Chamber and committees

I echo and support that call from Clare Haughey. The Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice wrote to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions the day after his announcement, asking for the earliest possible clarification of when exactly UK ministers were first made aware of the new evidence, and urged him to complete the review at pace. She further reiterated that the Scottish Government has always supported the WASPI campaign and that compensation must be delivered now to right that historic wrong.

Any death or serious injury on our roads is a tragedy, and I offer my sympathies to everyone affected by the loss of a loved one. The Scottish Government is taking forward measures on road safety, including investing £48 million in road safety this year, which is a 33 per cent increase on last year’s amount, and supporting engineering improvements, education and enforcement nationwide.

I recognise that more work has to be done, and the Government will continue working with partners to reduce harm and keep communities safe.

The education secretary’s announcement set out the Government’s commitments in that respect and the progress that needs to be made. I answered a question on the subject from Mr Cole-Hamilton last week or the week before—in fact, it was last week, because I then went to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities conference in St Andrews, in Mr Rennie’s constituency, at which I set out the Government’s expectation that progress is to be made on class contact time. I hope that the education secretary’s proposals will help to advance the timescale for implementing those changes, because the last thing that I want to see is any industrial action in Scottish education.

I share Annabelle Ewing’s concern about the lack of intervention from the UK Government when it is able to intervene in other situations in other parts of the UK. She puts on the record the comments from ExxonMobil about what led to the decision, and the unsympathetic and unhelpful actions of the UK Government.

The Scottish Government will do the following things: we will provide direct support to the workforce who are affected, through the partnership action on continuing employment. We will take forward measures that arise from the work that we are doing in Grangemouth to find alternative opportunities for industrial sites. Details of that work were shared with the Parliament on Tuesday by the Deputy First Minister. We will continue our engagement with the company and the trade unions to identify approaches that will help to support the workforce—Ms Ewing’s constituents—who are severely affected by the announcement was made. The Scottish Government will do all that we can within our powers to support those who are affected.

I agree with Fulton MacGregor’s point and recognise the importance of there being free-to-air television access for matches of that nature. I will be happy to ensure that ministers support and take forward Mr MacGregor’s representations.

The Scottish Government has long called for national sporting events, such as men’s and women’s football qualifiers, to be protected for free-to-air broadcast. We will continue to make that case on behalf of fans across the country. It is a matter of enormous significance that all of us were able to experience the joyful scenes at Hampden on Tuesday evening. It should be free for members of the public to be able to see those events.

There is an important point underlying Mr Mountain’s question, which is that communities must have adequate and appropriate opportunities to be involved in decision making in that respect. I hope that that can be undertaken within the available timescales, but I will consider the specific point that Mr Mountain has made about the appropriateness of the 30-day timescale and will write to him in due course as to whether any flexibility can be applied. I cannot quite recall the status of the 30-day period, but I will check that and come back to him.

In Scotland, there are more staff working in our national health service now than there were when this Government took office. There are more midwives, more nurses and more dental consultants, and general practitioner numbers are going up. On discharges from Scottish hospitals, 97 per cent happen without delay. More patients are being seen and treated in shorter periods. There were 23,181 operations performed in September 2025, which is 13.7 per cent more than in September 2024. The number of hip and knee operations reached an all-time high in 2024. That is delivery, and that is what people get from an SNP Government.

It is vital that those services are available. However, fundamentally, we have to take decisions about the sustainability of services as they relate to individual parts of the country where demand for services lies. I will look at the details of what Miles Briggs has raised with me. Obviously, the Government is focused on ensuring that we have sustainable public services in place, which includes the national health service.

The work that the Government is undertaking, as set out by the Deputy First Minister on Tuesday, is focused on learning from the experience of what we are taking forward in Grangemouth and on the business ventures and developments that can come forward, supported by Scottish Enterprise, to enable us to assist companies and individuals to meet the just transition. That is the work that the Government is taking forward as a consequence of the very damaging decision that was taken on Tuesday. We will support that activity with the assistance and the intervention that the Government has set out.

The Government has taken forward a number of steps in relation to the work that has emerged from Grangemouth on identifying low-carbon solutions and economic opportunities for Scotland. That is what the Government has done. A range of business opportunities and projects have been developed by Scottish Enterprise and are designed to address the need to provide sustained employment in the Mossmorran area. Those ideas and arguments are central to the propositions that we can take forward. They are part of the Government’s transition to net zero and to a just transition, but they happen in the context of the damage that is being done to the whole process by the perpetuation of the energy profits levy. That is clearly damaging, and the Mossmorran leadership has ascribed to it a contribution to the damage to employment that has been experienced at Mossmorran.