 I am not responsible for the answers that come from ministers or anybody else. The next item of business is a debate on motion number 1-2-3-2-5, in the name of Jenny Marra, on protecting Scotland's communities. Members who wish to take part in the debate should press a request-peak button now. I call on Jenny Marra to speak to you and move the motion. I start this afternoon by publicly thanking our NHS staff up and down this country for the service they give and the care they deliver to our patients and families. So many of the stories I hear from our health service talk of the compassion and generosity of NHS staff in the care that they give our loved ones every day. The NHS is our most important public service, owned by us and delivered through the caring hands of NHS workers. It is in the interests of all of those staff and the patients and every citizen in Scotland that the Labour Party brought a motion to this Parliament today to lift the veil of secrecy around our NHS in Scotland. For it is confident, fearless and robust institutions that have no fear of openness, transparency and accountability. It is institutions that are open to change and open to improving their services that want the public to know what service they are delivering and how they are measuring up to expectations. Of all the NHS staff that I have spoken to, none of them fear nor dread openness and transparency. That is why the cabinet secretary's U-turn on publishing statistics is very welcome but at the same time quite baffling. For only two weeks ago today, Shona Robison stood up in this chamber and told me that publishing A&E statistics on a weekly basis was political interference and was I suggesting that she should politically interfere with the publication of statistics. If she would like to tell me if she still feels that this is political interference, I am happy to take the intervention. First of all, it was the chief statistician that has decided to release this on a weekly basis, which of course I welcome, but on the issue of political interference. Can Jenny Marra take this opportunity to apologise to the staff of the NHS after her political manipulation of statistics? Something she refused to do this morning. If she cares about the staff in the NHS, then apologise to them for that gross misrepresentation of the hard work that they do. Please apologise. Jenny Marra. The chief statistician decides to publish on a three-monthly basis and then decides to publish on a one-monthly basis, but after pressure from the Scottish Labour Party, the chief statistician decides to publish on a weekly basis. If the cabinet secretary is also saying that she had nothing to do with this decision, then I would suggest that she is not in control of what is going on in her own health department. Lest in 24 hours after Shona Robison made that statement on political interference, the First Minister stood up and told us at First Minister's questions that her civil servants had already started to look into the publication of weekly statistics. Was the health secretary aware on 4 February that the Government's policy on publishing A&E statistics was changing? It is hard to believe that, if Shona Robison herself had instructed her civil servants to look at publishing that data, she would then come to the chamber and forcefully say that such a policy was political interference. Is it the case that Shona Robison did not know what was going on in her own department on 4 February? Is it not the case that the decision to publish A&E statistics was not hers but the First Minister's and that decisions are being taken on health that Shona Robison knows nothing about and has no control over whatsoever? That is indeed what the health secretary's statements strongly suggest, that she is not in control of decisions on health but the First Minister is intervening where necessary to clean up the mess. I will give away later. Just yesterday, Shona Robison had to make an apology to more than 800 people in Scotland who have had their operations cancelled since the new year. I have taken an intervention already. The cabinet secretary, Ms Marrush, is not giving away. Let's not be in any doubt about how bad this is. NHS Tayside has had to cancel over double the number of operations since the new year that it had to cancel in the whole of the last financial year. The number of cancelled operations is increasing exponentially across this country as a result of the pressures on our health service. We come to the chamber today with one of our wishes granted. It is becoming quite easy to get the Government to move because no sooner was our motion laid calling for publication of statistics than the health secretary or the First Minister who knows decided that a new website is to be launched, giving the public the information that they need on A&E waiting times with cancelled operations to follow in the coming months. It is worth asking the cabinet secretary when she opens her own speech to explain the delay in publishing cancelled operation figures as the Herald newspaper was able to publish them on Monday. We now have a new website for the public with information on our health service. Very welcome and a great idea, may I say. Can I ask the cabinet secretary which of Labour's five-point plan for the NHS she or the First Minister will adopt next? Point 1, a review of acute beds would be very welcome too. Since 2007, the SNP has cut beds by nearly 1,200 across Scotland. Point 2, mandatory annual cleanliness and safety inspections for A&E wards. My colleague Alex Rowley will talk in some more detail later about the shocking report that was published last week on the state of the A&E department at the Victoria hospital in Kirkcaldy, but I know that the health secretary will be as concerned as me at beds, chairs and trolleys in that hospital being contaminated with blood. Does she or the First Minister now have a plan to address this? Point 3, as she will have heard at the weekend, Scottish Labour would introduce modern-day matrons into A&E to ease pressure and ensure the highest standards of cleanliness. No. Point 4, sharing best practice. The health secretary knows, as well as I do, that our local A&E department in Dundee hits its targets and beyond. How can those arrangements be shared across the country? How can areas of excellence—I would like to make some progress—how can areas of excellence help areas of weakness improve, and what will this health secretary do to make that happen? Point 5 was the website, which the SNP has already adopted and is very welcome indeed. We also heard yesterday that we are to have the most transparent health service in the world. That is a very high bar. I would like to make some progress. That is a very high bar, and I will be very interested to hear from the cabinet secretary today how that will be achieved and what her ambitions are for that. To have the most transparent service in the world, it will not simply be a matter of publishing A&E waiting times. Patients will rightly then have a higher expectation of the information and of their health service. What is their whole journey time to be? From lifting the phone to making an appointment with their GP, to the point of discharge from hospital, will the Scottish Government begin to measure and improve that? Each stage along that journey—there are expectations, there are sometimes delays, stress and surprises—can that be managed better? Will the Government be open about those stages, how long they should take and what patient's expectations will be? Will the duplicity of social unavailability hidden in waiting times end in this new? I wonder if she has put it to us that Jim Murphy has caught red-handed fiddling NHS figures, and is it not time for the Labour Party to apologise and particularly Jenny Marra to apologise that she has singularly refused to do earlier on today? Jenny Marra? I'm not sure if Bruce Crawford's microphone is on. I couldn't hear exactly what he said. I think I got the gist of it. I think I got the gist of it. I would say that no political party or the British Medical Association would have had to resort to putting in freedom of information requests if this Government—I'm answering his colleague's point at the moment, if this Government had been open, transparent about the information that it has published and not have to take the lead from David Cameron and put the pressure on them to publish statistics. I suspect that the difference is that, firstly, the BMA would not have fiddled the statistics, and secondly, the BMA would have had the good grace to apologise if they had misinterpreted the statistics, which the Labour Party has failed to do. For the third time, will Jenny Marra apologise to the hard-working staff at NHS for the way that the Labour Party has used those statistics to run down our health service? Jenny Marra? As I told Mark McDonald last night, nobody would ever have to resort to putting in freedom of information requests if this Government had been open and transparent in the first place. Presiding Officer, the health secretary must look at the duplicity of social unavailability, because it is hidden in waiting times. I would expect that the new period of transparency that she has announced will bring that to an end, and I hope that she can address that today. If it is to be the most transparent service in the world, does the Scottish Government plan to match the transparency of the Scottish Ambulance Service updating its performance on its website every 15 minutes? Delayed discharge, Presiding Officer, we have not yet heard from the cabinet secretary if she will publish figures. I hope that she can clear that up today on what she has called her greatest priority, and we both agree that it is the biggest challenge in our health service today. I am surprised that she has not included delayed discharge figures in the transparency project, but she might be able to clear that up. When she does publish those figures, will it be with openness and accountability that the Scottish Ambulance Service is showing? Will we be able to see, hour by hour, how many patients are being discharged, how many beds are occupied and unoccupied, how the patient flow through our hospitals is operating throughout the day and on each day of the week? Presiding Officer, that perhaps sounds fanciful, but if you take the aspiration of full openness and accountability to its logical conclusion, then it makes absolute sense and should be exactly what we are aspiring to in our most important public service in Scotland. An international report published by McKinsey has concluded that transparency is one of the most powerful drivers of healthcare improvement. It cites a powerful example of data publication in Canadian hospitals, where, within a few months of the data's release, average length of stay decreased by more than 30 per cent and unexpected readmissions declined by more than 20 per cent. Now, if data publication could have a similar effect on delayed discharges in Scotland, what a radical improvement that would be. A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine has shown that public data reporting is as effective and incentive as financial rewards in increasing providers to improve their clinical performance. None of the NHS staff I have spoken to have any truck with data publication. Indeed, openness and transparency is as much in the interests of our hard-working staff and their own performance in the NHS as it is in the interests of patients. If that evidence is to be taken at face value, the international evidence, then the Scottish Government has created an incredible opportunity this week by setting up this website and this project. The test will be on how open, transparent and up-to-date their information will be. How innovative and ambitious can they be with this new tool for the success of our health service? I sincerely hope that they will grasp this opportunity and not have to be forced bit by bit into publishing more and more information, like they have been over the past few weeks. The way that SNP, the health secretary and the First Minister have come to the publication of weekly statistics has been surprising and disappointing for people who have been at the top of Government for eight years, but they eventually reached the right conclusion. It is now their ambition for this that is critical. I move the motion in my name. Thank you, Ms Marra. I now call Shona Robison to speak to and move amendment number 12325.3. Cabinet Secretary, 10 minutes. Thanks very much. First of all, I thank Labour and Jenny Marra in particular for the fantastic timing of this debate. It really could not have been better on so many levels. I am sure that I am not alone in this chamber in my admiration for the work that staff do in our NHS day-in, day-out, both staffing and, of course, front-line funding of the NHS are now at record high levels, but I recognise that our health services absolutely face challenges. To Jenny Marra, in particular, to answer to her questions earlier on, we are already rolling out the best practice of A&E on the nine wells model to the rest of the A&E estate. If she had been looking at what we were doing, she would have known that. We are already doing that. In terms of matrons, I saw Richard Simpson physically shrink at the concept of the matron. We are not in the 1970s. We are in 2015. We call them senior charge nurses, not matrons. I would thought that Labour might keep up with what the RCN and the nurses themselves are saying about that. The NHS currently produces a large volume of data on various aspects of its performance and makes that information available on the ISD website. However, while that information is available, I believe that it could be more accessible for people who do not regularly work with health statistics. That is why I have tasked the Scottish Government officials to work with ISD in the coming months to establish a new NHS performance website to give quick and easy access to key NHS statistics, either by hospital or health board, as appropriate. Something Labour never did in the eight years that they were in power, so it is good that this SNP Government will be the ones delivering the most open, accountable and transparent NHS anywhere in these islands, if only Wales would follow suit. However, I have written to the Welsh health minister suggesting that they may wish to do that, because we will lead the way on that. The service will be developed over time to ensure that information such as waiting times performance, cancelled operations, staffing levels and hospital activity rates are readily available. The regular collection of year-round A&E statistics first began under this Government, because it was not done under the previous administration at all. I welcomed the chief statistician's decision to instigate weekly publication of A&E figures that will make NHS Scotland even more accountable to the public and patients who use its services. Those new weekly statistics will also contain more detail on the length of waits that is currently published by NHS England. I have set out in the chamber before that we have to plan for an NHS not only for 2020 but beyond that to ensure that it continues to deliver effective care for the people of Scotland free at the point of need long into the future. We are absolutely committed to a preventative programme that tackles the symptoms and causes of poor health and health inequalities, which still too many in Scotland suffer. The population health improvement at the same time as reducing demands on the health service in future years is an absolute priority for us. I want to try and reach as much consensus around what we want our health and social care systems to look like over this longer timeframe and the steps that we need to take to get there. That engagement will be on-going, but I would like to have reached broad agreement on the plan by the autumn of this year, as I have said previously. I believe that we can achieve a consensus for the future direction of our NHS, and my offer to parties in this chamber, as I have said before, still stands. I believe that the people of Scotland deserve no less than our collective endeavours to enhance the NHS for the future. That is why it was so disappointing for the Scottish Labour Party this week to willfully and deliberately misinterpret data on the NHS. I hope that Jenny Marra will take the opportunity at some point