In Parliament

I welcome today’s debate on supporting Scotland’s health and social care sector. We all agree on the need for a skilled and well-resourced workforce.

Labour’s call for a 10-year workforce plan overlooks the fact that our SNP Government already has a detailed strategy from 2022. This strategy includes plans for oncology, staff retention, and recruiting more paramedics. The strategy aims to ensure everyone gets the care they need, but Labour’s motion ignores this existing plan, making it flawed. While there’s progress, like more nurses and training posts, we need to retain staff. The recent NHS pay raise should help with this.

I also want to know if Labour’s national insurance policy will affect future staff recruitment. The challenges we face are not unique to Scotland and are seen across the UK. Issues in Wales show these pressures aren’t solely contained to Scotland.

Brexit, Covid, and UK austerity have impacted us all. Labour acknowledged this before taking power but now plays politics with our NHS. That’s why I voted against Labour’s motion and choose support our Government’s efforts to improve our health and social care system.

Full Text of my speech

I welcome this afternoon’s debate, which—once we have removed the raw politics that are clearly at play—is a hugely important debate about how we support Scotland’s health and social care sector to deliver for the communities that we all serve.

There is also—and I must only whisper it—probably broad agreement that, in addressing the significant pressures and challenges that clearly exist, we must ensure that an appropriately structured, skilled and resourced health and social care workforce sits at the heart of any solution.

The Labour motion speaks of the need to

“urgently bring forward a 10-year health and social care workforce plan”.

If someone took that at face value, they might reply, “Absolutely, we should!” However, the Labour motion completely fails to acknowledge that much of the work that it is calling for is already well under way by our SNP Government.

In March 2022, the Scottish Government published a national health and social care workforce strategy. I had a look at it ahead of this afternoon’s debate. Although the strategy is very detailed and thorough—with 71 short-term, 26 medium-term and 12 long-term action points—I noted that it would benefit from a clearer, more slimmed-down approach to summarising the strategy and from being focused on clear milestones for delivery.

However, there is some good stuff in the strategy. There are some good points with reference to acute oncology—we have heard about cancer in the chamber this afternoon. We have also heard about staff retention, and the strategy contains a health and social care career pathway endeavour. We have heard about ambulances and paramedics, and there are plans to recruit more paramedics. There is real, concrete stuff in the strategy—a strategy that already exists.

Given that the strategy was published in 2022, it might benefit from a refresh. I would therefore welcome details from the cabinet secretary as to how the strategy is monitored, how delivery is tracked and how it links into the Scottish Government’s commitment, in its amendment, to

“the publication of a medium-term approach to health and social care reform”,

including workforce planning, before the Parliament’s 2025 summer recess.

I wholly agree with the strategy’s aim to deliver reforms to ensure that everyone can access the treatment and care that they require in the right place, at the right time.

I am not sure why Labour would not acknowledge the strategy in its motion. The motion is fatally flawed from the outset, as it calls for a strategy that, well, um, already exists, and which has been built on by our SNP Government—crazy stuff.

Workforce strategies have to deliver results, and we all agree that this remains work in progress. However, the number of nurses increasing each and every year for the past decade and an additional 153 training posts for junior doctors in 2023—an extra 880 training places during the past decade—are two examples of where it is working.

There is much more to be done. I acknowledge that. It is not enough to train more clinicians; we need to retain them. I have no doubt that the 5.5 per cent NHS pay uplift for agenda for change healthcare staff—making them the best paid in the UK—will assist in that endeavour. That was an additional £448 million investment during the past year and an extra £1 billion during the past two years.

I ask the Scottish Government to say in its summing up whether Labour’s tax grab on our public services with its national insurance raid might impact on how many more staff we can recruit in the future in Scotland’s NHS and social care sector. Will Labour’s national insurance grab mean more doctors, nurses and social care staff, or fewer? We need to know the answer to that.

The challenges faced by health and social care in Scotland are not unique to our nation. They are replicated across the UK and beyond. Before I make my next point, let me be clear that the rest of those challenges are the responsibility of no one other than us in Scotland. However, sometimes, perspective and context, which Christine Grahame talked about, are very important.

Recently, there were headlines in Labour-controlled Wales about Welsh hospitals’ waiting lists being at record levels—again. At the turn of the year, the Welsh ambulance service declared a “critical incident” across Wales: 340 calls to 999 went unanswered for a long time, and more than half the ambulances in Wales were stacked up outside hospitals because the patients could not be transferred over.

I sincerely wish the Welsh Government every success in tackling those enduring, entrenched problems. I recognise the challenges that it is facing—we are also facing those challenges here in Scotland. To pretend that the pressures faced by the Scottish NHS and social care system are unique to Scotland or that they were solely created by the Scottish Government is—to use the word of one Labour speaker—delusional.

For many years, SNP Scotland and Labour Wales have been impacted hugely by Brexit, Covid and UK austerity. That is why, before Labour took power in the UK, the now UK Labour health secretary, Wes Streeting, was clear that, in relation to the NHS,

“All roads lead back to Westminster”.

However, when the Labour Party gets a whiff of power, and it gets into power in London, it forgets the reality of the matter and plays politics with Scotland’s NHS and social care system. That is why I will vote against Labour’s motion this evening, and why I will back this Government and this health secretary to turn our NHS and social care system into the one that we want to see for all the people of Scotland in future.