I am particularly grateful for that reply.

I remind the Parliament that my wife is a primary school teacher and a member of the Educational Institute of Scotland.

We have calculated that, after the disruption of the pandemic, Scotland’s school pupils have now lost more than 2 million days of education due to strike action. That will double if an agreement is not reached. Today, it is Dundee and Argyll and Bute. Tomorrow, it is South Lanarkshire and the Western Isles. Teachers care deeply about their pupils, and closing the gates is the last thing that they want to do, but the previous pay offer was made to them back in November, and there has been nothing new since then.

This generation of young people has had it harder than any other, and life-qualifying exams are coming over the horizon. Waiting for teachers to buckle or inflation to fall is not a strategy. What will the First Minister do personally to keep those school gates open?

The Scottish Liberal Democrats believe that anyone who has committed sexually violent crimes and poses a risk to women should not be housed with women in the female prison estate, and that view is shared by Scottish Trans and Rape Crisis Scotland.

This will have been a triggering and bruising episode for survivors of sexual offences and for the trans community, and public trust in prison safeguarding will have been dented. Is the cabinet secretary confident that the outcomes of the reviews will be enough to restore that public trust? What further steps does the cabinet secretary’s Government plan to take to reassure people and heal the divisions in our society?

Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. On the basis of what you have just said, I will withdraw my point of order on this occasion.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer.

Edward Mountain (Highlands and Islands) (Con) rose—

I warmly welcome the introduction of the freeport in the Forth estuary. On behalf of my colleagues in the far north, I congratulate the Cromarty Firth on the decision on that bid.

The cabinet secretary is right to reference in his remarks the concerns that people have about the displacement of economic activity from around and about freeports into freeports, and the loss of tax revenue and work opportunities from the areas that have lost out. I was gratified to hear him give some consideration to that in his remarks, but would he consider coming back to Parliament, perhaps in a year’s time or a year after the introduction of the freeports, to talk about the impact on economic activity in surrounding areas?

The cabinet secretary will be unsurprised by what I am about to say, because we have done this dance before. Of course there has been a global pandemic, and nobody can deny the impact that that has had on our health service. However, the problems were manifest in our health service and in social care well before anybody had heard of Wuhan, China. The retired chief executive of NHS Scotland, Paul Gray, said that the pandemic only hastened the date of the crisis, which was always coming down the track.

I am grateful to Bob Doris for that intervention. I salute the efforts of health boards that might be achieving the target, but it is not happening universally. I hope very much that we will achieve it. I certainly want the Government to succeed in it, but it is manifestly clear from the correspondence that I receive that, in Lothian, we are nowhere near clearing those waiting times by March.

The Government says that it will clear those targets by March, but they are getting worse every day and vulnerable young people are paying the price. In previous budget negotiations, my party secured £120 million extra for mental health, but the SNP and Greens have just cut it again by a staggering £38 million. Young people are suffering under the long shadow of lockdown—any specialist or schoolteacher in the country will tell you that. The Government could not have picked a worse time to cut that funding. Liberal Democrats led the way in getting the Parliament to declare a national mental health emergency. Now, the Government needs to step back and give that declaration the funding that it deserves.

In the face of multiple crises, it is natural to wish that someone, somewhere, in a position of power might be working with every breath in their body to make things better. That is what the Scottish people expect of the Parliament and what they hope for, but, sadly, they are faced with an SNP Government that is led by a First Minister who spent the weekend scheming about how best to break up the United Kingdom. She is more interested in which election should be made about her pet project than in ensuring that NHS staff are treated fairly and that patients are seen on time.

Let us get real: one person in six who could not get a doctor’s appointment last year conducted a medical procedure on themselves or got someone equally unqualified to do it. The waiting times for primary care are so bad that it made sense for a Ukrainian refugee to travel home to face the bombs and bullets of her home country rather than the queues of our Scottish NHS. That is the grim reality in Scotland in 2023 under the health secretary, the First Minister and the SNP-Green Administration, and no amount of plotting, scheming or wishing for a future nationalist utopia can hide that fact.

The cabinet secretary accuses others of being out of ideas. If he is open to them, let me offer some. Activate an immediate staff burn-out prevention plan that guarantees better pay and time off when people need it, as well as safe staffing levels. Replace the meaningless treatment time guarantee with real-time information for waits and operations. Reform the funding structure so that dentists can return to taking on NHS patients. Put more counsellors in schools and establish a single point of contact for those young people who are on CAMHS waiting lists. Stop the ministerial takeover of social care and invest the £1 billion that the Government intends to spend on it in services and staff. Finally—

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I am very grateful to Jackie Baillie and the Labour Party for making their Opposition debate all about the crisis in our NHS. I rise to speak on that basis for the Liberal Democrats.

It is hard to remember a time when things were this hard and our NHS was engulfed in such a crisis. Indeed, every new set of health statistics reveals yet another unwelcome record. We have heard so much about that today—it is exhausting. To put it plainly, things have never been this bad. Not a day goes by when I do not receive an email, phone call or visit to my constituency office from someone who has been waiting months for a routine operation, weeks for an important diagnosis or days just to speak to somebody in their local GP surgery.

Every day, we hear more alarming reports from the front line of Scotland’s A and E departments. The huge impact on patients cannot and will not be overstated. We have heard from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine how the dysfunction in our NHS is measured out in human lives. It results in more than 40 preventable deaths each week. Perhaps we should stop for a moment and consider that number. Every one of them is a husband, wife, brother, sister, son or daughter who could have, should have and would have gone home but for the crisis in emergency care.

Just yesterday, I heard the heartbreaking story of an elderly patient who was forced to spend her final days on a trolley in the middle of a busy A and E department. Such accounts are, sadly, becoming familiar, but we cannot afford to become accustomed to them or desensitised to what is unfolding daily in Scotland’s NHS. The stakes are too high. People’s lives are literally on the line.

Neither can we afford to accept the toll on staff. They are on their knees. I saw it this week when I visited a medical practice in my constituency. It is a popular medical practice in a bustling part of our nation’s capital, but it has had an open vacancy for a partner for a year. It cannot hope to fill a locum vacancy when somebody goes on leave.

Doctors have spoken movingly about what they describe as the moral injury that they are suffering from being unable to provide the care that they would want to provide and that their patients desperately need. I know that members speak with one voice in saying that none of that is their fault. On the contrary, we owe the staff a huge debt of thanks for the incredible efforts that they go to and the fact that so many are sticking with it. We are blessed to have them and they deserve so much better.

I turn to the crisis that is engulfing mental healthcare in Scotland. Children and young people still face devastatingly long waits for treatment. Liberal Democrat research has revealed that, since mid 2019, the Government’s 18-week treatment time target has been breached by a cumulative 2.7 million days. The Government says that it will clear up those dreadful waiting lists by March, but they are getting worse by the day. The chances of the Government achieving that goal are, to be frank, vanishingly small.

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

Sue Webber has outlined eloquently the reality that many of our constituents face. They are given letters that say that their treatment will begin in 12 weeks when there is not a hope in hell that they will be seen within 50 weeks. People make life plans based on those letters; they agree to attend weddings overseas or put off holidays in the hope that they will be seen. We need to make sure that patients are seen in real time. Does the member agree?