I thank all staff who are employed in the NHS. We know that they work incredibly hard to care for us, but they are being let down by the Scottish National Party Government.

It has been two years and seven months since Humza Yousaf published the Scottish Government’s NHS recovery plan. The First Minister at the time, Nicola Sturgeon, said:

“This plan will drive the recovery of our NHS—not just to its pre-pandemic level, but beyond.”

That was in August 2021.

Since then, we have had a new First Minister—who is, of course, a former health secretary—and we are on to our third health secretary. They all committed to the recovery plan. They promised to build 10 national treatment centres to provide an additional 55,500 procedures per year by 2025-26. They promised to increase the number of diagnostic procedures by 78,000 in 2022-23. They promised to deliver 800 additional general practitioners by 2027 and to give every general practice access to a link worker.

The truth is that those promises have been broken. Only three national treatment centres are up and running, with the rest being delayed and over budget. The number of people on diagnostic waiting lists is up by 55,000 since 2020. Only 271 whole-time equivalent GPs have been hired in the past six years, and work has not even started on providing much-needed link workers in general practices.

Why is that important? Since the SNP promised Scots that it could fix the crisis in our NHS, the number of people on a waiting list has grown by almost 20 per cent, from 608,000 to 825,000. Let us picture the scale of that for a second—that is enough people to fill Murrayfield stadium not just twice or four times over, but 12 times over. Those are real people who are living in pain and discomfort, and with anxiety and uncertainty about when they will get the treatment that they need. The Scottish Government can spin it in any way that it wants—and we know that it will try—but the reality is that it has fundamentally failed people right across the country.

Here are some facts that might be uncomfortable for members on the Government benches. Ten years ago, just over 800 people on an in-patient waiting list still had not been seen after 12 weeks. In 2023, that figure was more than 101,000, which represents a 125-fold increase. That is not the only thing going up. Since 2013, the number of people on an out-patient waiting list has doubled; the number of people on an in-patient waiting list has more than doubled; the number of people waiting longer than the 31-day target for a cancer referral has more than tripled; there has been a seven-fold rise in the number of people waiting longer than the 62-day target for a cancer referral; and there has been a 27-fold rise in the number of people waiting for over 12 weeks for a referral for out-patient care.

Here are some more facts about accident and emergency departments. In 2023, more than 7,300 Scots waited more than a day in A and E, and a freedom of information request that we lodged revealed that patients waited in A and E for as long as 122 hours. That is almost five days waiting to be seen in accident and emergency.

In January this year, the number of people stranded in A and E for over eight hours soared to more than 17,800, and the number who waited for over half a day rose to more than 8,800. That is the highest number on record. In the same month, 57,860 days were spent in hospital by people whose discharge was delayed. That was higher than the number at the same point in 2023. The SNP promised to end delayed discharge way back in 2015.

The reason why that is serious is that the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has calculated that there will be an excess death for every one in 72 patients who spend between eight and 12 hours in an emergency department. Based on those figures, that equates to up to 2,000 excess deaths last year alone. That is heartbreaking because it is preventable.

Broken promises matter, because the failure to clear the waiting lists has real-life consequences. That is the legacy of the SNP Government. It has even broken its own statutory 12-week treatment time guarantee 680,000 times since it introduced it and 320,000 times before the pandemic itself. However, it still denies any responsibility.

What about the long waits? It was Humza Yousaf who promised to eradicate two-year waits by September 2022, I think. That date has come and gone, and we still have 7,170 Scots who have waited two years for treatment. That is 25 times more than the 282 patients who have been waiting that long in England. That is utterly shameful.

Please do not insult our intelligence by trotting out the same old excuses. Health is devolved. The SNP has been in charge for 17 years. It must tell the people of Scotland—the people whom it has failed—what its plan is now. It must tell them what it will do to stop the delays to the new national treatment centres. They are delayed in Ayrshire and Arran, in Grampian, in Lanarkshire, in Lothian and in Tayside. It must tell them where the £300 million for waiting lists that was announced last year will come from, because it is not in the budget.

The SNP is out of time and out of ideas. When it comes to the NHS, the SNP’s record is a blizzard of rhetoric to hide a litany of deadly failures.