to apologise to the staff involved, because she asked me about apologising about the cancelled operations, and I willingly did so. I am big enough to apologise for the things that I think are wrong. Perhaps Jenny Marra needs to be big enough to apologise for the things that are blatantly wrong, but her party has done. Of course, it was a desperate attempt to continue to talk down our NHS—a desperate attempt. I heard Jenny Marra try to gloss over the issue and claim that she had misinterpreted the data that she received from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. Fortunately, in the spate of online deletions, she forgot to remove the actual response that she got from Glasgow from their website, although I am sure that it will be gone too, probably before the end of this debate. It provides a table breaking down reasons for cancellations, and in that table, as clear as day, it says how many were cancelled for clinical reasons—absolutely there in black and white. It is exactly this sort of fiddling of the figures by Labour that was so evident from their time in office when they had more than 30,000 people on hidden waiting lists. That sees more than double the number of people who trust the SNP with the NHS and trust Labour, and this will wonder after Jenny Marra and Jim Murphy's performance over the past few days. Of course, the reality is that the NHS as a whole is performing better today against tougher targets than when Labour were in office here in Scotland, or where they are in office in Wales today. As Labour tried to deride NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's performance on operations this week, I will point out that, since the introduction of the 12-week treatment guarantee target for inpatients, Glasgow's performance against that target has been 99.9 per cent, something that I think we should absolutely congratulate the board for. Sometimes taking responsibility is hard, is it not? Labour's reaction to being caught red-handed was to blame one of its poor researchers. Labour said that its researchers had miscalculated. That is the same researcher that took the picture of Jenny Marra outside Glenwood Health Centre, but it was the old closed-down health centre, not the shiny new one, just a few metres away. Yet another attempt to misrepresent the health service, but Labour has been caught out, cannot be trusted on the NHS and everybody now knows it. The treatment time guarantee acts as a long stop and helps to ensure that if someone has their operation cancelled, the board works to treat them as quickly as possible. Again, the people of Scotland will find it deeply troubling that Labour has previously confirmed in this chamber by Richard Simpson that they would scrap the treatment time guarantee, something that I think they will live to regret. That is absolutely incorrect. What I said was that you have made it a legal guarantee rather than a target. A legal guarantee means that you are breaking the law for 12,000 Scottish patients a year. While I am on my feet, what about the delayed discharges that are on the standard weekly template? You have not even mentioned publishing them yet they are available by every board every week to your Government and you are hiding them. I am very happy to publish as much information as possible, but this Government is getting to grips with delayed discharges, something that your Government never did. Richard Simpson is on the record as saying that you would get rid of the legal treatment time guarantee, so you want to remove patients' legal rights. I think that that has been confirmed yet again in this chamber today. The progress that the NHS has made in recent years has been tracked by the progressive increase in the volume of statistics that are available and allow for comparisons with other health systems. That is why the Welsh Audit Office was able to report in January on a comparison between performance on elective surgery in the UK and concluded that Scotland and England are performing better than Wales against the most stringent referral to treatment time targets. It is also why that we can compare A&E performance in Scotland not only with other parts of the UK but with other health systems. For example, in 2014 we know that Scotland's A&E's are outperforming those in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, as well as England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I will give way. I will show the Robson publish delayed discharge figures on the website. I am happy to publish delayed discharge figures on the website because this SNP Government will deliver the most open, transparent NHS information system that is in these islands, and we will be very proud to do so. The work of our Scottish patient safety programme has helped to bring real benefits through action in hospitals around the country, utilising performance statistics to monitor progress and identify where action is needed. Of course, we saw yesterday the hospital standardised mortality ratios having reduced by more than 16 per cent since 2007, a testament to the work of our patient safety leaders and the NHS staff right around the country. I am more than happy to talk about how statistics can improve transparency around the performance of the NHS, because I believe that we can use the NHS performance website to tell the fantastic story about NHS performance, one that the Labour Party wants to talk down. However, our staff in the NHS are doing a fantastic job, and I think that it builds politicians of all parties not to talk down the NHS, and we will make sure through NHS performance that we continue to tell the fantastic story of that performance across the whole of this country. I now call on the net mill to speak to your move of amendment number 12325.2, in the name of Jackson Carroll, six minutes. When I learned that Labour's debate today was to be about protecting Scotland's communities, I did not expect the focus to be yet again in the NHS with an unrelenting emphasis on an alleged lack of transparency and openness regarding the operation of the service in Scotland. Of course, a major role of opposition is to scrutinise the Government of the day, but I find it utterly abhorrent that the NHS is at times being used for party political gain, and regrettably, I have to say by both main parties in the chamber, which is why our amendment refers to the use of rhetoric such as weaponising the NHS and to claims made during the latter stages of last year's referendum campaign that the future of the NHS would be secure only if Scotland became an independent country. The NHS is a precious institution to all of us, and any threat to it, real or perceived, is of huge public concern. The last thing people want to see is that it is being used as a political tool by parties seeking victory at forthcoming elections. It is far too important for that—at everyone that I speak to outside this place wants this to stop—asking that politicians of all parties and none come together in support of our NHS and in developing it for the future. Nobody is denying that our health service is currently and increasingly under very severe pressure and that there are times when it struggles to cope with the demands placed on it. There have always been added problems during the winter months, but, as the population ages and many more people are living with multiple and complex health conditions, the pressures on NHS services and staff are relentless and they do struggle to cope with demand. My party absolutely agrees that detailed scrutiny of the NHS is essential, as demands on it continue to escalate in an era where resources are tight, and, of course, that requires the regular publication of rigorously produced statistics and reports, giving all of us, both parliamentarians and the public, an accurate picture of the operation of the NHS. There is undoubtedly now more openness about the NHS than I have known in all my years of involvement with it and more patient involvement with their planned care, and this is a good thing and must continue to improve. Every week the Health and Sport Committee receives a list of published Health Improvement Scotland inspection reports. For instance, this week we were notified of nine, covering hospitals within four health board areas. The care inspectorate also provides much useful information in its reports, aimed at improving standards in Scotland's many care homes. Next week we will discuss with the health secretary the recently published report on the seed of outbreaks at the Vale of Leven hospital, which found many faults and has made many recommendations that have carried out should ensure that there is no repeat within Scotland of the failings found in that hospital. Like others, of course we welcome the Government's announcement yesterday that it now plans to publish A and D statistics on a weekly basis. All those measures are extremely important in developing a clear understanding of the pressures on the system and where the need for improvement is identified, how that can be undertaken quickly and effectively. I think that we need to listen to the warning from Dr Peter Benney, chairman of BMA Scotland, when he says that, while the weekly publishing of statistics can be a useful indicator of pressure in one part of the system, we must avoid reducing the NHS as a whole to a set of weekly performance figures, skewing the public's perception of the service and ignoring the system-wide pressures that extend far beyond A and D. He is absolutely right that pressure on emergency departments is a symptom of wider pressures across the NHS and that problems in one part of the service cannot be addressed without looking at the system as a whole. That is why we respect coalface organisations like the BMA and the RCN when they seek the co-operation of all stakeholders in the NHS, including politicians, in giving thorough and objective consideration to what needs to change to ensure the long-term sustainability of the NHS in Scotland as it faces the inexorable demands being placed upon it. As a start, we need to relieve the pressures on our emergency and acute services by effectively planning and developing primary and social care to keep people within the community at home or in homely settings for as long as possible. That is why it is so important that the integration of health and social care is a success that they achieve right across the country. There needs to be serious discussion and planning about the future of the NHS and that must involve all health professions that contribute to primary, secondary and tertiary care, as well as the local authority, third and independent sectors on which much community care depends, as well as politicians both at a local and national level, and most importantly, the patients and carers whose wellbeing depends on a well-run service. This sort of planning cannot be achieved by political points going. Not for the first time this year, I would stress the need for co-operation between politicians on all sides and plead that, where the NHS is concerned, we look to where we can agree a way forward, working together to find a sustainable future for an NHS that has been the envy of the world and whose staff deserve our full support but are increasingly demoralised by the constant bickering of their elected representatives. Scottish Conservatives are willing and ready to co-operate in this way and we challenge other parties to do the same. This is what our constituents and the NHS staff who work so hard on our behalf expect of us. The member is closing. This is what they deserve from us. I am looking forward to the open debate. I do not think, but I do hope that it will be conducted in a constructive manner. I am pleased to move the amendment in Jackson Carlaw's name and having studied the Government's amendment, we will also support it, assuming that it will be carried at decision time. Many thanks to our Collin Jim Hume to speak to and move amendment 1, 2, 3, 2, 5.1. Maximum six minutes, Mr Hume. I'm tight for time. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. To the health secretary, how delighted I am that she's chosen to fully accept the Liberal Democrat amendment, which we did have lodged asking for a weekly reporting of A&E figures. It's quite a turnaround or even perhaps a U-turn given the Government's opposition up until now to this measure. Lib Dems, of course, welcome the Scottish Government bending to opposition pressure to say that we were waiting times on a weekly basis. That information was already available to ministers. It's only right that it's made fully available in the interests of accountability. The move has come about through considerable pressure from across the political bank benches and was the sole focus of that earlier Liberal Democrat amendment. We've been calling on the move for one day less than four weeks and it's curious that we should see such a radical change from the Government in such a short timeframe after such opposition to weekly reporting. Indeed, the health secretary claimed that she'd no influence over such a move, claiming that it would amount to political interference. So it's a pity that the Government announced the news through the press just yesterday afternoon rather than engaging in a meaningful discussion with MSPs and health spokespeople across the benches in a collaborative way. However, this is perhaps yet more proof that it was needed off the power of opposition. I just correct Jim Hume. The announcement was actually made through the chief statistician's office if he had been paying attention. Jim Hume. I saw your words in a Scottish Government press release website just yesterday afternoon. Or I should have didn't see yours, obviously, Presiding Officer. I saw the cabinet secretary's. Presiding Officer, our dedicated front-line NHS staff strive to provide second and uncare for every single patient and they deserve our respect. It's incumbent on the Scottish Government to look at the waiting times issue with times within our A&E units and act swiftly for patients and for our NHS staff. That's why Lib Dems have been calling on the Government to stand behind the principles of accountability and openness re-A&E waiting times. By releasing weekly figures to the public, the Government will be subject to tougher, of course, more rigorous scrutiny, and, ultimately, those will improve areas that we know are failing in some of our A&E units. The benefits for our patients will be obvious, but, likewise, addressing the problem areas quickly with support for staff will go a long way towards taking pressure off staff and, I believe, boosting morale. It's critically important that this new found transparency is accompanied, of course, by real action from the Government to support our great NHS staff so that they can continue to provide the best care for patients, and that's the crux of the new and revised Lib Dem amendment today. The weekly information will enable us to see the extent of the growing A&E waiting times and where action is needed. We've seen a growing number of people waiting for more than four hours in some departments. We know about the recent Royal Alexandra hospital incident in Paisley where a special support team was sent to provide help to the A&E section there, and, of course, the Government claimed that that was a responsible move. At Glasgow two weeks ago, patients had to wait up to 20 hours in a port of cabin to be seen in the Victoria. We don't want that happening across other areas of Scotland. The severe understaffing and underresourcing in that situation was hidden in the vast figures of monthly ISD stats. The health secretary must not be allowed to hide behind a wall of figures, so ultimately, through weekly publishing, the Government will quite rightly be held accountable more swiftly, meaning that staff and patients can have confidence that an open conversation with us as MSPs, patients and NHS staff can be had in order to identify and target where help and support for workers is most needed through flexible resources. More accountability, better management of resources. It's a move supported by health professionals also. The BMA stated that the NHS faces pressures in the EU units because, as a quote of wider pressures from across the NHS, causing A&E to struggle to coat with rising demand in the face of increasing numbers of elderly people with multiple health conditions alongside constrained