Meeting of the Parliament 03 June 2026 [Draft]
Thank you, Presiding Officer. [Interruption.] Oh! Did I make that noise with the microphone?
I will start the debate on a consensual note. I very much welcome Angela Constance to her new post as Cabinet Secretary for Health and Care. I have considerable respect for her as an individual—I hope that my saying that is not career ending for her—and as a politician, and I wish her well in her portfolio.
Our NHS needs her to do well. The cabinet secretary will, of course, expect me to hold her feet to the fire and, on that score, I will not disappoint, because the NHS is our most loved public institution. We care deeply that it remains true to its founding principles and is free at the point of need, but we recognise that it faces huge challenges. Thousands of Scots languish on NHS waiting lists. The situation with A and E remains chaotic, with long waits now almost baked in. Burnt-out NHS staff are voting with their feet, and the social care sector is in crisis.
Fixing the NHS will require fresh thinking. The Scottish National Party has been in power for nearly 20 years, and I genuinely believe that, if it had any idea how to turn things around, that would have happened by now. I look forward to what Angela Constance is going to do. However, to quote Samuel Johnson, that is perhaps expecting a
“triumph of hope over experience”.
Angela Constance’s predecessors were very good at creating NHS plans—in fact, they could probably paper the walls of St Andrew’s house with them—but they were much less effective at delivering them. In many cases, the plans were excellent; they were informed by people who worked in that sector. However, with no timelines and no money, they simply gathered dust.
The Scottish Government’s flagship promise last year was the commitment to end, by March 2026, treatment waits of more than a year. I distinctly recall the First Minister making that commitment. It should have been delivered more than three months ago, yet there are still 32,279 treatment waits of more than a year, 3,433 waits of more than two years and, at the last count, more than 750,000 ongoing waits for tests and treatment.
Behind those figures are people in pain, who are waiting day after day for the appointment letter that never comes. In the meantime, their lives are on hold. Some become so desperate that they use their savings to get private surgery. We know that the number of Scots who are using private healthcare is the highest ever on record. The reality is that the SNP has presided over the growth of a two-tier health system in which people who have savings are raiding them to pay for treatment and those who do not are left languishing in pain. If the new cabinet secretary is true to her word and serious about getting waiting lists down, she must use all available theatre capacity. I also recommend that she ensures that money follows the patient instead of their being left at the mercy of health board bureaucracy.
Emergency departments are under pressure, too. Each month, thousands of patients are still waiting for more than eight or even 12 hours at A and E. A significant proportion of those patients would not be there at all had they been able to access care earlier, but many people are still struggling to get through to GPs. Patients are still waiting for the facility to book GP appointments on the NHS app, and I look forward to that being rolled out at pace.
The cabinet secretary knows that the percentage of the NHS budget that goes to primary care has dropped from 11 per cent to only 6 per cent, that the number of patients per GP has increased and that qualified GPs are out of work because GP practices cannot afford to hire them.
Doctors have already made clear their concerns that GP walk-in clinics are not effective and do not provide what I think we all strive for, which is continuity of care. The message is that we should just fund existing GP practices, which should be the walk-in clinics in everybody’s community.