I recently visited the H17 overdose prevention facility in Copenhagen. A discrete co-operative policing model in the Vesterbro district is key to the successful operation of the centre, even though a major police station is situated directly opposite.

What assessment has the cabinet secretary made of international examples of policing safe consumption rooms? How will the Government ensure that potential users of the Glasgow pilot facility are not deterred from engaging out of fear of contact with the police or the criminal justice system?

To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government’s response is to the analysis by Citizens Advice Scotland suggesting that over 660,000 people are experiencing mental health problems due to increasing household debt. (S6F-02847)

Increasingly, people have nowhere to turn when their mental health deteriorates. Patients in some health boards have been waiting for more than 1,000 days to start psychological therapy, and one in four consultant psychiatry positions is vacant. The Government’s response is to cut £30 million more from the mental health budget, despite its already being £180 million adrift from the target. When will the First Minister’s Government start to take the crisis in mental health seriously and reverse the proposed cut to mental health funding in the budget?

Will the member take an intervention?

Springburn railway station does not offer step-free access, which makes it inaccessible to wheelchair users. The Scottish Government must do all that is within its gift to ensure equal access to Scotland’s railways. Will the minister make representation to the Department for Transport to press for access for all scheme funding for control period 7, so that much-needed improvements can be made at last to Springburn railway station?

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to ensure that railway infrastructure is safe and fit for the future. (S6O-03114)

I am pleased that the Conservative member for West Scotland has raised waiting times for children and young people, as long waits for child and adolescent mental health services come up regularly in my casework—indeed, the Government has never met its CAMHS waiting time target. Does the cabinet secretary accept that there might be a link between repeatedly freezing and then reducing the mental health budget in-year, and the Government having never met that waiting time target?

No one here is charging the Government with not having to deal with a difficult financial position; our issue is the clarity with which it is approaching those points. For example, we know that community link workers have a positive effect in avoiding unnecessary admissions to acute hospitals, yet their numbers in Glasgow were about to be cut and we had to fight a defensive campaign against that proposal. That is just one symptom of a wider issue, in which the Government is often found wanting by not acting intelligently with the resources that it has.

I take this opportunity to welcome the new cabinet secretary to his place. It was remiss of me not to do so during the previous debate, but I do so now. I also congratulate the new member, Tim Eagle, on his excellent maiden speech.

The decline in NHS dentistry in Scotland under the SNP is, frankly, scandalous. The Government is driving NHS dental services into the ground. Oral health is consistently a second thought, and there are people across the country who are unable to sign up to a dentist and who are relying on emergency dental phone lines instead. In 2022, the number of NHS 24 calls about dental health exceeded 60,000, which was an increase of 40,000 compared to four years prior. That is not good enough. Scots should be able to access the care that they need in their local area and should not have to wait until a minor dental issue becomes an emergency to see a dentist.

Labour research shows that, in recent years, waits for dental surgery have soared. Each of the 14 territorial health boards has seen an increase in the average waiting time for dental surgery. In some parts of Scotland, people are waiting close to a year, in excruciating pain, for the surgery that they desperately need.

The Government’s failure to get to grips with NHS dentistry issues is—as is far too often the case—compounding health inequalities. In 2022, children and adults from the most deprived areas in Scotland were less likely to have seen their dentist compared to those in the least deprived areas. The gap between child participation rates in dental care was 20 percentage points between the most and least deprived, which is completely unacceptable. Shockingly, only 68 per cent of 10 to 11-year-olds in the 10 most deprived areas in Scotland are decay free compared to 90 per cent in the 10 least deprived areas. That is a stark contrast. Patients and dentists deserve better.

I can furnish members with a personal anecdote. For the past 20 years, I have been registered with an NHS dentist in one of the most deprived communities in Scotland—north Glasgow—and, for the first time in my life, from childhood to the present, I have been unable to get a routine check-up because the permanent dentist has left, locums continually fail to appear and dental appointments have routinely been cancelled. I have not been able to get a dental check-up for eight months, despite repeatedly attempting to book one. That is just one personal example.