resources. It becomes then even more necessary to allow for this movement of information, and I would urge the health secretary to engage fully on issues that we know are problems areas in the NHS. Royal College of Nurses Scotland's senior officer said, quote, many nursing staff working in Glasgow have been in contact with us to let us know how worried they are and concerned about how they can care for patient safety when they are so few staff and equipment is such short supply, unquote, with warnings of delayed discharges and delayed operations. So the Government must improve its record on A&E waiting times. I'm sure we all want that. Westminster has done it recently, and I'm delighted that the cabinet secretary has now agreed with the Lib Dems to publish weekly figures. However, it should be a reminder to the Scottish Government that it needs to take heed of what those at the front line of the NHS are saying on the wider issues of sustainable staffing, resourcing for the long-term, geriatric beds have been cut by thirds since 2010, boarding has soared to 3,000 and our hospitals are being bottlenecked. In the last two years, 16,500 NHS staff have been signed off work with mental health issues. A&E weekly reporting is one aspect. It's now vital that, going forward, the Scottish Government outlines what measures it will take in targeting the pinch points that we now exist in our A&E departments, and long-term staffing and resourcing must be key to that. I move the amendment in my name on behalf of the Liberal Democrats and look for support across the chamber. Many thanks. We now turn to the open debate. I'm afraid we are already short for time. Speeches of a maximum of six minutes. Could members who wish to speak press the request-to-speak buttons? I call Bob Dorris to be followed by Rhoda Grant. Thank you very much. The Scottish Government has a strong record in increasing transparency and openness within the NHS. After all, it was this Scottish Government that began the routine publishing of treatment time statistics, including progress that has been made towards the 18-hour referral to treatment target and the 12-week treatment time guarantee. That is to be commended. That is not secrecy, that is to be commended. Likewise, it is the current Scottish Government that began to routinely publish statistics on compliance with the four-hour A&E target and on the number of 12-hour breaches not before collected labour-preferred to keep that hidden. I would ask Parliament on the balance of probability to work out who is secretive and who is transparent. I welcome therefore the latest announcement to go further than ever before and make a significant amount of NHS data easily accessible and available from March 2015 on the Scotland performance website. Indeed, that will include weekly statistics and A&E performance, and I hope to see a little bit more about that later on in my speech. Across a range of measures, the current Scottish Government has already made far more information available than under any previous Labour administration. For instance, Parliament will remember the farce of Labour's hidden waiting lists, where around 35,000 people had no guarantee of when treatment would take place and no published statistics to even admit that they existed or what the length of wait was likely to be. That is secrecy, Presiding Officer. The Scottish Government ended that system with the new-age system to ensure that all patient waits were recorded, statistics published and transparency was brought into the process. Indeed, Presiding Officer, when the Scottish Government identified that system had to be improved further during our time of administration, we acted once more and improved it further. I want to share some further statistics with the chamber. I can assure Scottish Labour that those statistics are accurate. I have checked them. I would like to look at mortality ratios in Scotland's hospitals if we compare the period from October to December 2007 with the period July to September 2014. In other words, over the lifespan of the current Scottish Government, we see an improvement of over 16 per cent on mortality ratios that NHS has never been so safe. I am pleased to say that the hospitals in my constituencies that I represent my constituents, including the Western, including Gartnavel, including the Royal, including the Southern General, do better than the national picture. Despite some bad press that they have been subject to recently, I think that that is to be welcome. All that is publicly available information, but we are never going to hear about that publicly available information from the Labour Party. The Labour Party is silent on this. It is available of silence from the Labour Party on all of this. Of course, we all know why it just does not fit in with its false narrative about an NHS crisis. Likewise, I do not see Labour keen to tell people about the plummeting levels of hospital-acquired infections and the huge progress that has been made on that. If I recall rightly, the Labour Party of Forum indulged health statistics in this area. I believe that it was Jackie Baillie that rushed for a PR slamming the level of hospital-acquired infections in Scotland, before realising, of course, the statistics that she was using referred to the time period that Labour was in charge of the NHS. While Jackie Baillie was calling Scotland the superbug capital of Europe, the reality was that, under the SNP Government, hospital-acquired infections were down 70 per cent, seven zero, and were the lowest since records actually began. That is a dodgy dossing. That is misleading people. It is this Government that has been open and transparent. The reason why I draw attention to hospital-acquired infections is that the current Scottish Government has established the healthcare environment inspectorate to carry rigorous inspections into published findings publicly and accessible to all. Sometimes that leads to uncomfortable headlines in newspapers. Sometimes it is uncomfortable press for the Scottish Government, but it was this Scottish Government that established the inspectorate and are identifying what services have to be improved and taking action to improve them. That is why mortality is improving, that is why hospital-acquired infections are falling. Open, transparent, public and accountable. Jenny Marra was on Good Morning Scotland this morning. When it was put to her that the SNP Scottish Government published more information than any previous Labour Government when they were in power, Ms Marra did not deny it and I welcome that. Instead, Ms Marra said that there was now a different culture, different pressures and different challenges. We are on to identifying challenges in relation to delayed discharge. I absolutely agree with Jenny Marra in relation to that, but I again selectively use of statistics because what the statistics show is that, under this Scottish Government, delayed discharge has fallen by two thirds. I am actually minded to agree with Dr Peter Vinnie, the chair of BMA Scotland. I have already heard his quote earlier. I am just finishing off. I am afraid, Dr Simpson, because I welcome the weekly publishing of statistics, but picking one week at any given time can skew the public perception of a service and it is important that it is put on the record, but we have to look at the service in the round and we have to look at the improvement over a long period of time. The record shows that it is this Government that has achieved that and that it has put more information into the public domain than ever before. Rhoda Grant, to be followed by Joan McAlpine. I was going to start by welcoming the Government's change of heart with regard to the publication of the A&E data, but I should obviously be thanking instead the chief statistician. It is quite good that the statistician has told the Cabinet Secretary who is boss that they are stepped up to the plate and taken charge of the NHS. Something we have been asking that the Cabinet Secretary do for sometimes it is really good that somebody has taken on that challenge because it was the right decision. The NHS belongs to the people, not to the Government. The people have a right to know what is happening and what their expectations should be. We now look forward to the chief statistician making a similar announcement on weekly bed blocking statistics and indeed in real-time publication of NHS statistics. Only when that happens we will have a transparent service. Rhoda Grant needs to understand that the chief statistician decided on the weekly statistics because that was a statistic that was already out there and he decides on the frequency. In terms of new reporting, we decide on what should be reported if it is not already reported upon and that is why I have announced the NHS performs website. Something I hope that she will welcome. That is as clear as mud, so we have to wait for the chief statistician to decide whether to publish the other statistics weekly. I think that we know who is in charge. Perhaps the Cabinet Secretary will make an appeal to him to publish those statistics. The last few months in the NHS has been a nightmare for patients and staff. We have a national health service that is unable to cope with basic winter pressures and it is due to the Government's neglect of their duty. They have ignored our pleas for action but what is more is that they have ignored the pleas made by staff in the NHS, by their trade unions and professional bodies and indeed they have ignored pleas made by patients. Yet they are still in denial suggesting that we are playing politics rather than highlighting the real concerns of real people and that is wrong. However, what is worse is that they appear to ignore the pleas of staff and patients and they do this aided and abetted most disappointingly by their friends in the Tory party. This mismanagement has placed an acceptable strain on NHS staff. We know that those in the caring professions work above and beyond the call of duty that is in their nature. If the SNP MSPs think that that is funny, they should maybe spend some time on the front line working with staff in the NHS who are making up for their neglect of that service. The Government is abusing that goodwill and that is totally unacceptable. I am not going to take an intervention. I have already taken one. Staff shortages throughout the NHS have meant the withdrawal of some services. Perhaps if the cabinet secretary were to listen to some of the real experiences of patients in the NHS, she might listen in silence and at least take some notice of it, because I am going to highlight some of the issues in my own region. For example, if you have a baby in the sky, you better do it within working hours, otherwise you are going to spend several hours in the back of an ambulance travelling to Inverness to maternity services because there is no out of the hours maternity services in the sky any more. That is not a great journey at the best of times. It is certainly not a great journey when in labour. Endoscopy services in the sky have been totally withdrawn, again meaning that patients have to travel to Inverness for their procedures. Locums are running the hospital services in Wick and Caithness and that is not sustainable. It seems impossible, because of lack of training to attract and appoint qualified staff on a permanent basis to continue service delivery as it happens currently. It is the community and the local health board that are coming together to work up a sustainable model, not the Scottish Government, but the community that is taking that on. It is absolutely unacceptable until this happens that people are travelling more than 100 miles to get procedures that should be delivered on their doorstep. The Government talks about care in the community treatment closer to home. What is happening is that the direction of travel is absolutely in the opposite direction. Operations are being cancelled. A constituent phoned me a couple of weeks ago and told me the story of an elderly woman, a neighbour of hers, who is waiting for a hip replacement. She was in agony and obviously really concerned about her operation. That was cancelled at short notice due to unscheduled care pressures, but the stress of waiting for that operation has continued and will continue again with her pain worsening until her operation takes place. If the cabinet secretary wants to apologise to her, I will take the intervention. As I always say, I regret anybody who has not had the service that they should expect, but is it not a great example of what is wrong with Labour's portrayal of the health service that, through her speech, particularly about Skye, she did not even mention the fact that I have given approval for the new hospital in Skye? Is it not about a bit of a balanced view? What does she now welcome that decision because it is good for the people of Skye? I certainly welcome the decision to build a new hospital in Skye. It has been a long time coming and does nothing for the mothers who are travelling to Inverness in the back of an ambulance at this moment in time, something that she should be concerning herself with right here right now. In Harris, there are no GP out-of-hours services. Patients have to travel to Stornoway to the hospital to access out-of-hours services. Over the highest road on the islands, a danger is rooted at any time but much worse in wintery weather conditions. That is really not good enough. NHS Highland has informed staff that, if they require a bank nurse, they must have someone at nursing assistant grade, not at the grade replacing the person that they are taking over from. That is totally unacceptable and puts patients at risk. I am afraid that they need to close. Presiding Officer, this Government needs to step up to the plate. They need to take charge of the NHS. They need to support the staff who are working extremely hard to make up for their shortcomings and to give the patients who are suffering under their management the treatment they deserve. I need to make it clear to members that they cannot go beyond six minutes. Joan McAlpine, to be followed by Neil Bibby. