St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs

Debate between Johanna Baxter and David Mundell

Thursday 11th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[David Mundell]

As Members across the Chamber know, this is a well-used SNP tactic of constant comparison with other places, rather than focusing on the SNP Government’s delivery compared with their promises. It is clear that there is a huge discrepancy between what has been promised by the Scottish Government and what has been delivered.

[Johanna Baxter (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)]

Is it not the case that there are more people waiting more than two years in individual health boards in Scotland than in the whole of England? Does the right hon. Member agree that that is a disgrace of the Scottish Government?

[David Mundell]

I do. What the hon. Lady points to is the shuffling of figures that we have just seen, so that the best figures are presented, but those 86,000 people I mentioned who have been on waiting lists for more than a year are erased from the debate. It is all about smoke and mirrors.

Analysis of this astonishing increase in waiting times by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine found that it has likely contributed to more than 1,000 needless deaths, despite the best efforts of frontline staff who have been failed by the SNP’s inaction. And what of the strain on those hard-working NHS workers? Last year, data revealed that NHS frontline staff were forced to cover understaffed shifts on 348,675 occasions. That is hundreds of thousands of times when there were simply not enough staff on hospital wards and in other care settings to meet Scotland’s healthcare needs. A recent report by the Royal College of Nursing Scotland warned that over the year to May 2025,

“at no point has NHS Scotland employed the number of nursing staff needed to deliver safe and effective care.”

The warning signs have been there for years, but the Scottish Government have failed to act on workforce planning, and it is patients and health service workers who are paying the price of that failure.

Of course, the healthcare crisis in Scotland is not restricted to our hospitals. Anyone who represents a rural constituency like mine will be acutely aware of the often severe pressure on GP services, where face-to-face appointments can be difficult to obtain, and that is to say nothing of the near impossible job of getting registered with an NHS dentist. In Dumfries and Galloway, which has one of the worst rates of NHS dental registration, more than 40% of residents are not registered with a dentist. That is not because they do not want to be, but because practices are not taking on new patients, and thousands of existing patients have been deregistered.