Chamber and committees

Will the member give way?

The First Minister cannot dodge this entirely. Some of it lies with his Government, too. Yesterday, I was in north Edinburgh with Ed Davey and Councillor Sanne Dijkstra-Downie and we met Edinburgh College apprentices who are being trained for good green jobs installing home insulation, solar panels and heat pumps. Those technologies are ready to go and they are at the heart of Liberal Democrats’ realistic plan to halve household energy bills by 2035.

John Swinney’s own independent advisers now say that his Government is extremely unlikely to meet its fuel poverty target. They found people catching hypothermia in their own homes, missing meals to top up the meter and burning their own floorboards as fuel. The Scottish Government’s consultation on the amount that energy companies give back closed six months ago, but nothing has changed. Under Liberal Democrat proposals, there are millions of pounds out there that could warm homes across Scotland. When will the First Minister change those rules?

I am grateful to the member for giving way, but he will be aware that we were not pioneers in opening the Thistle centre. It is built on international evidence. There is evidence that the Thistle centre has already saved lives and is continuing to do so. Rather than castigating those people who are working valiantly at the front line of the drug deaths crisis, we need interventions such as the Thistle to be rolled out right across Scotland.

That felt like something of a “jam tomorrow” response from the cabinet secretary. Incidentally, tomorrow does not fall until very soon after the next Scottish election, which feels convenient.

The app will be incredibly limited compared with what has been available for years in England, so that will be cold comfort to Scottish patients. Some 34 million people use the app in England. They have come to rely on the functionality that Amanda expected when she came here, but her move to Scotland felt like a step back in time.

Patients in Scotland are stuck in a phone queue for the 8 am scramble for general practitioner appointments. British Medical Association Scotland has called it a disgrace that GPs still have to sign paper prescriptions by hand, given the pressures on their time. Software platforms still do not speak to each other across our health service. Everything is harder for patients and staff when GPs have to navigate outdated tech.

Does the cabinet secretary recognise that, as long as our Scottish NHS relies on technology from the last century, we are holding clinicians and patients back and deepening the crisis in our health service?

Amanda Clark and her family moved to Scotland from England three years ago. The app that was available to her south of the border made her life as a parent and carer much easier. It gave instant access to her medical history and allowed her to easily renew prescriptions for herself and her disabled son. When she moved to Scotland, she expected that her details would automatically migrate to the Scottish version of the app—except that there was not one. The transfer of paper records led to vital information being missed on allergies, Covid vaccines and complex medical conditions. Why, in 2025, are patients in Scotland still unable to benefit from a national health service app that provides the same joined-up care that families in England have been able to rely on since before the pandemic?

To ask the Scottish Government for what reason patients across Scotland will reportedly not be able to fully access the new MyCare NHS app until 2030. (S6T-02701)

Whatever one’s point of view on these matters, everyone can recognise that it is harder to be trans in Scotland than it used to be.

When trans pupils go to school, they want to be clear about what is expected of them, and they want to know that their anonymity will be protected—if they want it to be—and that teachers, staff and other pupils are there to support them.

When it comes to teachers, I have no doubt that they will want to know that the conversations and plans that the guidance suggests that they carry out will be done in the most sensitive manner possible. In that spirit, what further assistance and assurance can the cabinet secretary provide to trans pupils and teachers in navigating these issues?

I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests, having been a host for Ukraine for nine months under the homes for Ukraine scheme.

I welcome the tone of the minister’s statement, particularly her remarks about the fact that we have a proud tradition of offering safe harbour to people through our asylum system. However, does she recognise that there is a crisis in the asylum backlog because of processing times, which was caused in large part—and deliberately—by the last Conservative Government, and does she agree with Liberal Democrat plans to activate the Civil Contingencies Act 1998, so that we can double the number of caseworkers processing asylum claims and start up Nightingale-style processing centres in order to reduce the number of claims in only six months?

Colleagues will remember that I raised this subject at First Minister’s question time when there was very nearly a tragic incident on the doorstep of Portree hospital last year. The cabinet secretary says that most of the recommendations made by the independent review have been met, but people on Skye still face the possibility of finding the doors of Portree hospital locked during a moment of crisis and some will still be forced into a two-hour round trip to Broadford. Given the tragic incidents of last year and the continued confusion around urgent care, when will people living on the north end of Skye be able to walk into Portree hospital without first having to phone NHS 24 and with the confidence that qualified staff will be there to treat them?

The Scottish Government’s ferry fiasco is a national embarrassment. It has cost us a fortune, but no Scottish National Party minister has ever had the decency to resign. Scottish Liberal Democrats have been arguing for years that islanders and coastal communities deserve compensation for the colossal disruption to their lives. Now, the Scottish Government has belatedly set up a scheme, but far too many are excluded from it. Why do businesses on Mull, Iona, Coll, Tiree, Islay and Jura all get absolutely nothing?