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. We are now almost halfway through this debate and we have still to hear an apology from Scottish Labour. After their leader Jim Murphy was caught red-handed fiddling NHS figures and tried to save himself a red face by deleting his false tweets and his YouTube video making those false claims, but talking of red faces, you really have to have a brass neck to come to this chamber, as Jenny Marra did today, and praise NHS staff while failing to apologise for undermining their hard work by publishing false statistics about operation times. Labour's misrepresentation was not a minor matter. More than 200 of the 292 operations cancelled, cited by Jim Murphy, 200 of those were cancelled for clinical reasons, that is 70 per cent. Ms Marra is on very shaky ground by coming here to talk about honesty, transparency and statistics, given Labour's own appalling record on those matters. On hitting waiting lists, for example, or on that embarrassing photograph of Ms Marra, outside of Glenroth's health centre, that had been replaced by a £5.8 million new facility. Ms Marra, in her speech today, introduced another blooper into Labour's abysmal record on those matters. She cited the consultancy McKinsey to attack the Scottish NHS. If she had done her homework and she might end up blaming a researcher for this, who knows? Ms Marra should know that McKinsey is a company that has regularly been exposed for its role in privatising the NHS in England. Dr Phil Hammond, the respected doctor and commentator, said that McKinsey is the firm that, quote, hijacked the NHS in England. McKinsey, for example, drew up many of the clauses in Andrew Lansley's health and social care bill. The legislation that has taken the NHS in England so far down the road towards privatisation, a road, incidentally, which began with Tony Blair's Labour Party when they established foundation hospitals in England. McKinsey is already benefiting from contracts arising from the health and social care bill, according to an extensive investigation by Tamsen Cave of Spinwatch, which monitors the lobbying industry. Serious concerns have been expressed about the revolving door between the marketised English NHS, McKinsey and Government. Indeed, one of McKinsey's executives was an adviser to Tony Blair, who then went on to head up monitor the regulator of the NHS size of the border. McKinsey, of course, worked closely with the last UK Labour Government on health and, in 2009, produced a report recommending that the NHS in England cut 10 per cent of its staff. Within weeks of the coalition taking power, a £6 million contract by Mr Lansley's department had been awarded. Of course, serious questions have been raised about the fact that it represents private healthcare companies around the world and the serious conflict of interest involved in that and its work with the NHS in England. I think that Ms Marra should be very, very careful about who she cites in evidence to trash the Scottish NHS. Dr Hammond has praised the NHS in Scotland under this Government for rejecting the kind of market competition that has destroyed or brought the NHS in England close to destruction. This Government, by contrast, has a very good record on health. We have 17,000 more nurses than we had under Labour, and that is real nurses. That is not the fictitious 1,000-plus nurses of Jim Murphy's imagination. We have 13,000 more consultants, and perhaps the most important of all, patient satisfaction is higher in Scotland than in anywhere else in the UK. According to the social attitudes survey, 75 per cent of patients are satisfied with the NHS in Scotland compared with 51 per cent of patients in Wales where the NHS is in Labour's hands. Significantly, the NHS in Scotland is more trusted in the SNP's hands according to a survey poll in January. I am not surprised by that statistic given what we have seen over the past couple of days and the lies that Labour is prepared to tell in order to gain political advantage in this matter. I welcome the opportunity to speak in Scottish Labour's debate this afternoon about the need for open and transparent information and the challenges facing our national health service. I want to focus my remarks today specifically on the challenges facing the Royal Alexandra hospital in Paisley, the hospital where I was born, the hospital where I have been a patient as a child and an adult and where I have visited friends and family. A hospital that has recently been the headlines for all the wrong reasons and a hospital where thousands of patients and staff have been badly let down and failed over recent months. As has been said already this afternoon, we should have full transparency and openness in our national health service. REH patients want to know what has gone wrong and what will be done to fix the problems that their health service is experiencing. I welcome the fact that the chief statistician along with the Scottish Government have listened to consistent calls from those benches and finally agreed to make their weekly A&E statistics public. There should be no veil of secrecy. I appreciate the member giving way. I wonder if the member has the chance to look at mortality rates for the Royal Alexander hospital for clarity. It is combined with the veil of leaving hospitals. Since this Government has been in power, the mortality ratio has fallen. That means that it has improved to the tune of 19.6 per cent. Is that something that you would like to welcome under the Scottish Government? I know that there have been issues about mortality rates at the Royal Alexandra hospital and I would welcome any progress in reducing that. One statistic that we already know and it is a shocking one is that 23 per cent of patients almost one in every four people waited over the four-hour target time for treatment at the REH in December last year. Last week, after concerns had been raised by staff and patients for months, a support team was finally sent in to the REH confirming the A&E crisis. A crisis that was apparent to anyone who has spoken to patients and staff over recent months and a crisis that would have been highlighted in the earlier stage had A&E stats being published more frequently. It is welcome that a crisis team has finally been sent in, but one wonders if the health secretary has a grip on the situation when she denies that there is a crisis on the Monday and yet sends in a crisis team to a major hospital on the Tuesday. I do not deny the challenges at the Royal Alexandra hospital, which is why we sent the team in. What I take exception to is the labors portrayal that every A&E in Scotland has a crisis that is clearly blatantly not the case. Will you accept that that is not the case? There are far too many hospitals that are not meeting their A&E waiting times and certainly the REH is one of them. I have been contacted by dozens of patients and staff over recent weeks and I want to share some of their experiences in the chamber and ask some questions of you, health secretary, about them. One woman described to me recently how her mother had a 13.5-hour wait in A&E with two broken bones on her back. Another told me how her father waited four and a half hours for an ambulance and when he finally got to the REH there was no trolleys available and no porters to find when. The minister will be aware that other patients have waited up to 20 hours. However, those are not criticisms of the dedicated hardworking staff at the REH. In fact, several people have provided me with examples of the outstanding work that staff are doing in extremely difficult circumstances. One man even described how nursing staff even turned their eating area into a waiting room for patients who could not get a bed when he was in the hospital for a knee operation recently. Staff are going above and beyond the call of duty. There are a significant number of questions on behalf of both patients and staff that I have for the health minister. Given that she wants to be as open and transparent as possible, I hope that she will be able to answer those questions to REH patients and staff. If not in her closing speech, I welcome her response in writing. How long does the minister envidge the support team that will be in the hospital for? Will the minister tell us what were the weekly stats for the REH that she received last Tuesday at noon, the same day that she sent in the support team? Does the minister agree that there are staff shortages at the REH? Does the minister accept what staff and patients have been saying about a shortage of beds at the REH to meet current demand and what does she intend to do about it? Given that the minister has so much to say about cancelled operations, I would welcome if she could tell us how many cancelled operations that have been at the REH over the past few months, because I am certainly aware of constituents who have had cancelled operations. There are questions that both patients and staff are demanding answers to. We have also seen concerns over adverts for volunteers at the REH A&E department. Does the Scottish Government and the minister still support the use of volunteers at the A&E department? Will the minister also know that it was reported in the Herald last week that the Government has been made aware of two critical and very serious incidents where patients at the REH have been injured whilst at A&E? People rightly expect such serious incidents to be fully investigated to find out why they occurred and how they can be prevented from happening again. I ask the minister to tell us how many other critical incidents has she been made aware of at the REH and other hospitals in Scotland. I hope that the minister will be able to respond to those questions. However, my final question to the health secretary is simple when she is called on Jenny Marra to apologise. Given that the NHS Scotland chief executive has apologised to patients at the REH, I would ask the cabinet secretary to apologise to patients and staff at the REH for being badly let down by her government, because our NHS and the REH in Paisley deserve much better than they currently give. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. You need to have a good sense of humour when you see some of the Labour party sponsored motions these days. The way that the motions are actually camouflaged, I do not think that you are doing in this Parliament any service the way you term the motions in advance and then we end up saying and talking about something that does not fit the bill on how you table the motions, but that just said who would believe with Labour's record in this area that Labour would bring a motion to Parliament that reads as it does. Presiding Officer, when you investigate Labour's record in comparison to the SNP's, you would almost laugh if it was not so serious, with just about every stat of the SNP's record knocking Labour's out the park. This is at a time when the Scottish budget has been consistently cut by British Governments of all colours. The SNP is delivering record spending with the health budget of more than £12 billion and an extra £383 billion this year. The SNP Government is delivering record levels of staff with 1,300 more consultants, 1,700 more qualified nurses and midwives and 9,600 extra staff overall, being recruited since Labour ran the health service. The Scottish people are not daft, you know. They see the effects of our total commitment to the national health service in Scotland. 73 per cent of the people in Scotland are satisfied with the health service, compared to only 63 in England, where the Tories run the health service. Who would have thought that it would be possible for the Tories, while struggling to match the SNP's record in the NHS, satisfaction that they are doing better than the Labour Party who run the health service in Wales? Who would believe it, with satisfaction records to the tune of a disaster's 51 per cent? The Labour Party has some brass neck to come to this Parliament here today with this jumped-up motion, but let's not look at the Labour Party in Wales where they slashed the budget. Ian Gray said that he would not have ringed fence to the health budget if Labour had won the election in 2011. Well, thank goodness that people re-elected the SNP or we would be facing the same problems that the people in Wales are facing right at the present time. That's what we get when you don't ring fence. It should never be forgotten that, when power in Scotland Labour was closing Monklands hospital and Ayr General hospital, and at the same time, a slimy slicing services at the Vale of Leven hospital were the view to eventually close it. The Vale of Leven hospital served, and now, thanks to the SNP Government, continues to serve a number of people within my constituency. That's one of the many reasons that people tell me how much in the era that they trust the SNP on the NHS. What would waiting times be like now without those hospitals that have been seen which would have been closed and where you would have over one million patients not been able to attend those hospitals? As far as transparency goes, it was the SNP Government that routinely published statistics with four-hour A&E targets. On the number of 12-hour breaches, what did Labour do? Labour buried them and kept them secret. We introduced routine monitoring and reporting of hospital-acquired infections. We created the healthcare environment inspectorate to carry out rigorous inspections, and we instructed them to publish those findings. Don't bother to talk to me. You should really contact the BBC who will put your mints out whether it's been cooked or not. When we come to power, there was a shortage of dentists in some parts of Scotland in some locations, best described as chronic. We brought in an additional 430 dentists. We have increased the number of GPs by 7 per cent and reduced the number of service managers to 29 per cent. We are making a difference. At the end, it really counts. Exceeding the target set in April by this year in that regard. Funding is in place to ensure 500 new health visitors post will be created in the NHS over the next four years in Scotland. That list goes on and on. The Labour Party and the business of talking national health service down that claimed disaster after disaster paid a false picture of the NHS in the minds of the people of Scotland. They are prepared relentlessly to do our services down just to attack the SNP. Hardly what I would call protecting Scotland's communities more about protecting the Labour Party seats. The health service is expendable by Jim Murphy and the Labour Party. How could it be otherwise when all the indicators and that, although the challenges that we need to face will be consistent, how else can it be other than the Labour taking down the SNP and talking down the national health service in Scotland? You should be completely ashamed of yourself using this motion today in the way that it has been handled in the last few days. It is a disgrace. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I would say what a shame is the way it has been handled the last few days. A few weeks ago, I shared with you my surprise that Labour tabled a motion for debatable health on the Scotland's future title. Today, Labour had it again on the misleading title protecting Scotland's communities. Here we are talking about health. Again, if anyone from Labour would like to apologise, please stand up. No, I thought not. The only explanation to do exactly this is to put a motion which has absolutely a title which has got nothing to do with the motion. It's misleading. Nothing else. The only explanation, Presiding Officer, is that orders are coming from London to weaponise the NHS as the only one I can find. No distinct message is allowed in UK Labour PLC. We therefore must debate NHS Scotland again. However, I won't pretend like others that the NHS is a UK organisation. We might have similar challenges because the way we are responding to those challenges is very different. Let me repeat my own words a few weeks ago. Under an S&P Government, we have not only protected the NHS budget but we have increased it. Despite the cuts to our own budget, Tory cuts supported by Labour at Westminster. The picture of the Labour Party has been desperate to paint since the beginning of the year in this chamber is not based on facts. You would think there is an election looming presenting, Officer. I pointed out that the Scottish branch of the Labour Party is desperate attempts to run the same campaign against the NHS as UK Labour is running in England won't work. Labour has been found out time after time. Not only NHS Scotland is performing better than the NHS in England but this Government has shown leadership working in collaboration with NHS boards and local authorities to set out a great vision for an integrated health and social care service. I can report, Presiding Officer, that NHS Grampian is working seamlessly to implement the S&P Government vision that will address the challenges that all health services in the UK and beyond are experiencing just now. The pressure on social care services has been recognised. This Government has put in additional money to deal with delayed discharges. Part of the problem within NHS Grampian is that Aberdeen City Council has got rid of its care services to an arms length company causing delayed discharges to rise dramatically. I know the member for Aberdeen Central. He reminds the chamber quite often that Bonaco Care, the arms length company of Aberdeen City Council, has become a smokescreen to hide the failings of the Labour administration. Kevin Stewart tells me quite often in the train on the journey back to Aberdeen but when he was a consular there were no delayed discharges. Would Labour in Aberdeen apologise? I think not. This is my third contribution to a debate about health this year. In every one of them, I find the Cabinet Secretary for Health and the First Minister for visiting our North East hospitals. Yes, on Monday the Health Secretary was in Aberdeen speaking to the board and the staff at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. I thank her for this. NHS Grampian is recruiting more nurses and I heard first and last Friday how better the new board is at investigating and responding to complaints. I suggest this to the board and elected representatives present that we are all other responsibility to not only highlight the complaints but also the many positive feedbacks from patients and making sure these positive feedbacks go back to the staff, to the NHS staff. Because there are many. I would like to congratulate both the new chair of the board, Professor Stephen Logan, and the