Chamber and committees

I do not find it acceptable that anyone waits longer than they should for an ambulance. We know that the pressure that the Scottish Ambulance Service is under at the moment is because of many of the other pressures on our national health service that have been caused and, in some respects, exacerbated by the pandemic.

We are working very closely with the Scottish Ambulance Service to resolve the issue. The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care spoke to the chief executive of the Ambulance Service this morning. Next month, 90 additional technicians will come into employment by the service.

We are also funding the health service. We bolstered investment by £10.5 million last year, and an additional £20 million has been invested this year.

Although any individual wait is unacceptable, and we must work to resolve that, it is worth bearing it in mind that despite all the challenges, and despite the fact that our Ambulance Service serves some of the most rural areas in the United Kingdom, during 2020-21 our crews responded to more than 70 per cent of the highest-priority calls in less than 10 minutes, and to more than 99 per cent in less than 30 minutes.

We will continue supporting our Ambulance Service through this challenging period—just as we continue to support the entire national health service.

As I set out on Tuesday when I outlined the programme for government, we are making immediate investments of £120 million into mental health, with a particular focus on prevention and early intervention. We are already funding health boards to improve community child and adolescent mental health services and to enable the expansion of community services for people aged 18 to 25. The funding that I announced will enable the clearing of historical waiting lists, which I accept are too long. They were long as we went into Covid, and that has been further exacerbated by the experience of Covid. The funding that we will make available is specifically targeted to deal with the issue that Jamie Greene raises.

I remember Jason and I hope that Beatrice Wishart will pass on my best wishes to him. I am happy to engage with Jason through Beatrice Wishart, or he can email me directly, to set out exactly what the Scottish Government and our agencies are doing to keep fishermen as safe as possible. Our fishery protection vessels have a key part to play in that. He clearly has some real concerns, and that reflects my memory of him as a very engaged young man. I would be happy to have a further discussion with him directly.

The managed isolation service in Scotland is operated under a United Kingdom Government contract, which places responsibility for setting the quality and levels of service on the UK Government. The Scottish Government’s international passenger co-ordination team is in regular contact with Corporate Travel Management, which is the UK Government’s travel agent, and we continue to work with them to ensure a high-quality service for travellers.

In short—yes, I trust the system. As I have said in relation to Covid and the various different systems and approaches that we have had to take over the past 18 months—not least the vaccination programme in general—there will, in a system so big and complex, be individual cases of things going wrong. We should not shy away from that, but what is important is that we have processes in place to fix those things.

Yesterday, in my Covid statement, I gave the number of the helpline that people can phone to have any such mistakes rectified, and I encourage them to do so. I know that the system is taking on a number of those questions and very quickly resolving them on a daily basis.

I very much agree with Christine Grahame’s comments about international students. We always want to offer a warm welcome. They make a significant cultural, economic and intellectual contribution to our universities and, indeed, to the whole country, and they are welcome here.

Scottish Government officials have been engaging directly with universities on the issues that are highlighted in the question. They have contacted CTM, which has said that it is addressing those issues as a priority. My officials will continue to work with the universities to improve processes.

Students should, of course, contact their universities if they continue to experience issues with the booking system.

In recognition of the difficult circumstances that international students have faced, the Scottish Government has also taken steps to put support in place. For example, international and European Union students can apply for financial hardship support from the Scottish Government’s higher education coronavirus discretionary fund.

I agree that there were pressures before Covid. I do not think that anyone can or should deny that those pressures have been significantly exacerbated by Covid, and not only here in Scotland: we see similar pressures on health services across the UK, and further afield.

Because we have been aware of those pressures, we have been working to address them. Last year, we commissioned a working group to agree and implement a range of actions to improve turnaround times. As part of that, 296 additional ambulance staff are being recruited as a result of the investment that we have made available in the past two years. In the north of the country—the part of Scotland that Douglas Ross represents—there will be an extra 67 front line staff, who will be a mixture of experienced and newly qualified paramedics and technicians along with nine patient transport service staff, who will be located across the region.

I will not stand here and suggest that it is in any way acceptable for anyone to wait too long for an ambulance. In the week up to 7 September, which is the week for which we have the most recent figures, the Scottish Ambulance Service responded to 10,435 emergency incidents, which was more than in the previous week. The median national response time in that week for all calls about immediate life-threatening need was nine minutes and three seconds. That is slightly higher than we want it to be; the target is seven minutes.

The Ambulance Service is working hard under incredibly challenging circumstances. My job, and that of the health secretary, is to support them with funding and in other ways, to ensure that they can meet the challenges for the sake of all patients across Scotland, who deserve timely responses from the Scottish Ambulance Service.

The point that I am making is a serious one. It does not in any way take away the Scottish Government’s responsibility for addressing the problems in Scotland. However, I think that most people understand that exceptionally difficult circumstances have prevailed over the past 18 months, and they understand the difficulties that all Governments and health services are having as we try to recover. That is why we are making investment, why we have the recovery plan and why we will continue—every single day—to support our health service and everybody who works in it to recover and to get the NHS fully back on track.

I do not think that we can argue about the impact of United Kingdom Government austerity on services the length and breadth of Scotland—it has been utterly devastating. The problem is that, unless we do something to get ourselves out of the grip of Tory Government after Tory Government, people across Scotland will suffer more.

Just this week, we have seen a national insurance increase that will punish the lowest paid in our society—[Interruption.] Well, we all want to see extra money for public services but raising that money in a way that punishes the poor is the bit that we do not agree with—no one should agree with it if they care about those issues. We are also about to see the UK Government make the biggest overnight cut to social security since the 1930s, when it takes away the £20 per week uplift to universal credit.

It may be something that Alex Rowley and I have to disagree on—he can explain that to his constituents. It is right that people in Scotland have the opportunity to choose a different and better future, in which we take control over social security and how we raise funds, into the Scottish Parliament, so that we do not have to stand here and—to use Alex Rowley’s phrase—argue about the impact of another Government on people the length and breadth of Scotland.

The Minister for Transport meets ScotRail and trade unions regularly. He met trade union representatives on 24 June, and subsequently met Abellio. I met the Scottish Trade Union Congress on 12 August. On each occasion, we expressed our disappointment about the current dispute affecting ScotRail’s Sunday services and urged all parties to seek resolution.

I understand that the transport minister is meeting Unite the union today and has offered with to meet the other rail unions. We want all parties to get around the table and identify solutions to the challenges that our rail services face.