Chamber and committees

I would be happy to consider that.

In his question, Mr Golden has highlighted some of the great strengths that exist in the University of Dundee, of which I am very proud and which are an essential part of what has been deployed on other occasions in other circumstances around the world. He has made a very good and strong point. However, it comes back to the context in which those strengths could be deployed. There needs to be peace; there needs to be an approach that means that those skills can be deployed safely. That is what we are lacking just now. The necessity of a peaceful outcome is critical to enabling Mr Golden’s very good suggestions to take their course.

Mr Marra misconstrues my comments, and he does so in a very dangerous way, for which I want to hold him to account. I willingly accept my responsibility—I am in the chamber every Thursday when Parliament sits, answering questions as First Minister, in order to accept my responsibility. I was making the point that blame has been foisted on migrants in this country, and half of it has been landed on them by the Labour Government in London.

The voices that speak to me from the oil and gas sector tell me that the cost regime that is applied by the taxation levels of the United Kingdom Government—which this Government does not support—is undermining investment to sustain activity in the North Sea. This Government is investing heavily in supporting the energy transition that we must make to ensure that we achieve our climate change objectives.

That brings me to my comments about energy. I know that people in Scotland share my frustration that households are not feeling the benefit of the rapid expansion of low-cost renewable energy generation here in Scotland. A clear Scottish policy success is not delivering the savings to consumers that it should, because of policy choices made by successive United Kingdom Governments, and some of what Mr Ewing has just raised with me is relevant in that respect.

Westminster will happily take our energy but will do nothing to lower our energy bills and nothing to give Scottish business the competitive advantage of lower energy costs. That is why Scotland’s energy resources should be in Scotland’s hands, but that can come only with the control that independence would give to the people of Scotland.

It is my firm belief that our vast, low-cost, renewable energy generation has the capacity to be as transformational for Scotland’s economy, and for the wealth of our people, as corporation tax was for Ireland’s. It has the capacity to send Scotland on a new, more prosperous course.

The fundamental truth that anchors all my politics is that the people who care most about Scotland, the people who choose to live here, should be the ones setting our nation’s course—not politicians in Westminster for whom Scotland is too often just an afterthought.

That principle has been delivered in part by the creation of this Parliament. We have some ability—but limited ability—to shape our nation, but for so long, as big decisions about our budget, our economy, immigration, membership of the European Union, energy, jobs and wages have been taken elsewhere, there has been a brake on what our country can achieve. Westminster choices hold us back when we should be moving forward.

Let us consider immigration. Not having control of immigration means that our national health service and our care homes are facing critical staff shortages. The UK Government has made it more difficult for them to recruit abroad, which impacts on the levels of care that they can offer. It is a completely unnecessary problem that has been manufactured by Westminster’s toxic immigration debate, and Westminster policy is doing, and will do, real damage to Scotland’s national health service and to our care sector. The solution is a simple one: a Parliament with the power—

I am very happy to reinforce the point that I made a moment ago about the extra capacity that means that, right now, in-patient waiting lists are falling in Scotland. I am happy to put that on the record once again for Rachael Hamilton’s benefit.

The latest statistics confirm our progress, with planned care activity up, the number of operations performed in July 2025 at the highest level in more than five years, the child and adolescent mental health services waiting time standard met for the third time in a row and the lowest number of eight-hour and 12-hour waits for A and E since September 2023, despite the highest July attendance level for six years.

It is not a broken national health service; it is an NHS that we can be proud of. It is an NHS that, after Covid and after the Government’s decision to put record investment into the NHS—record investment, of course, that neither the Labour Party nor the Conservatives in the Parliament supported—is getting better once again. Much has been achieved, but there is much more to do to strengthen the NHS in Scotland.

Thanks to choices made in Scotland, the child poverty rate is now lower than it has been for a decade, despite UK Government actions that have pushed more children below the poverty line. Indeed, if Scotland had the same rate of child poverty as the rest of the UK, an additional 90,000 Scottish children would be in poverty.

Progress has been delivered because of innovative policies—made-in-Scotland policies such as the Scottish child payment—and because of our prioritisation and hard work in bringing people together to ensure that we delivered lower levels of child poverty in Scotland. That has had an effect on our schools, where free school meal provision has been expanded and where the pupil equity fund has enabled 3,000 additional staff to be employed—staff who can work with children to ensure that they have more of the support that they need to thrive.

Let me give Mr Findlay a flavour of some of the practical things that the Government is doing to help people with the cost of living challenges that they face. Council tax bills are generally 30 per cent lower and water bills 20 per cent lower than those south of the border. Yesterday, we abolished peak rail fares, which will halve the cost of rail journeys for the average commuter between Edinburgh and Glasgow every single day. Mr Findlay mentioned small businesses in Perth. Many small businesses in Perth will benefit from the small business bonus scheme that this Government voted for in the budget, but which Mr Findlay never voted for in the budget. That is just a flavour of what the Government is doing to protect people’s incomes.