acting chief executive Malcolm Wright, for deciding to conduct the public board meeting in a new transparent way, which is very, very important and goes exactly at the same pace as the Scottish Government is taking just now. There is a lot to celebrating Grampian, a lot to be positive about. This government has allocated a 49.1 million increase to the health board's budget for the next financial year. This equates to a 6.3 per cent rise presenting officer. The SNP government is showing commitment to deliver for the North East. NHS Grampian funding is now within one percent parity with other NHS boards around Scotland, one year ahead of schedule. Yesterday our first minister met cancer patients when she officially opened the new state of the heart, 13.6 million radiotherapy department in Aberdeen. I look forward to many more visits from both the Scotland Health Cabinet Secretary and the Scotland First Minister. There is a lot going on, a lot of good news for patients in the region. Two new projects have been unveiled, a new cancer centre and a new hospital, which we are still debating what name it should have. These two projects are part of the 120 million Scottish Government National delivery plan programmes. The new hospital will be paid under non-profit distributing the NPD model, and the project will be under design, built, financed and maintained contract over 25 years. Again, tax payers, when they are used by public health under 25 years contract, will labour stand up and apologize for the amount of debt that we have created with PFI. The cost of private financial initiative repayments is one of the reasons why labour cannot be trusted with NHS. It can stand up and apologize. Final minute. The member is closing. Dr Simpson, please. The president will decide. Never cannot be trusted to have an NHS. He is closing, but running out of time. NHS Scotland is not public support, because NHS staff in Scotland are working tirelessly under pressure to deliver high-quality details to patients. I have a message for London Labour bringing as many health debates to the chamber as they wish, and I will make sure to speak to every one of them. I point out that members can only take interventions if they can do so within six minutes. Ann McTaggart, to be followed by Mike Mackenzie. I am pleased to take part in this important debate on protecting Scotland's communities. We know that Scotland's health service is facing significant pressures, while at the same time having to make major changes to services in order to meet future needs. It pains me to read the horror stories and hear about the horror stories that have been coming out of the NHS almost daily over the past few weeks, in particular the stories within my region of Glasgow. The recent petition from the Royal College of Nursing signed by over 7,000 people complaining at inadequate staff parking at the new Southern General Hospital should have been predicted. When the new Larbott hospital opened in 2010, the main complaint was lack of parking for cars. Why is the same problem arising again, just five years later, when the next new hospital is being built? Ann McTaggart realises and I hope that she realises that the application for additional car parking at the moment is with Glasgow City Council and, indeed, it is Glasgow City Council's responsibility to resolve the residents parking issue. Surely she would acknowledge that in a more balanced view. Cabinet Secretary, I would have well thought that the infrastructure of a brand-new built hospital would have been looked at, not just by Glasgow City Council, but by 7,000 people who have signed this petition who obviously do not approve of what is currently there. It is simply unacceptable that our hard-pressed NHS staff should have to worry about parking. Many nurses and doctors will be on shifts requiring them to be in early and leave late in the darkness. Their safety, as well as ease of transport, should be a priority. That should have been monitored by the Scottish Government so that this issue was foreseen and tackled. Figures published recently showed that the A&E patients across Scotland are being let down. The percentage of patients being treated in A&E for four hours or less dropped from 93.5 per cent in December 2013 to just 89.9 per cent in December 2014. The accident and emergency department in the Glasgow western hospital has the worst figures in Scotland. 31 per cent of patients wait longer than four hours and is the worst in the country for accident and emergency waiting times. The waiting time starts for the month of December last year's show that the western met the target for 69 per cent of its patients, meaning that 548 were waiting for more than four hours. It also shows that 242 had to wait of more than eight hours. More worryingly, for 13 more patients had to wait more than 12 hours. The reality is that hospitals are simply understaffed. Scottish Labour has highlighted time and time again about the daily problems facing hard working NHS staff across Scotland. What is needed is more doctors and nurses in our A&E departments. Scottish Labour had one principal demand in the Scottish budget, protect the NHS with an additional £100 million front-line fund. That would have allowed hospitals facing extra pressure to have planned surgery at the weekends and diagnostics in the evening. Developing that approach would also allow for patients to have a health service that suits their lives, such as elective surgery, outwith their working hours. Although we on these benches welcome the U-turn from the Scottish Government on the weekly reporting of A&E figures, it came too late as the current NHS crisis could have been discovered much earlier as the ministers were aware of the crisis since the autumn, yet it has taken until now to admit it. It is not good enough that the people of Scotland are forced to get the information that they need on their NHS from the freedom of information laws under the Scottish National Party Government. Therefore, I strongly believe and call upon the Scottish Government to publish the weekly figures for each hospital, rather than for each health board. Every week, I am pleased to hear that cabinet secretary for both A&E and delayed discharges figures in order to foresee such crisis in the future and allow people to observe the performance of their local hospitals. In conclusion, there are serious problems in the Scotland's health service, with a lot of secrecy behind important statistics and behind each one of those statistics. There are vulnerable patients and their families suffering, and that is why the Government needs to take urgent action right now, as there is no time to waste. I am delighted that the cabinet secretary has announced the weekly publication of A&E performance data. It is continuing—not just as early in my speech as this, Mr Hume—it is continuing the trend that is established by this Government to publish increasingly accurate information on the performance of our health service. I will take your intervention now. I thank Mike McKenzie for letting me take an intervention. You mentioned that you have thanked the cabinet secretary for this announcement, but the cabinet secretary was quite clear that it was not her. He was the chief statistician. Mike McKenzie, I think that if you paid closer attention to what I was saying, rather than to the point that you were endeavouring to make, you would have understood that what I said was I am delighted that the cabinet secretary has announced. I think that there is no contradiction there whatsoever. However, of course, this is important. This is important in the interests of transparency, and it is important in order to provide a reliable guide to the effectiveness of our health services. Perhaps it is also important to help to prevent the Labour Party from making fills of themselves. That is not a trivial point, because whilst the Labour Party are at liberty to back up their own trees as much as they like, they should take care of their politicisation of health matters, because the effect is sometimes to place our hard-working health workers under even greater stress. The effect is often to subject them to a siege laid on them by the Labour Party, and the effect is often to criticise them on false premises, merely to try and score political points. The last thing our hard-working health workers require is to have their morale sacked in this way. It is sad too that the Labour Party cannot think of a more constructive way of acting in opposition than to endlessly criticise our health service, especially because the facts speak otherwise. Patient satisfaction when the Scottish Health Service has never been higher. The 2014 British Social Attitude Survey, published only last month, indicates that 75 per cent of people in Scotland are satisfied with NHS compared to 65 per cent in England and only 51 per cent in Labour-run Wales. Health funding has increased at an all-time high despite the reduction in the Scottish Government budget. Every penny of Barnett consequentials has been passed on to the health service budget. That is why we have got 1,300 more consultants than we had in 2006. That is why we have got 1,700 more qualified nurses and midwives than we had in 2006. That is why, overall, we have got 9,000 extra NHS staff than we had in 2006. Of course, there is merit in producing these statistics. The public has a right to know how our health service is performing. That is why this Government has done more than any previous Government to increasingly publish meaningful statistics, not to wrongly away the blame at the door of our hard-working health workers, but to rightly tell the relative success story that is the Scottish national health service. Our Scottish national health service, that despite the many pressures on it, is performing better than it was when Labour was in last in office in Scotland. Our Scottish health service is performing much better than the health service in England, and our Scottish health service is performing much, much better than Labour controls health in Wales. The health record of Labour when it was last in office in Scotland is not a good one. It is a story of hidden waiting lists. It is a story of Ian Gray's refusal to make a manifesto commitment to maintain the health budget, and it is a story of planning to cut A&E's at Muntlands in an air. The Scottish people spoke loudly and clearly on Labour's record on this and other issues in 2011. They will soon have another opportunity to speak. I suspect that they will speak loudly and clearly once again. The Labour Party seems to think that Mr Murphy is a prophet. In reality, he's a pied piper, and he's not leading them into the promised land. He's leading them further and deeper into the political wilderness. Thank you, I call Stuart McMillan to be followed by Alex Shiley. There's a word that is often overused in politics today, and that word is crisis. Too often, opposition politicians use that word on almost every issue or press release that they send out. I have heard it today, yet this is so far from the truth. Admittedly, the first person to use the word crisis was my colleague Bob Doris, but he was commenting about comments that the Labour Party had made. We did hear the word crisis being used by Anne McTaggart later on in her contribution, but what is a crisis? A crisis is something that's happening in eastern Ukraine or in the Middle East. The issue over health stats or what is happening in NHS Scotland is not a crisis, no matter which version of Jim Murphy's press release or Twitter or YouTube or video that you are reading or watching. Dr Simpson-Eller commented about the fact that no one had mentioned the word crisis. In actual fact, yesterday, Jenny Marra, Jim Hume used the word yesterday, the Daily Record of 18 February, Gemma Doyle used it, the Daily Record of 3 February, Jim Murphy used it, the Daily Record of 13 February, Jim Murphy used it. The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have been using the word to try to talk down our NHS. The budget that this Parliament recently approved will see for the first time ever over £12 billion spent on our NHS in Scotland. That includes an increase of over £383 million this year. That is a staggering amount of money, but even if we were to actually increase that amount by up to, say, another £5 billion or £10 billion, there would still be issues that need to be addressed because it is such a huge organisation. It is how we deal with those issues as they arise that is actually important. We should be looking at ways to minimise issues within the NHS in Scotland, as it is a massive organisation, but it also reaches into every area, every community and every family in Scotland, but there will always be issues that will arise. However, what is not helpful is the almost hysterical level of condemnation, attack and vilification poured on to the NHS by members of the Labour Party. Although most Scots see the NHS as an institution to be treasured, respected and supported, Labour sees it as another attempt to get a cheap shot in the press, another overhead press release piling up one stoked-up crisis Arthur and another pouring scorn on the NHS and its workforce. Rhoda Grant, I have listened to the member with awe and interest. How does he think that we are pouring scorn on the NHS? What we are asking the Government to do is support the NHS, its workers and indeed its patients, so that we can all enjoy the services that we very much want? It is the neglect of his Government that I have led to those problems. I think that an apology from the Labour Party after the comments over the last 24 hours would be a start to prove that the Labour Party actually does like the NHS as compared to the condemnation and vilification that they have been putting out over the last 24 hours and beyond. To Labour, the worry and concern that it is inflicting upon the NHS employees, the volunteers and even the patients is merely collateral damage as they seek to tarnish it in order to get their spokespeople in prime slots on radio, phone-ins or on TV or on breakfast news broadcasts. It is time that Labour stopped talking down the NHS in Scotland and, after all, before 18 September 2014, did it not tell us that the NHS was safe if Scotland voted no? Now it seems that we have to forget those Labour words. Today's motion calls for a culture of transparency and openness with regular publication of stats and reports about it makes no mention of the costs of providing that information. Speaking from personal experience when I worked in the private sector, one of my duties was to analyse stats and produce regular reports, and they do not come with no cost attached. There is a staff time needed to record information to compile the stats as well as to produce the reports as well as any costs in publishing the information, either in a printed format or in an electronic form. I would hope that Labour politicians are well aware that the costs for increased information, even if it is already being collated, will result in additional costs. I would be grateful if the cabinet secretary could certainly inform the chamber as to who will bear this cost, whether it be the ISD or the official statistics. I welcome the introduction of the weekly statistics and if it continues the excellent progress of information reporting from the SNP since we came to power, that would certainly be an advantage to the NHS and Scotland's patients. ISD Scotland already compiles a significant amount of NHS data, which can be accessed easily. We are all MSPs in this chamber. There are other methods for us to obtain information. We could write parliamentary questions, we could write letters to the ministers and the cabinet secretary, and we could ask for meetings with the cabinet secretary and the ministers. Those are the things that we can do. There is also the other option of using the FOI requests to access further information. However, some members in the chamber can take a bit of advice on that. When someone submits an FOI request, it is usually helpful if they understand what they are asking for before running to the press complaining that the information says something else. It seems strange that Labour politicians who have not got the hang of FOI requests are knowing what information they are after, and they are running around demanding more information. Do we have any guarantees? We will actually understand it