Meeting of the Parliament 28 January 2025
I echo Neil Gray’s thanks to our emergency service workers and public service workers for their Herculean efforts in response to the extreme weather this weekend.
We approach the debate with a depressing sense of déjà vu. It is another SNP Government debate that papers over the structural cracks in Scotland’s finances and fails to address the fundamental problems in our public services. It is another SNP Government debate where the excuses pile high. The simple truth is that, under this Government, public service outcomes have declined despite significant increases in public spending. That is no criticism of our nurses, our teachers or our police—the very people that the SNP Government cynically uses as human shields to mask its policy failures. The problems that we see across Scotland’s public services stem from a failure of leadership in the SNP Government. It is a Government that yet again, only yesterday, thought that a hollow speech from the First Minister would fix Scotland’s ailing NHS. The First Minister’s predecessor and the First Minister who went before him both served as health secretary, and the current First Minister led on Covid recovery. Therefore, the waiting lists, the workforce crisis and the staggering collapse of the national care service before it was even launched are their failures. They caused them, and they own them.
In 2021, the SNP Government vowed to increase NHS capacity by 10 per cent to tackle waiting times. That never happened—we are still waiting. In 2022, Humza Yousaf said that he would “eradicate” long waits for patients, but Public Health Scotland says that that has not happened either. We were promised a national care service by 2026 but, £30 million of wasted money later, we have a task force and nothing more.
When it comes to the SNP, we are used to having more strategies and working groups but no real, commonsense solutions to the problems across Scotland. On schools, for example, under the SNP, education in Scotland has gone backwards in international rankings. On housing, more than 10,000 children are still living in temporary accommodation. On law and order, police numbers are down and violent crime is rising.
The Government says that its budget will deliver growth. It does deliver growth—growth in the cost of the civil service and growth in the benefits bill. As the Scottish Fiscal Commission warns, this year, the Government is spending £1.4 billion more on social security than it receives funding for. By the end of this decade, social security spending will be nearly £9 billion—some 15 per cent of the entire Scottish Government revenue budget.