Chamber and committees

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.

Magdalene Robertson was Packer’s first known victim. She was raped as a teenager, yet she was ignored and misled by the criminal justice system. Then there are Packer’s dozens of other victims. None was believed and some are no longer alive to see that justice is done. Will the cabinet secretary give an undertaking that every victim’s voice will be heard?

I give way to Gillian Martin.

I agree with Gillian Martin on the importance of investment, and it is true that it is a declining basin. I worked in the energy sector for decades, and we both understand that. However, it needs to be a managed and programmed proper transition, not a rushed and forced transition, which is what the SNP Government wants us to have.

A rushed, premature transition serves no one, nor does it serve Scotland’s economy. Offshore Energies UK has warned that the region will be £6 billion a year poorer by 2030 as a result of such a transition. I think that that matters to Gillian Martin’s constituents as well.

Humza Yousaf, who announced last year that Scotland would stop being the oil and gas capital of Europe, has suddenly decided that he is the saviour of North Sea workers. There must be a general election on the horizon. What an insult to the intelligence of the thousands of people who rely on the North Sea for their livelihoods.

The SNP can pivot all that it wants, but the north-east has not forgotten the depth of the betrayal that was perpetrated by Nicola Sturgeon. I see Labour members laughing, but Daniel Johnson did not mention oil and gas even once in his speech—

I thought that I was in a different debate.

The Scottish Conservatives will stand up for our oil and gas industry. We support new oil and gas licences. We will not abandon the industry or the workers who rely on its continued survival, and we will not allow the industry to shut down.

There is no denying that the past decade has been exceptionally challenging for the energy sector because of the downturn in oil and gas, the Covid-19 pandemic, Putin’s war in Ukraine and the global energy crisis—not forgetting the massive supply chain disruption that was caused by the conflict. Many companies throughout the supply chain in Scotland have battled to stay afloat, and livelihoods have been lost.

Just as there was an upswing in the industry, more uncertainty struck. The North Sea became a bargaining chip in the disastrous Bute house agreement, with Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater castigating the industry and the thousands of people in my region who rely on it for work. Patrick Harvie ludicrously proclaimed that only those on the hard right support oil and gas extraction.

The SNP’s draft energy strategy includes a presumption against new exploration for oil and gas. It does not want Cambo, Jackdaw or, as we have seen and as is being reinforced today, Rosebank. It does not care about the UK’s energy security, workers in the north-east or the environmental impact of importing fossil fuels.

The Scottish Conservatives recognise the importance of a fair, careful and well-managed move to renewables. We know that we need an energy supply that is more secure and more sustainable. The north-east, with its unrivalled technical knowledge and know-how, is perfectly placed to become a world leader on net zero. However, propped up by the Scottish Greens, the SNP wants to turn off the taps and go for the fastest possible just transition. It is a cliff edge, plain and simple.

The moment that Nicola Sturgeon signed on the dotted line with the Scottish Greens, she betrayed the north-east, because the SNP-Green Government values virtue signalling over 90,000 highly skilled jobs.

Pot, kettle.

Members: Oh!

Will the Scottish Government ensure that all the records of all its meetings and engagements with Eljamel’s former patients, which go back a long time, will be made available to the public inquiry?

You had your chance, and you did not say anything during the committee process.

Members: Oh!