when they receive it. I do say that the best line of defence is attack. Boy, have we seen plenty that coming through these benches here today. I would say that the first ability to be able to start to tackle a problem is to acknowledge that you have a problem. If we are going to sit in denial where there are issues that have to be addressed in the national health service, we will not make progress. Joan McAlpine talks about record levels of consultants. The last time I checked in five, there were 37.7 consultant posts not filled because they were unable to fill them. Companies like Medinet were flying up people, consultants in England at the weekend to do home hours in five. I have raised with your predecessor, the previous secretary, Alex Neil, specific cases where that went wrong. I also talked about record levels of numbers while we are seeing more nurses who have welcomed going into NHS five. That is because we were highlighting the issues. Before I came into this place, I spent two years as the leader of the five council. During those two years, I was consistent in raising my concerns about the assumptions that had been made through the previous right-of-five exercise that had put together how our hospitals would be co-ordinated and how health and social care would be running five. Since coming into this place, I have consistently continued to raise those concerns because I meet with nurses, I meet with staff in the hospitals on a regular basis and I can see the pressures and the challenges that are there. That is why I have met with the predecessor, Alex Neil, to discuss many of those issues. I was grateful for the meeting with the health secretary just last week, the week before. I am consistent in raising the hard work, care and commitment that I certainly and my family have seen first-hand for NHS staff in five. That is why I am so vocal on this issue, because I am so passionate about the national health service. Just as it was the greatest creation of the last century, we have a duty as politicians in this century to ensure that the health service can move forward and can be modernised to meet the needs of this century. Last week or the week before, last week, there was a report published accident emergency that a healthcare environment inspector carried out an anonymous visit to the Victoria hospital. The majority of the wards and units inspected the standard of environmental cleanliness was good. That is the starting point, because that is what you would expect within a hospital. However, there was an exception in accident emergency in ward 5, the care of the elderly ward. In those areas and in the ICU, there were significant levels of dust. Concern was raised about the cleanliness of equipment. Accident emergency trolley frames were contaminated with blood and bloody fluids, chairs, blood, gas analysers, bed frames were contaminated in accident emergency in the maternity. I could go on—the minister has obviously read on that, so I am not going to continue to go on with it. The chief inspector said that that basically they were extremely disappointed, so much so that they raised their concerns with the Scottish Government. I would say to you that, going through and reading every bit of that, what I would say to you is that we have a responsibility and a duty as parliamentarians where those kind of issues are highlighted. We have a duty surely to come to this place and raise these issues and raise other issues of concern regarding the health service. That should not be seen as somehow attacking the health service or attacking health staff. Quite the reverse. We are on the side of the health service and health staff. I agree with that. However, you are the first speaker on the Labour benches to offer a balanced speech, which recognises the good things that are happening, as well as highlighting the difficult issues that have to be resolved. That is the difficulty that we have, because there is no balance from Labour in the main. I reassure Alex Rowley on the point of the report that the HEI inspection will go back into that hospital and will absolutely make sure that those issues that we are not good enough are absolutely resolved. I can give him that reassurance. I thank the minister and I would say to you that I have consistently called on Fife for a review of NHS Fife's ability to meet the health needs in Fife. A report came out a few weeks ago in the courier about an accident emergency waiting times. It compared Fife with Tayside and said that—I remember if it was Tayside—it had no problems, but it certainly didn't have a lot. NHS Fife had significant problems. What I am saying to you is that in this term crisis, NHS Fife seems to have bounced from one issue to the next to the next. Again, I come back to what assumptions were made when the reconfiguration of health services were put in place in Fife. I remember back in the 1980s when I was studying at a university in this city. A report came out of the Griffiths report and talked about that. That was the start of community care. It was the Conservative party that was in power at that time and commissioned that. I remember making the point that community care would not be care on the cheap. There are major pressures on health and social care, so I would appeal to you that let's work together, but let's not pretend that everything is rosy or attack everybody when they try to raise issues of concern. Let's be proud of our national health service and work together to build that service so that we can be confident that it delivers for all our citizens. Many thanks and I now call Unritchard Lyle four minutes or thereby please. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and I notice that everyone is taking two minutes off me. The issues facing the national health service are indeed important ones. Despite this Labour motion trying to claim otherwise, the SNP Scottish Government is taking on board and addressing those issues. The SNP vision for the NHS is a Scottish NHS should remain a publicly delivered service, and I believe that as long as the SNP Government are in power, it will remain a publicly delivered service. Unlike that of Westminster, condemned Governments that marches the English NHS down the path of privatisation in order to facilitate that vision, the SNP has met its commitment to protect the NHS budget. Health resource budget for the year 2015-16 will be a record £12 billion. The Scottish Government—no, I don't have time—announced an extra £65 million that will be made available to NHS this year. Those funds will help to alleviate some of the pressures and ensure that NHS can continue to deliver and sustain care of all the patients across Scotland. That is in spite of a 10 per cent cut in the fiscal resource budget of Scotland by Westminster since 2010. I hope that people will remember that in May. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government has increased the health resource by 4.6 per cent in real terms. The Government is putting their money where the amount is. The Scottish Government is a pity that Westminster will not do the same. However, we have those on the other side of the chamber, the Labour Party, a party with poor record and government and the handling of the NHS, and it leaves a lot to be desired. We will only need to look right now south of the border, the only part of the UK where Labour and Scotland power in Wales. When the Welsh Labour Party has a poor record in dealing with its national health service, perhaps Carmen Jones will take tips from the Labour Party in Scotland. Who knows? Jenny Marra's motion highlights an issue of transparency and goes even further into saying that it is a veil of secrecy. Would that be the same veil that the Labour Party used during their term in government when it came to hidden waiting lists, an issue in which this Government abolished something that they failed to do for eight years, despite acknowledging that they were not in the interests of patients? The SNP Government does act in the best answer of patients. In fact, so much so that patients here in Scotland have a high satisfaction in their NHS and, indeed, the confidence of the public when looking after and predicting the NHS sits with the Scottish National Party and this Government. Under this Government, there has been a steady increase in the publication of statistics about the performance of NHS, so I hear the Labour Party pontificate from high across this chamber about our lack of transparency. I cannot think of the hypocrisy to show when their record of openness was so lacking during the administration of Scotland's NHS. The NHS belongs to all of our citizens and any improvements or views on how it can make it run better are always welcome. This is how this Government acts on all areas of our responsibility and how I am sure it will continue to do business. The national health service is close to all of our hearts and that is why we, on those benches, and in particular, the SNP will never stop doing its best to make Scotland's NHS ever healthier. I remember when the Labour Party threatened to close the A&E in Monklands. I remember the views of the community, but it was the SNP Government that saved Monklands and protected it from closure. It has continued with that service. Hundreds of thousands of patients since then have been treated in Monklands. Where would those patients have gone if not to Monklands? There was a swamped washer. There was a swamped hair mire. That speaks volumes for our NHS and how we protect it. As far as I am concerned, Presiding Officer, it is better to be with the SNP for our NHS. We now move to closing speeches and I would take this opportunity to remind members that they would be grateful of their presence in the chamber if they have already taken part in the debate, so I hope that they will return soon. Mr Hume, six minutes or thereby. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. As I mentioned in my opening, Spatialib Dems have long been calling for the weekly publication of A&E waiting times and such a move we believe would make the system more transparent. The Government, of course, will have nowhere to hide when things go wrong, so I am pleased to see that that has happened. Of course, we cannot rest back and expect just more stats to fix NHS issues. The Scottish Government has some tough questions to tackle in creating a more effective A&E service and, ultimately, it would be better supported by Government in meeting waiting times and maintain a smoother patient pathway. I thank the member for taking an intervention. I have wanted to be strange in his opening remarks on the cabinet secretary hiding behind figures. He was talking about a wall of statistics. Is it not the exact thing that he was asking for? I am referring to the ISD figures that would come out on what we called Superstats Tuesday once a month. It was a pile of statistics and it was like a wall and very difficult to get through, so getting weekly targets are exactly what we wanted. MSPs across the chamber this afternoon have acknowledged the need for more transparency and, as we know from core health sector groups like the BMA and the Royal College of Nursing, that this is only the first step on the right path to a more efficient NHS. As members have noted, it has taken a U-turn to get there and a very welcome one at that. I know that it was not the Government's previous positions. It has changed in the course of a very short time and I echo my view that this Government needs to adopt an open policy of working across the benches on such important issues of policy such as NHS, and I am happy to work with it on that. Nonetheless, the focus of the Lib Dem amendment is to seek assurances today from the Scottish Government on how it plans to use the information. The goal is obviously not to overwhelm the public, Parliament and health specialists with a flurry of information simply for the sake of obtaining it. We must always remember that what has to be noted is that the ultimate goal is a transparent system where ministers cannot hide behind that mounted-off data that I refer to and where problems areas within A&E departments are tackled head-on through targeted support and resources for our NHS staff. Relieving the current A&E crisis that has developed in a complex area has taken into account a number of many factors. We know that there is a particular problem around understaffing and resourcing. There has been a repeated call from the doctors and nurses who tell us that increase in A&E waiting times are a result of the compounding effects of pressures in other areas of the NHS. The BMA is warning that we must avoid reducing the NHS as a whole to a set of weekly performance figures, skewing the public's perception of the health service and ignoring the system-wide pressures that stretch far beyond A&E. Lib Dem's look to the health secretary to spell out what measures her Government will take in a bid to remedy this crisis in our departments of A&E. While keeping A&E units open is a move to ensure that communities have quicker access to care, it is not sufficient to have the infrastructure without the proper procedures, staff and resources. The case in point has been mentioned several times of the Royal Alexander hospital in Paisley. It is not enough for the Government to claim that it does something to address the A&E problems. It also knows to show how it will. It is then evident that what we need to do now is ensure that the Government manages to handle the released information in such a way as to have real tangible results. If we want to be able to truly resolve the A&E issues, it is a task that the Scottish Government must act upon and not simply divert the attention of the public by agreeing just to publish information. We want to see the information used actively in such a way as to develop flexibility among the resources of the NHS, taking primary input from the experts, dealing with patients on a daily basis. Whether it is staff shortages or material or financial shortages that can be mitigated by better analysis of the A&E cases or whatever the needs of the invaluable NHS staff that we have, this weekly information will be of little use and value without proper use and application to fix the root of the problems. Presiding Officer, the Scottish Government can no longer hide behind that wall of stats once a month. We now need to see real and tangible measures that will fix the problems in our NHS. Ministers will hear what NHS staff, health professionals and patients are saying. However, that should be a reminder to the Scottish Government that it needs to take heed of what those at the front line of the NHS are saying on the wider issue of sustainable staffing and resourcing for the long term. We know that geriatric beds have been cut by a third since 2010, that boardings soared to 3,000, and our hospitals are being bottlenecked. In the last two years, 16,500 NHS staff have been signed off work with mental health issues. A&E weekly reporting is one aspect. It is vital now that, going forward, the Scottish Government outline what measures it will take and target in the pinch points that we know exist in some of our A&E departments and long-term staffing and resourcing has to be key to that. It is also an opportunity to underline the need for the Scottish Government to look at those issues. I look to the cabinet secretary in summing up for assurances that she will set out how she intends to tackle the issue head-on. Patients and our dedicated NHS staff deserve and expect nothing less. In an afternoon of bloody fratricide, as the two parties opposite took lumps out of each other, I thought, what future for Great Britain were these two parties desperate to form a coalition together at Westminster after the May general election ever to be allowed to do so? I hope that that ghastly fate ever to transpire for the nation that, in the interests of transparency, which both were so keen to promote this afternoon, they will agree today to allow the cameras to follow every step of the way in those negotiations, because it really was not a pretty sight. I want to start where Jenny Marra began and where the cabinet secretary began, too. By joining in the congratulations, I think across all sides of the chamber for the heroic efforts that NHS staff have made over this winter. I have to say that they won't be able to listen to our praise on them because they are running