Chamber and committees

In 2022, around 12 per cent of women smoked during pregnancy. The minister mentioned that her own grandparent was advised to stop smoking. We know that smoking when pregnant can have serious health risks, but we also know how difficult it can be to stop. In England, midwives and NHS staff helped almost 15,000 mums-to-be to quit smoking over a three-year period. Will the minister ensure that midwives in Scotland have the resources to support pregnant women to kick the habit?

Will the cabinet secretary join me in recognising the work of For Women Scotland—some of whom are in the gallery today—whose tenacity and fundraising removed from the act the trans-woman-inclusive definition of woman, which impinged on reserved matters and was unlawful?

Thank you, Presiding Officer. I have voted, and my vote has been recorded.

From badges to suffrage colours, it seems that parliamentary staff are, with growing frequency, subjectively enforcing the visitor code of conduct. It has become the case that there is a rule for some but not for others. In the seat of Scottish democracy, policies of so-called inclusion are leading to exclusion of women, which is a worrying and dangerous precedent. That is unacceptable, and it must not continue.

Will the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body commit to reviewing not just the Scottish Parliament’s visitor behaviour policy, but all guidance and policies in relation to banners, flags and political slogans, in order to ensure that there is clarity, fairness and public participation?

To ask the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body how many visitors to the Scottish Parliament have been asked by security and other SPCB staff to remove badges and other apparel since May 2021. (S6O-03259)

Thank you, minister. I meant for people who, when the bill becomes law, want to pray. There will be the 200m buffer zone, but if they want to pray, they could be told to go into the chapel or place of worship and silently pray there.

I am interested to hear your view on balance and proportionality. On one hand, there is the right of women to access healthcare and not be intimidated and harassed. On the other hand, we heard last week from faith groups that are very passionate about their right to pray. We also heard from a woman who had basically changed her mind at the last minute because of that influence.

Therefore, given that there are chapels or places of worship at hospital sites, if faith groups need to pray—the point was made about praying at sites—would it be reasonable to say that they can go to the chapel or place of worship to pray, rather than their feeling the need to intimidate or harass someone, or do whatever is defined as “silent prayer”, which many women see as harassment and intimidation? I am talking about balancing the needs of women to access healthcare without fear of intimidation and the rights of faith groups to pray at the site where they feel that they need to pray.

Thank you, minister.

Audit Scotland hit the nail on the head when it said:

“There has been no unified vision”

for the NHS since 2013 under the SNP Government. A decade later, patients and front-line staff are paying the price for the SNP’s mismanagement of the NHS. Only the SNP-Green Government could make the national treatment centres the linchpin of its NHS recovery plan and then yank their funding. You could not make it up. National treatment centres in NHS Lothian, NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Tayside and NHS Grampian, in my region, have all been left in limbo.

Meanwhile, as we have heard today, patients who are in chronic pain have been left to languish on waiting lists for months and even years. MSPs’ inboxes are full of heart-wrenching accounts of people who are desperate for treatment. Earlier this week, a constituent contacted me after being referred for a gastroenterology appointment by her GP. The NHS Inform website said the current wait to be seen was six weeks. After speaking to staff, she was told it would be 42 weeks. That is a different la-la land from the la-la land that Mr Coffey spoke about. She said she came off the phone lost for words.

Sharon Dowey talked about the SNP’s broken promise to people in Ayrshire who have been waiting for years for a national treatment centre at Carrick Glen. She highlighted that the SNP knew nine years ago what would happen if the NHS’s capacity was not increased there, but the centre has not been delivered. The SNP has dithered and delayed.

Ruth Maguire today blamed Covid, but Edward Mountain raised serious concerns about NHS Highland before Covid.

The SNP might try to blame everyone but itself for those failures, and the SNP amendment certainly takes a crack at that. The SNP-Green Government has full control over the NHS in Scotland. As the Scottish Conservative amendment emphasises and Dr Sandesh Gulhane highlighted, it has full control over investment in healthcare and how it spends that budget. The cabinet secretary might shake his head, but that is the truth. Dr Gulhane was right to say that, year in and year out, the SNP Government has chosen not to pass on the full Barnett consequentials from the UK Treasury to Scotland’s NHS.

We should take note that the SNP Government is responsible for the decisions that it makes, and that it seems to enjoy the trappings of power but not the responsibility. Today, however, Neil Gray, as the new SNP Cabinet Secretary for NHS Recovery, Health and Social Care, publicly accepted responsibility, which is rich, coming after 17 years of the inertia and inaction of successive health secretaries. Nicola Sturgeon, Shona Robison, Jeane Freeman, Humza Yousaf and Michael Matheson have left our NHS in a desperately sorry state. Despite the heroic efforts of NHS staff on the front line, there are record waits for treatment, record waits to be seen in A and E, massive increases in private operations and major blockages in ambulance turnaround times.

The SNP Government is out of ideas and out of time. It must adopt the Scottish Conservatives’ plans for a modern, efficient and local NHS to secure the future of our healthcare system and to save lives.

I, too, thank Willie Rennie for securing time for a debate on such an important topic.

For those flood-hit communities in my region that are struggling to get back on their feet, it feels as though the magnitude of what happened still has not hit Humza Yousaf’s Government. The Scottish Governments ministerial task force met one month after storm Babet wreaked havoc in the north-east. Communities were left in limbo for weeks, but the First Minister still managed to stage a photo op on River Street in Brechin within 48 hours of the storm.

Four months on, the people of Brechin and communities across the north-east are still hurting. The fallout from the flooding is still being felt; repairs are on-going; and homes continue to be uninhabitable. Businesses are trying to make up for lost time. Vital infrastructure has been badly affected, such as Marykirk Bridge in Aberdeenshire, where repairs are due to get under way next month. Following storm Babet, as many as 82 businesses contacted Angus Council looking for help, upwards of 300 properties in Brechin were affected by floodwater and 57 council-owned properties still require significant work before they can be reinstated.

We have recently learned that Angus Council’s interim claim under the Bellwin scheme is £6.9 million, but that is just for immediate emergency response, not the recovery phase. Meanwhile, for many, the grants that are available for residents and businesses have not touched the sides of what is required. Adverse weather events are costly, both financially and emotionally, and they are happening more and more, with a record number of flood alerts issued by SEPA since 1 September 2023.

Since storm Babet, some areas have been hit again by flooding, including cottages in Castleton, which flooded in October and again in December. For residents there and many others whose properties had already been compromised, the problem is not going to stop; it will keep happening again and again. That is why I have engaged proactively with communities throughout the north-east on building resilience since I was first elected in 2021.

Willie Rennie’s motion rightly focuses not just on what has happened but on how better to manage the risk of flooding in future. Information that I received from Angus Council via a freedom of information request has confirmed that no climate change adaptations have been made to Brechin’s flood defence scheme since 2018, when the updated climate projections for the United Kingdom were published. It is all very well having flood protection schemes in place, but maintaining the defences and ensuring that they take account of updated climate change projections is key to protecting our communities.

I will be very interested to see the final output for the Scottish Government’s national adaptation plan later this year, but it is vital that local and national partners work together now to ensure that Scotland is not on the back foot when it comes to flooding. When lives and livelihoods are at risk, good enough will not cut it; we need gold-standard protection to keep our communities safe.