 The next item of business is consideration of business motion 11400, in the name of Delford's Patrick on behalf of the parliamentary bureau, setting out a timetable for the stage three consideration of the Historic Environment Scotland Bill. Any member who wishes to speak against the motion should press a request speak button now, and I call on Delford's Patrick to move motion number 11400. 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 11400, in the name of Delford's Patrick, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is the effort agreed to. We now move to topical questions. Question number 1, Jim Hulme. Thank you. To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports that patients are being put at risk by its failure to adequately fund GPs. Alex Neil. Presiding Officer, under the tenure of this Government, we have increased the Scottish Government's contribution to primary medical services by 10 per cent. Working with health boards, we are ensuring that there is now more money than ever being invested into local GP services. The investment in primary care has seen the number of GPs in Scotland increased by 5.7 per cent under this Government. This year, we have ensured that a GP pay increase and agreed a new three-year GP contract, which frees up GPs to spend more time with their patients by reducing bureaucracy. However, I believe that we can go further, and that is why today I have announced the new £40 million primary care development fund that will allow our GPs and primary care professionals to evolve our health service to meet the changing needs of the people of Scotland. The new fund aims to empower GPs to develop initiatives that address challenges in workload, tackle health inequalities and deprive in rural areas, and meet the changing needs of the people of Scotland. I thank the cabinet secretary for that reply, and I welcome the announcement earlier today that £40 million is to be made available for GPs in rural and deprived areas, whether it is new money or not. The sudden announcement highlights the wisdom and foresight of yourself to have topical questions every week if the result is a rapid alteration in policy. However, the reality is that a number of whole-time equivalent GPs in posts at the end of January 2013 is just 35 higher than the 2009 survey number. Organisations involved in the sector have warned that boosting services will require much more than a one-off £40 million. What is the cabinet secretary's long-term plan to ensure that we have an adequate number of GPs in Scotland so that we can ensure that at a quarter of patients that can't get appointments within a week can? Flattery, we will get you everywhere, Mr Hume. Can I disappoint you, Presiding Officer, because I did tell the Royal College last week that I would be making this announcement. This is part of a wider strategy in primary care. We have now negotiated a three-year contract with GPs in Scotland to get stability into the system. We have substantially reduced the bureaucratic requirements on them to free up time to be with their patients. I have instructed every health board in Scotland, the territorial board, to increase the funding for GP in primary care this year and next year, and I will continue to do so until we have the proper level of funding required. There is a national shortage of GPs, partly because of the feminisation of the workforce leading to much more part-time working, partly because of the work-life balance, which is making it more difficult to attract GPs into the profession—people into the profession of GP—and partly because there are particular challenges in rural and remote and island communities where we have extreme difficulty on recruitment and retention. We are working across a wide range of areas, with a wide range of initiatives, with all the key stakeholders to address all those issues. However, I recognise that there are challenges, but we are facing up to those challenges, and I believe that we are putting the resources in place to successfully face up to those challenges. In addition to the conventional practice nursing role, advanced nurse practitioners who can improve access to GP services—this already happens in many parts of Scotland where nurses with advanced qualifications can diagnose and prescribe medication for a wide range of long-term conditions—is the Scottish Government going to put in place resources and support to develop more roles like that so that the whole team can provide access to healthcare as part of a long-term approach to workforce planning rather than more stop-gap measures? I have been very impressed by what is called the NUCA system in Alaska, where it has completely redesigned GP services. It recognised that something like 30 per cent of the people who are seeing GPs—only 30 per cent—really needed to see the GP. The other 70 per cent would be better dealt with by a clinical psychologist, a podiatrist, an advanced nurse practitioner or whatever. Over the past few years, they have redesigned their primary care services, and as a result of that, they have dramatically reduced the incidence and the level of hospitalisation and got a much more efficient system than they had before. I believe that there is a lot of lessons that we can learn. We have already run a pilot of this project in Fife successfully, and a GP practice is going to adopt this model in Edinburgh, and it is being officially opened on Friday. I will see if I can get Mr Human invitation. In welcoming the new £40 million primary care development fund, can the cabinet secretary tell me how much has been transferred from the performance-related pay system co-off to co-practice funding in the last two years, and whether that transfer has had a beneficial impact on how much time GPs have when treating their patients? Over 2013-14 and 2014-15, the co-off, which is the framework for the GP contract, was reduced by a total of 341 points to a total of 659 points, moving £47 million total funding of GP income into co-funding and out of performance-related pay. That was negotiated with the Scottish General Practitioners Committee, who agreed that that would help reduce the bureaucratic burden on GPs, freeing up GPs to spend more time with patients. Can I compliment the cabinet secretary on the general direction of travel? I think that he would agree with me that the first step is recognising the challenges that we face. For example, the fact that in the north-east of England, as opposed to the UK as a whole, there are more full-time equivalent GPs than there are in Scotland. That is reflected in some of the Nuffield report that 74 practices in Lothian have closed to new registration. That is actually occurring in other health boards as well. In Millport and Drummond, to take just two examples, we are unable to recruit GPs as a consequence of the dispensing changes that I know that we are trying to address now, but it is difficult. Locums are really difficult to obtain, which breaks the pressure back on partners in the practice. I accept his long-term vision and I understand the Alaska concept, but that will not change things overnight. How does he see the current local development plans, which he has seen and I have not been able to see, actually affecting general practice this year and next year? As I have said, under the LDP guidance for this year and next year, I have instructed the boards to put additional resources into GP practices. I think that what those GPs will do is buy in particular services that they require. For example, as