Meeting of the Parliament 18 February 2015
Thank you, Mr Hume. If the member had paid closer attention to what I was saying rather than to the point that he was endeavouring to make, he would have heard me say that I was delighted that the cabinet secretary has announced the publication of the data. There is no contradiction there whatsoever.
The publication of the data is important in the interest of transparency and in order to provide a reliable guide to our health service’s effectiveness. Perhaps it is also important to help prevent Labour Party members from making fools of themselves. That is not a trivial point, because while the Labour Party is at liberty to bark up the wrong trees as much as it likes, it should take care in its politicisation of health matters. The effect of that is sometimes to place our hard-working health workers under even greater stress; often, the effect is to subject them to a siege, laid on them by the Labour Party, and to criticise them on false premises merely to score a political point. The last thing that our hard-working health workers require is to have their morale sapped in that way.
It is sad, too, that the Labour Party cannot think of a more constructive way of acting in opposition than to endlessly criticise our health service, especially because the facts speak otherwise. Patient satisfaction with the Scottish health service has never been higher. The 2014 British social attitudes survey, which was published only last month, indicates that 75 per cent of people in Scotland are satisfied with the NHS, compared with 65 per cent in England, and only 51 per cent in Labour-run Wales.
Health funding has increased to an all-time high, despite the reduction in the Scottish Government budget. Every penny of Barnett consequentials has been passed on to the health service budget. That is why we have 1,300 more consultants, 1,700 more qualified nurses and midwives and, overall, 9,000 extra NHS staff than we had in 2006.
There is merit in producing the statistics. The public have a right to know how our health service is performing. This Government has done more than any previous Government to publish increasingly meaningful statistics—not to wrongly lay blame at the door of our hard-working health workers but, rightly, to tell the relative success story that is the Scottish national health service.
Our Scottish national health service, despite the many pressures on it, is performing better than it was when Labour was last in office in Scotland. It is also performing much better than the health service in England and much, much better than the Labour-controlled health service in Wales.
The health record of Labour when it was last in office in Scotland is not a good one. It is a story of hidden waiting lists, of lain Gray’s refusal to make a manifesto commitment to maintain the health budget and of the party’s plans to close A and E departments at Monklands and Ayr. The Scottish people spoke loudly and clearly on Labour’s record on health and other issues in 2011, and they will soon have another opportunity to speak. I suspect that they will speak loudly and clearly once again.
The Labour Party seems to think that Mr Murphy is a prophet. In reality, he is a pied piper and he is not leading Labour into the promised land; he is leading it further and deeper into the political wilderness.
16:05