around, harassed in wards just now, doing a job in the most trying of circumstances. After that, I have to say in Dr Nanette Milne's opening speech, that I have never thought in all my years in this Parliament of Nanette Milne as an angry woman, but that was the nearest I have heard in Dr Milne to being angry because it was a dispiriting motion. It was the third health debate that we have had this year. The first debate was on a motion that was really ghastly, but actually the debate turned out to be slightly more constructive. The second debate was reasonably consensual, but this afternoon I am afraid reverted back to being wholly unhelpful and really deeply destructive. It is not that the issue in hand that Jenny Marra raised at the heart of her motion is not important. It is not that it was wrong that it be raised. She did, effectively, in a question to the First Minister on 5 February to which the response was that the First Minister could tell the chamber that she had asked officials to look at the possibility of moving to weekly publication. I just think to characterise this is some great culture of conspiracy to deny us information on the health service when, as Nanette Milne has detailed, we have more information than we ever have had, is simply to perform the wrong service to the debate. I have to say that the Labour Party under Jim Murphy have launched all manner of fireworks on health into the air. We have had the mismanaged release this week. We had the nonsense of the mansion tax that is going to fund phantom nurses. We had the redeployment of moneys into an illusory front-line fund. Today, we had the return of matron when it was Labour who persuaded us to join a consensus on senior charge nursing, only for us to do so, to find that matrons to be brought back now. Then we have from Labour a demand as an apology a week. In fact, in January the first Jim Murphy asked for 10,000 apologies, as I recall. I have got to say that these Labour fireworks leave after their spectacle only the smell of sulphur, as fireworks always do. I have to say that there is a suspicion that at Labour Party group meetings at the moment, Jenny Marra, who is very keen and I have to say very diligent and well briefed, is putting her hand up and saying, well, I'll have another debate on health. Where are all the other Labour front benches? Have they gone to roost? Are they hiding? Because the only thing we seem to be doing is having a Labour Party debate, which is wholly destructive on the NHS, with one honourable exception to which I'll respond. I think that we are right. It is our responsibility to challenge the Government of the day, but it is to challenge it to the benefit of the NHS and patients, not to the political advantage of any poll rating ahead of a general election or indeed a Scottish election. Shona Robison, like her predecessor, has talked about arriving at a consensus approach. The older generation used to say of health that they had a fright. Sometimes a fright then became a shock. Sometimes a shock then became a crisis. We have had lots of frights. The NHS is having more shocks more regularly than it has in the past. I hesitate to say that it is yet in a state of crisis. I am not blaming the SNP because although there are lots of occasions when I have disagreed with them, they have done a lot of good work. We are at the point where, if we cannot arrive at a consensus soon on what the strategic way forward to create a sustainable NHS is, it is going to be too late and we are going to find ourselves in a crisis that was wholly avoidable if we had been prepared to rise to that challenge. So when will it be? Are we going to rule it out for 2015 because there's an election? Are we going to rule it out in 2016 because there's an election? Are we going to rule it out in 2017 because there's an election? Are we going to have to wait until 2018 when there isn't an election before we're prepared to have the courage to arrive at that consensus? It's more than just spending millions. Gil Paterson, in a slip of the tongue, this afternoon said that the SNP was going to spend an additional £380 billion this year on the NHS. Even if they did, let me say that I don't think that that would be enough because it's a culture, it's an attitude, it's a much more fundamental response to GP primary care, to discharge, to staffing levels, to the whole issue of how we address the preventative agenda, the whole debate on alcohol that will be required. I think that we are at a point now where politicians collectively are on the verge of being held collectively in complete collective contempt on the NHS by people outside of this chamber. Time is running out for us to arrive at that consensus that we've all agreed that we need and which I think rather heroically Alex Rowley addressed in the speech that he made this afternoon. Thanks. I'll now call on Shona Robison in eight minutes or thereby, cabinet secretary. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I think that the first thing I should do is to move the amendment in my name, which I think I forgot to do in the opening speech, so I'll do that now. I think that one of the most notable things about this debate has been how few Labour members have been here for it for most of the afternoon, including Jenny Marra for vast parts of it herself. I wonder if that reveals a bit of an acknowledgement that this week has not been handled particularly well, and I hope that Labour learns from that experience. Alex Rowley was very notable and stood out in a very different tone, and that is absolutely this. I absolutely acknowledge that there are challenges with the NHS that sometimes things don't go as we would want them to go, and that will always be the case with an organisation that large treating so many people that that is always going to be the case, but it's about the balance. I thought that Alex Rowley put over a balanced view of particularly the report into the Victoria in Fife. The problem is that we do not hear that balanced view from the rest of the Labour Party. It's only negative, it's only about using information to tell a certain story, and I think that's where Labour really has to take a long, hard look at themselves. I want to turn to some of the issues in this debate that have been raised by various members. Jim Hume said that he hoped that we wouldn't hide behind a whole load of figures when we moved from the third of March onwards. I mean, it's a bit like, can't win really, I mean, on the one hand we're criticised for not enough information and then in the same debate we're criticised for too much. What I can assure Jim Hume is that we will put as much information on to that system, but it's important that we also help to make it usable by the public. We want this to be a website not for politicians, but for the public, yes. I thank the cabinet secretary for taking my intervention. It was a point that Christian Lallard tried to make me do it as well. Releasing the figures weekly will give all of us a good chance to analyse them better than what we've had at present, which was a super stat Tuesday when there's been a huge wall, but even a mountain of figures that we've all had to try and get through. That was the point. That's why NHS performs will tell the story about the NHS performance in a way that will be more accessible to the public. Bob Doris reminded us of the fact that the SNP Government had ended Labour's hidden waiting lists. He also reminded us of the very good story that is to tell about mortality statistics and the reduction in that, particularly in Glasgow. Some of the Glasgow hospitals have performed very well indeed. Of course, the fact that we established the healthcare environment inspectorate established under this Government and making sure that that goes into hospitals. Yes, that can make for uncomfortable reading, but it is the right thing to do because if we don't know what the problems are, we're not able to address them. Rhoda Grant talked about a number of things. I want to pick her up on those. She talked about the issue of births in the sky. Yes, there have been issues. The pressures on the midwifery staffing due to illness have been difficult, and that has led to the service being suspended while those issues are resolved. It is important to know that the safety of mothers and babies was paramount, and I am sure that Rhoda Grant would not be suggesting that an unsafe service was provided. I know that the board is working very hard indeed to get that service back up and running. I would hope that Rhoda Grant would give her support in doing that. She talked about endoscopy in the sky. Of course, the new hospital will have new endoscopy services and facilities, but she failed to even welcome the announcement of the new hospital in her speech. I think that that proves my point about the lack of balance in the Labour party's narrative around the health service. Of course, there is another new hospital in Rhoda Grant's area in Avimone. Again, there is no mention of that whatsoever, and that does lead us to suspect that Labour has one narrative and it is a negative one, never a positive one. I think that you have been found out well and truly on that. Neil Bibby raised a lot of questions that I am sure he will appreciate would probably be the detail of which I will write to him around. What I would say about the Royal Alexandria hospital, though, and where he has a point, it is a hospital that is very tight and very constricted around the space, and we have to look at how we make sure that the patient flow within that hospital is improved. I can assure him that the team that is in there at the moment is looking at that very carefully indeed, but I will write to him with some of the detail on that. Gil Paterson reminded us of the very high levels of patient satisfaction, and that is something that we should welcome indeed. Christian Allard mentioned the visit that I made to Grampian on Monday. I met the area partnership forum and staff side, and I can tell the chamber that there is a culture of change in Grampian. The staff, while recognising that there was a road still to be travelled, spoke about a different culture, one of openness, and that staff were very much engaging in that process in Grampian. I am very optimistic about the progress that will be made in that health board area. Ann McTarger talked about the transport issues, and there are transport issues to be resolved at the new South Glasgow hospital. However, the health board is only part of that solution. The council is a major part of that solution, which Ann McTarger did not talk about. Again, it is that lack of balance when it comes to address issues that we absolutely have to address. Stuart McMillan asked about the cost of the resources to look at the statistical analysis on the website. We are supporting ISD to do that. Of course, if any support is required beyond our capability at the moment, we will look at that. Alex Rowley did come to see me about some of the local issues, and I hope that he found that a constructive meeting as I did. I think that the thing to remember in Fife is that the success going forward of integration also relies on Fife Council to play its part. From 1 April, both NHS Fife and Fife Council will be jointly responsible for many of those issues, and that is important to bear in mind. There has been a lot said this afternoon that some constructive points have been made, perhaps not much consensus, but perhaps because of the tone of the motion and the context of the motion. I am keen to bring debates to Parliament and to try to build a consensus, but that has to be a two-way process as well. It cannot just be from those benches. I would say again that Labour has to take a long, hard look at themselves after what has happened this week. If they are serious about being taken seriously on the NHS, they have to change their tone, because I can tell them that they are not being taken seriously, not least by the staff in the NHS. We see them as negative, carping and nothing positive to say about our health service. The one thing that has been very clear from this debate is that Labour has proven today that sorry is absolutely the hardest word to see. I now call on Dr Richard Simpson. Dr Simpson, you have until 4.43, almost 10 minutes, please. I will try to hurry up, Presiding Officer. In the last few months, we have seen a Government driven by the realisation that they really do need to concentrate on a deteriorating NHS, whose hard-working staff are really very stressed, as Jackson Carlaw said. Thanks to our staff, progress has undoubtedly been made. I say to the side that I did not get in on Christian Allard, but the NDP Audit Scotland simply calls another form of PPP, so I think that is something that you should be very careful about. However, planning well ahead is imperative, and as Anne Taggart said about the parking problem at the new southern general, this mirrors the problems that we had at the Royal Labor book, which were really severe. Nurses complained to me bitterly that they felt unsafe going home at night. They have had five years in planning the southern general, this should have been planned for, as indeed should the public transport, which has still not been approved. No, I will not at the moment make a little progress. Is there progress since 1999? Yes, of course. There has been progress under both Labour and SNP. The HGI, which many have referred to, and the HIS inspections of the elderly, are very welcome. The patient safety programme has made a big contribution, as Bob Doris said, to reducing mortality. I welcome all of these things. That is a programme that we started, and the SNP has continued to develop, and it is excellent. The staff partnership system, which Senator Robison referred to and is summing up, we initiated and has been continued by the SNP and has been applauded by the Kings Fund as one of the best bits of practice in working with staff. However, I have to say to the SNP that, if I had been making this speech in 2010, I might have been more lauditary. However, since 2011, many elements are going backwards. Multiple shocks, as Jackson Sarlow called them, are becoming more frequent in their nature and may not yet be quite a crisis, but it is getting there. Actually, Mark McMillan used the word crisis more than any of us this afternoon, although it was in a different context. Alex Rowley reminded us that it is not the staff that are a problem, but the Governments need to listen and not be in denial. One point of agreement with Annette Milne is that you cannot just look at one part of the system like GP out of ours, you need to look at the whole pathway. Now, there is a pattern in this Government's response to issue. The first is to blame Labour and blame us for raising the issues. The second is that the Government is becoming adept at playing the game called Whackamall, a game that I was not familiar with until my grandchildren told me about that. For those who are not aware of the game, this is one in which moles appear, popping up at random in a series of holes and have to be hit on the head with a mallet. There are two aspects of this game that apply to this Government. As soon as they identify a problem, they throw some money at it in the hope that it will disappear. A and E 50 million, GPs 40 million, Medicine Fund 40 million, delays discharges money and then they turn around looking for a prize and for all of us to admire their skill in whacking the mall, not at the moment, but I will later. The second part of this game, which applies here and is the subject of this day's debate, is the apparent random nature of the appearance of these moles. The Government sometimes seems astonished that they even deign to appear at all. The lack of information that they have portrayed is not, of course, entirely real as we have found. This aspect falls into three parts. The first is that the information that the Government has but has not actually given us. That applies to a number of issues. The second is that information once revealed requires action and then there is information that the Government doesn't have, doesn't really want to have and might provide a more unpalatable truth. Let's examine these in turn. Labour knew that the boards reported on a weekly basis on accident and emergency times. How did we know? Well, we asked the boards on an FOI and two boards, only two, were honest enough and open