SNP must spend every penny of Scotland's share of Rishi Sunak's spending boost on NHS – Christine Jardine

With one in every seven Scots on an NHS waiting list, health spending must be a priority

It should be the 75th birthday present we had all hoped the UK Government would unveil for the NHS. The historic £2.4 billion injection announced by Rishi Sunak to boost the workforce should amount to several hundred million in consequential funding for the NHS in Scotland.

In real terms, of course, it is a drop in the ocean compared to the £400 million originally invested in establishing that much loved, free-at-the-point-of-use service to which so many of us owe our own or a loved one’s life. But whether the promised “biggest ever expansion in workforce training in the NHS’s history” will be the right approach to tackle the ever-increasing and damaging shortfall of staff in the service is open to debate. In Scotland, there is also the question of how our Barnett Formula consequentials might be spent, with no guarantee that the SNP/Green Holyrood administration will ringfence them for our NHS at all.

The funds announced by Rishi Sunak on Friday have already taken a year longer to announce than was originally planned. Too late for the millions across the country languishing on NHS waiting lists or struggling to get an appointment with their GP. And it will, say critics, take too long to have an impact with no immediate improvement in the situation facing staff and patients.

For England, there is to be a 15-year plan to fill staff shortages by providing more university places for medical and nursing students, together with a greater emphasis on apprenticeships, including the first-such scheme for doctors. There will also be a consultation on whether five-year medical degrees could be shortened by a year.

In their immediate reactions, opposition politicians offered a guarded welcome, with the Labour party going as far as to say that it looked “remarkably like” their own plans for the NHS. But in Scotland, the government seemed slow to respond with meaningful pointers as to what any cash boost would be used for here, even though there are plenty of opportunities to put it to good use and the decisions on how to invest it will be theirs.

Currently one in every seven Scots is on a waiting list and any extra cash needs immediately to go towards tackling the worst-ever cancer treatment waiting times that threaten lives. There are also glaring gaps in mental health provision. And there are the worst-ever levels of delayed discharges with patients trapped in hospital while their local authorities scramble around trying to pull together a care package for them.

In Edinburgh alone, the council recently had to approve around £30 million of cuts in health and social care. Whatever Humza Yousaf and his merry band decide to do, they need to be aware that their UK Government counterparts have set them a challenge.

Our experience of the past few years, the most difficult, life-threatening of times, has surely reinforced public respect for those working within our health and care sectors. For the Scottish Government to fail to spend every penny received on improving the service for the next 75 years would be difficult to forgive.

Christine Jardine is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West