Chamber and committees

I do not need Mr Marra to shout at me about taking responsibility. I take my responsibilities deadly seriously.

I am calling for a serious conversation about what lies ahead. The health service is a product of the investment that we can make through the public finances. As I have just explained in replying to Mr Ross, when we came to office, the health service occupied 33 per cent of our budget, and it now occupies nearly 50 per cent of it. We have taken the hard decisions, including to increase tax on higher earners in order to invest more in the health service, which Mr Marra and Mr Sarwar want us to reverse.

To look ahead, the Labour Party is proposing an extra £134 million of investment in the health service in Scotland as a consequence of its election victory. That is what it is offering. The last spring budget health consequentials that we got from the awful Tories were £237 million. I invite Anas Sarwar to do the maths. We cannot prolong austerity, and that is what the Labour Party is offering. Until the Labour Party offers a sensible way out of austerity, people in Scotland will not take it seriously.

The report shows the scale of the impact of the two-child limit. An extra 250,000 children in the United Kingdom will be affected by it next year and an extra 670,000 will be affected by the end of the next session of the UK Parliament. Those households will be an average of £4,300 worse off, which represents 10 per cent of their income. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that scrapping the Westminster policy will immediately lift children out of poverty. It is frankly breathtaking that the Labour Party has committed to keeping the two-child benefit cap in place, offering no change to the Tories’ austerity agenda.

I associate myself very much with the sentiments behind Mr Bibby’s question. As a consequence of his incredibly successful career, Sir Andy Murray has given exceptional and demonstrable leadership in encouragement of participation in sport. He has been a great ambassador for Scotland and for tennis and sport.

The answer to the question lies in some of the points that Mr Bibby has put to me—it will be through partnership that we make the greatest success. We are already working with Tennis Scotland, the Lawn Tennis Association and sportscotland to support delivery of tennis activity around the country. There is a £15 million transforming Scottish indoor tennis fund, which is a capital investment programme that has been brought together by that partnership to enable greater use of tennis facilities and to encourage greater participation in tennis.

I assure Mr Bibby of the Government’s willing engagement to work with partners to deliver that increased participation.

I understand that this is a significant and sensitive issue in the Lanarkshire area. However, the conclusions have been arrived at after a very detailed and comprehensive process of evidence gathering. They are based on clinical advice that it would be impossible for the Government to ignore. The information that has been gathered points to the changes that are being proposed, and that approach is based on evidence.

The issue involves babies who are at an extreme level of vulnerability. As a logical consequence, and as the evidence points to, there is a need for very sophisticated intervention to maximise the possibility of sustaining life. It would be difficult for ministers to ignore the compelling evidence on that need. I understand the strength of feeling on the question, but ministers need to act with responsibility in relation to the evidence that is put in front of us.

First, the decisions of the City of Edinburgh Council are a matter for the City of Edinburgh Council. Ministers do not have any direction-making powers over local authorities on such matters, although there are some issues on which we have—actually, I am not sure whether we have any direction-making powers over local authorities, because they are independent corporate bodies. Therefore, that question just does not arise.

I certainly do not think that it is appropriate for any threats to be issued to public bodies. Public bodies should be free to make their own judgments and come to their conclusions. I do not agree with such threats in any shape or form.

It is not surprising that the cabinet secretary for external affairs should meet the Chinese consul general, because Mr Robertson has an obligation to meet the consular community regularly—indeed, I will meet the American consul general this evening to mark his moving on from his posting in Edinburgh. Such discussions are routine, but any decisions that the City of Edinburgh Council makes are a matter for it.

One of the issues that Douglas Ross put to me was alcohol-related deaths. I want to share a quote with Parliament, because this is the type of evidence that Parliament needs to chew over and consider when we are dealing with the type of rhetoric that we hear from Douglas Ross. Professor Gerry McCartney, who is professor of wellbeing and economy at the University of Glasgow, said:

“You see lagged effects from decades ago of urban planning, policy decisions and the 1980s economic changes and how that translated into people’s alcohol deaths a decade or two decades later. So it is not unprecedented.”

I simply put that evidence to Parliament, because we have to understand the consequences of the devastation that was wreaked on our country by the policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government.

Just to prolong—[Interruption.]

Just to prolong the absurdity of Douglas Ross’s position, he has, this week, set out a manifesto that commits to

“Repairing the Roads ... Ending Long NHS Waits ... Restoring our Schools”

and

“Making Scotland Safer”.

All—[Interruption.]

Let me go through some of the steps that we have taken to strengthen cancer care in Scotland and demonstrate the increased level of activity that is taking place. In relation to the significant increase in the number of posts that we have in cancer care, I note that we have funded the creation of 15 extra posts in clinical oncology, six in medical oncology, 68 in clinical radiology and 10 in clinical interventional radiology. There has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of consultant oncologists in the past decade, and we have increased the number of consultant radiologists by 34 per cent over the same period.

If we look at the volume of individuals who are being treated, we see that more than 15 per cent more patients were treated on the 62-day urgent suspicion of cancer pathway than in late 2019, before the Covid pandemic, which is 47 per cent more than 10 years ago. Further, 22 per cent more patients were treated on the 31-day pathway compared with 10 years ago.

My answers directly address Mr Sarwar’s point about what we are doing to treat and support more people. We are expanding the number of people delivering specialist care, and we are making sure that more patients are being treated on the 31-day and the 62-day pathways.

Other measures have been taken such as the rapid cancer diagnostic services that are now being delivered in parts of the country. In NHS Fife, for example, the average wait for referral from diagnosis has gone from 77.5 days to 11.4 days. In Dumfries and Galloway, that average wait has gone from 78.7 days to 13.6 days. I put that information on the record to reassure members of the public that the Government is investing, we are treating more people and more people are being treated more quickly.

I accept that there remain challenges in the delivery of healthcare and cancer care, which is why I believe that we have to have an honest conversation about the financial support that is required to support investment in our health service.

The Cabinet will next meet in the week commencing 5 August.

I set out the projects that the Government has delivered and put in place simply to establish confidence in the Government’s ability to deliver capital projects. I have not heard from Rhoda Grant an argument for why we should not have done any of those projects. We were encouraged by the Labour Party to do other projects that we did not want to do, and we had to find the funding for all of that. I simply put those projects on the record.

I cannot give Rhoda Grant a definitive figure for the volume of land that has been acquired, but I will write to her with the details after First Minister’s question time.