I mentioned at the committee meeting this morning, in the deep end practices, the addition of a link worker into the deep end practice is making a very substantial difference. In those practices where they are not in a deep end situation but where they have got an above-average percentage of patients who are elderly or very elderly, it would be a different type of use of the money. However, I am quite happy to let the GPs make the decision about how they need to spend those resources. As long as they are in return for putting the resources in, we get an improvement in the ability to service their patients, in terms of getting appointments quicker and all the other things that we all want to see. I do not want to just write a blank check and not get something in return. I want to make sure that we are going to get improved performance and quality in return for the money that we are putting in. Recruitment and retention have a recurring problem in general practice. The main reason that I supported the 2004 contract was because the young GPs were not coming in because of night work. I was happy to support what happened then. Given that there is currently the same sort of problem going on in recruiting and retaining within general practice, has the minister got any thoughts on incentives, particularly incentives to encourage young medical graduates to go in? I know that he has told the health committee today the need for perhaps more medical graduates, but those medical graduates need to be guided once they do qualify, and we would have plans to attract them into general practice. From the work that we have done, it is not a financial incentive that really is the issue, as I am sure that Mrs Millan would agree. It is more about the work-life balance. Of course, it is a kind of carton-horse situation. If we had more GPs working in each practice, each GP would need to work fewer hours. If they work fewer hours, it would be easier to attract more GPs into the practice or into the profession. I think that it is putting resources in. Jim Hume was absolutely right when he said that, given the shortage of GPs, and that a lot of the people that the GPs are seeing could be more appropriately treated by an allied health professional or an advanced nurse practitioner, we need to get into a system that we should be able to do sooner rather than later in each GP practice, where we triage patients to make sure that they actually go to the right person, and the right person is not necessarily always a GP. I believe that, if we did that much more extensively, it would take a lot of the pressure out of GPs, and if we managed to do that, I think that the work-life balance would improve, and therefore the image of the profession and the ability to recruit and retain GPs would improve as well. To ask the Scottish Government how the decision to hold a vote in the future of the European arrest warrant before 20 November could impact on justice in Scotland. As I have already told the chamber, I very much regret that the UK Government saw fit with no pretence of consultation to put our participation in the European arrest warrant system at risk. We hope that the UK Government will win the vote and succeed in opting back in. If not, there has been uniform concern across the Crown Office, defence lawyers and Police Scotland at the loss of an instrument that has seen hundreds of individuals, many suspected of serious crimes, returned to Scotland from other member states or to other member states from Scotland to face justice. I thank the cabinet secretary for that reply, and I absolutely agree in the fact that it would be very detrimental and dangerous if the UK Government does not opt into the European arrest warrant. I wonder whether he could further explain to me exactly what type of limbo Scotland will be in if it does throughout the vote on 20 November. Does he agree with me that to hold this vote on such an important issue just before the Rochester by-election has more to do with political manoeuvring than what is best for the people of Scotland and the people in the rest of the UK as well? I do, and I think that this is not just the position of the Scottish Government, it is the position of prosecutors, defence lawyers, rights campaigners and Police, not only in Scotland but throughout the UK. The European arrest warrant has served us well, it has brought people to justice in this country, some charged with the most heinous crimes. I am very grateful to the authorities, whether in Slovakia or Poland, who have assisted. Equally, as I said in answer to the other question, we have also supported returning those to justice elsewhere, so I think that this is political manoeuvring by the coalition Government down south that is threatening what has worked well to serve justice not only in Scotland, but indeed within the European Union. I thank the cabinet secretary and that was one of the reasons I raised the further question. Obviously, we know that the rest of Europe is supportive of it, and have been lobbying Westminster to support it. The worry that we have in this Parliament is that, if they do not make a decision in November, we will be left with this limbo and take a decision later on, but I think that the cabinet secretary also says that it is political posturing when there is this by-election on in Rochester, which the Conservatives are obviously contending against UKIP. There might have been a question here, cabinet secretary. I think that some of the things about legislatives dating in haste and repenting at leisure, I think that this was one of the initial matters that had not been given any consideration to by the Conservative administration. I have spoken to numerous ministers over the time, they are going to consider all difficulties and to a great extent to try and resolve matters of their own volition. I am hopeful that not only have we managed to sort things out, but they will win the vote. If it were not to occur, I think that the interests of justice in Scotland would be the worst for it, as would indeed the interests of the justice throughout the European Union. As I said before, it is simply political posturing, and it is damaging not only to those who work within the justice system, but it is also damaging to all of us in our society who wish to ensure that justice is done. Roderick Campbell Cabinet secretary, I was fortunate to be able to attend the Human Trafficking Summit on 17 October, in which representatives of the prosecuting authorities were not only from Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but the Republic of Ireland. During that summit, there was unanimity amongst the prosecutors in the United Kingdom as to the importance of the European arrest warrant in relation to human trafficking. Does the cabinet secretary accept that point? Absolutely. It is a valid point. Human trafficking is a crime that, by its very definition, does not know or accept boundaries or jurisdictions. We know in Scotland that many people being trafficked are coming in from countries within the European Union. That is a matter that we have been briefed on by Police Scotland. I can fully understand the point that Mr Campbell is making and the point that was quite clear at that meeting, seeking to tackle that dreadful crime that the European arrest warrant has served us well, is a threat and does ensure that justice can be done wherever possible. Thank you. That ends Topical Questions. We now move to the next item of business, which is a state sleeper seedings on the