In 2006, the last Labour-led Scottish Government introduced the world-leading and ambitious childsmile programme, which gives young people free toothbrushes and toothpaste as well as two fluoride varnishes a year. The programme has vastly improved prevention of the signs of tooth decay in primary school-aged children. Childsmile is an example of spending to save down the line and improving through-life costs. It is about prevention and is a good example of what the Government could do much more of. It was also a targeted intervention to close the oral health gap. That is why I mention it in my amendment. That foresight and long-termism is missing from the Scottish Government’s sticking-plaster approach to dentistry.

Last year, Labour members welcomed the news that the Scottish Government was in conversation with dentists regarding a new payment reform plan to ensure that dentists continue to offer NHS services in the light of swathes of dental practices turning away from NHS provision. Often, once they go, they will not come back in a hurry. However, what the Government offered fell short of the mark, and, as the British Dental Association has said,

“the fundamentals of a broken system remain”.

Dentists regularly tell me that they have witnessed a huge increase in the number of patients presenting with signs of DIY dentistry, and I am sure that they have said the same to ministers. We only have to look at the explosion of adverts for self-dental scaling kits that are available on social media as an indication of what is going on out there. A British Dental Association survey showed that 83 per cent of Scottish dentists have treated patients who performed DIY dentistry during lockdown. That is simply outrageous.

Significant change to the NHS recovery plan is needed to reverse the decline in NHS dentistry so that Scots have access to dental healthcare when and where they need it.

I move amendment S6M-12215.1, to insert at end:

“and recognises that the world-leading Childsmile programme, which was implemented by the last Scottish Labour Party-led administration in 2006, has been widely recognised as one of the most effective public health interventions of the devolved era and has transformed child dental health.”

I welcome Mr Eagle to his place and look forward to listening to his maiden speech. He will certainly have big shoes to fill replacing Mr Cameron as the representative for Highlands and Islands. I also thank the Liberal Democrats for lodging its Opposition day motion on primary care for debate and say that members on the Labour benches will be supporting it.

We have, over the course of the parliamentary session, considered the issue of long waiting times on many occasions—and rightly so. One in seven Scots is on an NHS waiting list. The reason why we keep coming back to the issue is that it is not going away; in fact, it is getting worse under the current Government.

If primary care had the support that it needed, we would be able to build capacity and give people the timely help that they need in their communities, reducing pressure on our acute hospitals. Unfortunately, primary care does not have that support. The Scottish Government is not on track to deliver on its commitment to recruiting an extra 800 GPs by 2027, and its earlier commitment to recruiting 1,000 new community mental health workers has been abandoned. Patients and primary care teams deserve better than constant broken promises by the Government, and Labour supports the call in the Liberal Democrat motion for the NHS recovery plan to be rewritten.

I welcome the references to mental health in the motion, and I am sure that members will agree that the issue is raised frequently with us by constituents. It is, unfortunately, clear why that is the case: as of September last year, 27 per cent of children and young people who were referred to child and adolescent mental health services were rejected, an average of 26 children a day. Some patients have been waiting in excess of 1,000 days to start psychological therapies, and NHS 24 mental health hub calls about psychotic symptoms increased by 101 per cent between 2021 and 2023. That is an extremely serious demonstration of unmet need.

We know that support for mild to moderate mental health issues in the community has a positive impact on outcomes for patients, as well as reducing the demand for onward care, but the Scottish Government has failed to deliver on mental health services. The Government’s previous commitment to funding mental health and wellbeing services in primary care, before pulling the funding entirely after the health and social care partnerships had spent almost a year planning for delivery, has been a catastrophic failure. As the motion states, the mental health budget has been frozen and then cut in-year for two years running. That kind of incoherence is unsustainable, and these are not the decisions of a Government that takes mental health seriously.

Labour is clear that primary care teams need to be supported and afforded the headroom to innovate and establish the services required to meet the needs of their practice population. My amendment, therefore, notes that members on the Labour benches have serious concerns about health professionals not being meaningfully involved in Scottish Government decisions on service delivery, patient safety and workforce planning. The fact is that there is no service delivery, no patient delivery and no workforce without our dedicated NHS staff. Those workers and our patients deserve better, which is why our amendment calls for a national clinical council that is on a statutory footing to empower clinical experts and to make a better reality for patients and professionals.

I move amendment S6M-12214.1, to insert at end:

“; is concerned that health professionals are not meaningfully involved when the Scottish Government is taking decisions on service delivery, patient safety and workforce planning, and calls for the establishment of a statutory national clinical council, which would empower clinical experts and improve services for patients.”