We gather today at the start of the fifth and final year of the sixth session of Scotland’s national Parliament—a Parliament that is more than a quarter of a century old, its place anchored at the heart of decision making in Scotland today, a Parliament elected to chart a way forward for Scotland and to wrestle with the challenges that face our people.

In this session of Parliament, our country has faced a number of those challenges, including the lasting effects of the Covid pandemic and the illegal invasion of Ukraine, with its consequences for energy costs and security. In the middle east, we have witnessed, and I have repeatedly condemned, Hamas’s barbaric attacks on 7 October 2023. I also share the concerns of other Governments and other international leaders that the brutal actions of the Israeli Government in Gaza constitute a genocide. That has unleashed widespread suffering and has caused such anguish.

In the United Kingdom, we are seeing the prolonged application of austerity at a time of desperate need to rebuild in our society.

These are difficult days. For many in our society, the implications of those events are that money is tight, prices are rising and hope is in short supply. The danger in such circumstances is that all those difficulties are marshalled together to be made the fault of others in our society, and that some get blamed for supposedly causing those problems. That has been ever present during the summer recess, when migrants have been put in the spotlight and the politics of intolerance has been stoked by some.

Let me be clear, at the outset of this final year of the parliamentary session, that I reject that demonising behaviour. Let me be clear that I intend to defeat the politics of fear and division by offering a clear, principled alternative based on the decent, welcoming values that have served Scotland so well throughout my lifetime. That is why I want to use every opportunity that is available to my Government to give that leadership to Scotland and to deliver improvements in the lives of people in Scotland.

Since becoming First Minister, I have heard loud and clear the desire of the people for effective delivery in Government alongside a meaningful message of hope. Today I will speak mostly about how we have delivered, how we are delivering and how we will continue to deliver for the people of Scotland in ways that will improve their lives. It is a story of much achieved but more still to do, of a corner that is being turned and of progress that is once again being made.

I will start with the national health service. I often hear my political rivals say that the national health service is broken. I reject that. I say that, thanks to our dedicated staff, Scotland’s national health service remains fundamentally strong and an asset for this country. Yes, it has problems, and why would it not, after a decade and more of Westminster austerity, after Brexit and after the foundation-shaking experience of Covid? That is not just my view; it is what the Labour Party says about the NHS in Labour-run Wales.

In Scotland, 97 per cent of people leave hospital with no delay, 95 per cent are registered with an NHS dentist, and 7 million treatments have been delivered since November 2023. Scotland’s core accident and emergency system has consistently outperformed that in England and Wales for the past decade, as has been repeated again in the most recent figures. Those are not just numbers: last year, more than 1 million patients were seen within four hours in our accident and emergency system, which is around one patient every 30 seconds in Scotland.

No, it is not.

In my speech, I quoted the statistic that if Scotland had the same level of child poverty as the rest of the United Kingdom, 90,000 more children would be living in poverty in Scotland today. Our figures are the result of the actions that this Parliament and this Government have taken to keep children out of poverty. Why cannot Mr Sarwar see the value of that impact on the lives of children in Scotland? Why is he prepared to support a Labour Government that is pushing child poverty in the opposite direction to the one that it should be going in?

What has helped in relation to the recruitment of teachers has been the pupil equity funding that we put into the budget and the increased levels of local government funding that the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government put into the budget, which Pam Duncan-Glancy was unable to vote for when the budget came to Parliament. That did not help one tiny little bit.

The first fruits of our interventions can now be seen, with more Scots from the most deprived areas entering university full time and the poverty-related attainment gap continuing to narrow at all three key qualification levels. Across the board, more and more Scottish children are getting the chance to learn and to grow in skills and confidence, with attainment levels in literacy and numeracy at key stages of primary and secondary school reaching record highs.

There is also progress on the economy. Scotland is by far the fastest-growing start-up economy in the United Kingdom and one of the fastest-growing in Europe. New business incorporations here increased by almost a fifth in the first half of 2025, compared to the final six months of 2024. This remains the best place outside London at attracting overseas investment, with investment in the tech sector alone increasing by a massive 120 per cent between 2020 and 2024.

Wages are up in real terms, unemployment is down and our economy is growing. Much has been achieved, there is more to do and more will, no doubt, be done, because life is tough right now for the people we serve and we are acting to address those concerns.

Let me address those particular issues. In our programme for government, we promised 150,000 extra appointments and procedures, but we now expect to exceed that and to deliver 213,000, meaning that, in total, we will deliver an extra 300,000 appointments and procedures. That extra capacity means that, right now, in-patient waiting lists are falling, a record number of hip and knee replacements are being carried out, more people are surviving cancer than ever before and the numbers of paramedics and GPs are increasing. There is work to be done, but substantial progress has been made in strengthening the NHS under this Government’s leadership of the NHS.