enough to provide us with the template of their reports weekly to the Government. Now it was only once it was uncovered, as Jim Hume said, that the Government has now agreed that they should publish the E&E figures—sorry, not the Government, the chief statistician. We also know that the same weekly return, however, also includes delayed discharges, because it was on the same template. I very much welcome what I think was the Cabinet Secretary's announcement today, without waiting for the chief statistician, that she will indeed publish this information since it is one of our highest priorities on delayed discharges. Then there are the published figures that sometimes appear quarterly, sometimes annually, sometimes even longer in arrears, but they had this information often long before the public. Let me illustrate. Problems such as Lanetshire hospital mortality record or the problems in Grampian. They say that once the statistics finally emerge, no, I wasn't able to get in on yourself, they say that once the published is finally published, they say, ah, look, we have acted, we sent in health improvement Scotland, and then they wring their hands and say that we deplore what happened and is it or is it not acceptable? Is it unacceptable? Yes, I will. Apart from the fact that the animal rights people know that they will be on Richard Simpson's back after his moll analogy, on the one hand Labour members come to this chamber time and time again demanding that we take action on various things, but then, Richard Simpson in his comment just now seemed to criticise the fact that we gather information in order to be able to take that action. I mean, surely it is right that we take action when issues arise. I thank the cabinet secretary for her intervention, but really, if she misses the point, what I'm saying is that that information was available to the Government a long time before it was available to the public. So I very much welcome the suggestion in the SNP press release that they will look timuously and now confirmed by the cabinet secretary at reporting on all material that they receive. Now can I ask her in the next 48 hours to publish a list of all the data that they receive so we can then judge that against her promise of openness and transparency? There are times when the Government hoped that perhaps we wouldn't notice such as in the waiting time scandal where the data showed such variation as to beggar belief, but they delayed and obfuscated when I raised it and acted only when forced to do so by brave and determined whistleblowers. Now, there are data which is never published and requires FOIs and the cancelled operation one was one of them. I raised that, I raised that FOI for one reason. Nurses approached me, a nurse approached me to say that one of her patients had his operation for an amputation cancelled within an hour of going to surgery. Now that may have been for clinical, it may have been for non-clinical reasons, but I asked members just to think for a minute. You are facing an operation of an amputation of a limb. You are prepared for surgery. Within one hour of going there, you are told no, you can't have that operation and you have to go home and wait for the next time you get an operation. So if it's clinical or non-clinical and I don't actually see quite what the difference is, it really is a problem. But now, but now, no, no, let me finish this bit, then I'll let you in. But if I may. But now, but now, what do we learn? What do we learn? The government in rebutting our interpretation of the figures that we got on FOI, in rebutting it, have actually produced all the figures for the last six weeks up to the middle of February. So they had all that data. We did not. Yes, you may groan and say, oh, but that's what this debate's about. It's about the adequate provision. It's about the revelation of information that the government had under their, had and did not publish. Now, there seems to be a failure very briefly. Well, Richard Simpson should understand there is a big difference between clinical and non-clinical reasons for our cancelling operations. The clinical reasons are because a doctor deems it to be so and to compare those statistics with English statistics that were only non-clinical reasons with absolutely a disgrace. Will you apologise for it? Richard Simpson. If the, if the cabinet secretary apologises for the fact that she's been hiding statistics. Now, a piece of a little bit of order, please. We turn to the Royal Alexander hospital, which Neil Bibby asked a series of pertinent questions on which I hope about. I can tell the cabinet secretary, I talked to the staff there and what they told me was that the consultants are having to act down to fill gaps in the middle grade rotors. That is unsustainable and was always unsustainable and it doesn't take putting in a support team to recognise it. The managers on the spot should have recognised it and recognised the pressure. If we'd had the figures on the A and E problems at R&H on a weekly basis, we would have actually raised the issue sooner. Now, the fundamental problem, which I want to finish on, cabinet secretary, is that we're in a situation where there doesn't seem to be a complete realisation in the Government's health department, that we've moved from a system in which you collect data and publish it in retrospective form to a situation in which we're actually in a new world of informatics in which there's real-time data. As Jenny Marra said, the NHS ambulance have recognised this. They upgrade their website every 15 minutes. NHS 24 are pretty good about publishing their information timidly as well, but we actually need to have a full review of what statistics are collected, how they're collected and when they're published. Obviously with caveats about some of them, but nevertheless information is needed. It's needed primarily by the clinicians to improve their outcomes. It's needed secondly by patients to see what is actually happening, because they're the ones that actually suffer when there are cancelled operations. Thirdly, we need it for the politicians so that we can hold the Government to account, but we are third in line on this. This is not about the Labour Party that's been attacked on this. This is about RSA raising issues that have been brought to us by patients, by staff and by the public. Therefore, I want to finish on a consensual note by saying that I welcome the fact that we are going to have published statistics, not just weekly, but the most public statistics ever. If we get that and we will hold the Government to account on that statement, then I welcome it. However, I have yet to see the proof of that, putting the hiding the delayed discharge stuff even when they announced to A&E is an indication that they really haven't yet got the message. I support Labour's motion. The next item of business is consideration of business motion 1, 2, 3, 3, 1. In the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau, sitting at a business programme, any member who wishes to speak against motion should press the request speak button now, and I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion number 1, 2, 3, 3, 1. Thank you. No member has asked to speak against the motion. Therefore, I now put the question to the chamber. The question is that motion number 1, 2, 3, 3, 1. In the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The next item of business is consideration of business motion 1, 2, 3, 3, 2. In the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau, sitting at a stage 2 timetable of the Community Government Scotland Bill, any member who wishes to speak against the motion should press the request speak button now, and I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion number 1, 2, 3, 3, 2. No member has asked to speak against the motion. Therefore, I now put the question to the chamber. The question is that motion number 1, 2, 3, 3, 2. In the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next item of business is consideration of four Parliamentary Bureau motions. I would ask Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion number 1, 2, 3, 3, 4 on referral of a bill, and motion number 1, 2, 3, 3, 5 and 1, 2, 3, 3, 6 on approval of SSIs. I would ask any member who wishes to speak against the motion to press the request speak button now, and I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move the motion. Patrick Harvie has indicated that he wishes to speak against the motion. Therefore, I now call on Patrick Harvie to speak up to three minutes, Mr Harvie. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I will try to be briefer than that. Back in 2003, when the regulatory reform bill, as it was then, acted as it is now, was being scrutinised, my colleague Alison Johnson was a member of the lead committee, the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, and consistently advanced the argument that to place a duty on what I have come to regard as the Government's central contradiction, sustainable economic growth, as central to the role of regulators, including environmental regulators, was inappropriate. A regulator's duty is to consider the purpose for which they have been charged with the duty of regulating, not to advance the Government's economic policy for it. Alison Johnson advanced that argument in relation to the legislation. Given that the Government has proceeded with this course of action, we advance the argument again in relation to the code of practice. The first version of this code was presented to the committee on 3 December last year, and having resumed my seat on the EET committee by that point, I was looking at the first version and actually welcoming it. I was all set, ready, geared and primed to congratulate Fergus Ewing for having understood some of the arguments that had been advanced in paragraph 9 of that first version of the code. It made clear the duties to have regard to the code in determining and applying general policies or principles do not apply to the exercise by a regulator or its staff of any specified regulatory function in individual cases. I was looking forward to the opportunity of congratulating the minister on understanding some of the arguments that had been advanced. I was so disappointed that he immediately withdrew it and promised to bring back a worse version. He has now done that, and the new version makes it clear that the code applies in exercising regulatory functions. Under questioning committee, it seemed clear that the intention was a complete reversal of what had been something that I would have welcomed in the first version of the code as presented back in December. For those reasons, Presiding Officer, and without rehearsing the whole argument that underpend the bell itself, the Greens will not be supporting the code of practice. I urge the Government to recognise that its own economic policy, whether I agree with it or not, should not be the central function of regulators. They have their own job to do and advancing the Government's economic policy is not it. Thank you. I know that Colin Fergus Ewing to respond up to three minutes minister. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Patrick Harvie is right that he has made those arguments before. He has made them on many previous occasions, so I suppose that this is a kind of equivalent of the parliamentary version of Groundhog Day, Presiding Officer, but let us cut straight to the chase. The definition of sustainable economic growth, which is contained in the code, is as follows. Building a dynamic and growing economy that will provide prosperity and opportunities for all while ensuring that future generations can enjoy a better quality of life, too. Whatever party we are in in this chamber, Presiding Officer, it does seem to me that we are all able to unite behind that as a fairly simple and desirable aim for society. Of course, economic growth is somewhat better than economic contraction, especially from the point of view of people who face losing their jobs at this current time, and as Minister for Business, sadly there are all too many businesses in my constituency and others where people will face the real threat of losing their job and redundancy. I have to say that if there is economic growth and that delivers opportunities for new work, new business and new employment, that creates opportunities for people to get back into work, to get the self-respective work and to look after their families properly. I make no apology in saying that the regulatory reform bill and the code, which we will pass, I hope today, Presiding Officer, with the support of all of the other parties that I believe were broadly in favour of the measures in this bill, will make a modest contribution. What it will not do and which Patrick Harvie failed to mention is that it will not supplant the primary duties of regulators. They are not supplanted by this legislation. The legislation makes it absolutely clear that that is so. This code was developed with and by regulators in business and subject to open public consultation. The correction to it—this is my last point, Presiding Officer—was made by the diligence of Nigel Donne and the members of the Delegated Powers Committee, who spotted that there was an error to the effect that the general duty set out in the bill was not to be applied in practice. Surely, if Parliament sets out a general duty, it would be utterly illogical then to have a code that said that that code should not—that code would—disapply the principle that Parliament had accepted. I would have thought that Mr Harvie, as a Democrat, would recognise that that would be a parliamentary absurdity. Thank you for the question. This motion will be put decision time to which we now come. There are eight questions to be put as a result of today's business. Can I remind members that, in relation to debate on protecting Scotland's communities, if the amendment in the name of Shono Robison is agreed, the amendment in the name of Jackson Carlaw falls? The first question then is amendment number 12325.3 in the name of Shono Robison, which seeks to amend motion number 12325 in the name of Jenny Marra on protecting Scotland's communities be agreed to. Are we all agreed? If Parliament is not agreed, we move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 12325.3 in the name of Shono Robison is as follows. Yes, 66. No, 35. There were 14 abstentions. The amendment is therefore agreed to and the amendment in the name of Jackson Carlaw falls. The next question then is amendment number 12325.1 in the name of Jim Hume, which seeks to amend motion number 12325 in the name of Jenny Marra on protecting Scotland's communities be agreed to. Are we all agreed? If Parliament is not agreed, we move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 12325.1 in the name of Jim Hume is as follows. Yes, 35. No, 66. There were 14 abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is at motion number 12325 in the name of Jenny Marra as amended on protecting Scotland's communities be agreed to. Are we all agreed? If Parliament is not agreed, we move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion number 12325 in the name of Jenny Marra as amended as as follows. Yes, 80. No, 35. There were no abstentions. The motion as amended is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 12334 in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick on referring off a bill be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 12335 in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick on approval for an SSI in the quality act 2010 be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 12336 in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick on approval for an SSI on the land and building transaction tax be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 12337 in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick on approval of an SSI on the Scottish regulator's strategic code of practice be agreed to. Are we all agreed? Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. Thank you. The result of the voter motion number 12337 in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick is as follows. Yes, 112. No, three. There were no abstentions. The motion is therefore agreed to. That concludes decision time. We now move to members' business. Members will leave in the chamber. Members should do so quickly and quietly.