Meeting of the Parliament 02 September 2025
I am very happy to reinforce the point that I made a moment ago about the extra capacity that means that, right now, in-patient waiting lists are falling in Scotland. I am happy to put that on the record once again for Rachael Hamilton’s benefit.
The latest statistics confirm our progress, with planned care activity up, the number of operations performed in July 2025 at the highest level in more than five years, the child and adolescent mental health services waiting time standard met for the third time in a row and the lowest number of eight-hour and 12-hour waits for A and E since September 2023, despite the highest July attendance level for six years.
It is not a broken national health service; it is an NHS that we can be proud of. It is an NHS that, after Covid and after the Government’s decision to put record investment into the NHS—record investment, of course, that neither the Labour Party nor the Conservatives in the Parliament supported—is getting better once again. Much has been achieved, but there is much more to do to strengthen the NHS in Scotland.
Thanks to choices made in Scotland, the child poverty rate is now lower than it has been for a decade, despite UK Government actions that have pushed more children below the poverty line. Indeed, if Scotland had the same rate of child poverty as the rest of the UK, an additional 90,000 Scottish children would be in poverty.
Progress has been delivered because of innovative policies—made-in-Scotland policies such as the Scottish child payment—and because of our prioritisation and hard work in bringing people together to ensure that we delivered lower levels of child poverty in Scotland. That has had an effect on our schools, where free school meal provision has been expanded and where the pupil equity fund has enabled 3,000 additional staff to be employed—staff who can work with children to ensure that they have more of the support that they need to thrive.