, which will improve patient outcomes.
Alongside mitigating the impacts of UK Government decisions, the scale of the current financial challenge means that we must change the way that we deliver public services in Scotland. In the short term, we need to reduce costs and improve effectiveness further. However, as we look at the demographic projections for Scotland, which were made worse by Brexit and the UK Government’s approach to immigration, combined with the anticipated level of demand on public services, we know that we must change the way that we deliver services in the long term to fundamentally improve people’s lives and reduce their need for on-going support.