Devolution in Scotland

Debate between Scott Arthur and Melanie Ward

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Melanie Ward]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about something we see too frequently across Scotland: our people being forced to opt in to private healthcare because they cannot get treatment under the SNP’s NHS. That is completely unacceptable. I know that similar waits exist for assessments for autism and for mental health support. There is a crisis across Fife and the Scottish Government are refusing to give NHS Fife the support needed to try to make a difference.

The problems do not just exist in our health system; sadly, they also exist in our education system. Our educational outcomes in Scotland worsened this year, with the gap in attainment between the richest and poorest students growing, including in Fife; that happened after Nicola Sturgeon said that eradicating that attainment gap was the priority on which she wanted her record as First Minister to be judged. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) said earlier, Scottish Government failure on the targets they set for themselves is a hallmark of their time in office. The same Nicola Sturgeon proclaims her love of literature at book festivals, yet she was part of successive Governments who have presided over the closure of almost 100 libraries in Scotland.

On skills, we saw the UK Government having to step in recently to save a welding skills centre because the SNP Government refused to do so. The SNP Government’s indifference and often opposition to the highly skilled, highly paid jobs that the defence industry provides across Scotland and in constituencies such as mine has meant young workers missing out on the opportunity of a secure, highly paid job. It is also deeply irresponsible at such a dangerous time in the world, with Russian aggression in Europe right on our doorstep.

All those cuts stack up, while the bill to the taxpayer for SNP waste becomes ever more eye-watering: nearly £1 billion spent on Barlinnie prison, almost double the original cost; more than £400 million or four times the original estimate spent on two ferries, with one ferry still not in service eight years later; and let us not forget the costly shambles that was the deposit return scheme, flunked by the SNP and the Greens and described by the SNP’s leader in Westminster, the right hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), as a “self-inflicted wound”.

The purpose of devolution is supposed to be to take action in Scotland on Scotland’s problems, and to help to make our nation the best it can be. Yet too often that is not the reality under this Scottish Government, as a couple of examples from my own constituency show. At the peak of summer this year, when many businesses in Kinghorn and Burntisland were looking forward to making the most of tourism season, because we are blessed by beautiful beaches, the beaches were closed because sewage spills made the water unsafe to swim. Some of my constituents became physically sick because they had swum among sewage, yet the chief executive of publicly owned Scottish Water said over the summer that the concerns of my constituents “should not be overblown”. This issue has a real social and economic impact on people in my constituency, not to mention a health impact. It is the direct result of the SNP’s failure to invest in our sewerage network and in regular water-quality monitoring.

I wrote to the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy in August and received a response that began with a comparison between Scottish and English bathing waters. We are familiar with that: if we raise a problem in Scotland, we hear, “Well, it is worse in England.” Even if that were true, that is exactly why this Labour Government are taking tough measures to crack down on polluting water companies. Yet water quality is another devolved issue, creating significant problems that the SNP Scottish Government seem completely disinterested in solving.

[Dr Arthur]

My hon. Friend represents my home town, so it is always great to hear what is happening there. The UK Government inherited an awful situation from the Conservatives on water quality in rivers—that is beyond doubt—but in the UK we know how much sewage goes from sewerage systems into rivers. In my constituency, I have had dog owners concerned about what their dogs are eating on river banks, if I can put it politely. When I contacted Scottish Water, it could not even tell me the volume of sewage going into the rivers. Does she agree that this whole situation is unacceptable and that we have to discuss it more?

[Melanie Ward]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The experience of dog owners in his seat has also been raised with me locally. In Kinghorn, some of my residents were promised action from Scottish Water five years ago, and nothing has happened. There is no justifiable explanation for that.

Another serious example is that of antisocial behaviour. Across Fife, this seems to be a growing problem. Just last week, some of my constituents were left terrified by appalling disorder involving up to 50 young people in Cowdenbeath. A police officer was assaulted, and residents in Cowdenbeath have said that they are scared to go out at night. I know my local police are doing their best to get on top of the issue and have a plan to try to deal with disorder that might take place over the Hallowe’en period, which residents are worried about. I have raised the issue with the local police inspector and discussed it with him, but the disorder was not an isolated incident. Surely it cannot be just a coincidence that this comes as police numbers across Scotland last year fell to their lowest since 2008. It is increasingly clear that more devolved action is needed in Scotland to tackle the problem of antisocial behaviour, because it makes lives miserable. We have to ask why it is not being taken seriously and why more is not being done about it by the Scottish Government.

I must say something about the number of tragic drug deaths in Scotland, which last year was the highest in Europe for the seventh year in a row. The National Records of Scotland has said that the total number of people dying from drug misuse in Scotland was more than 10,000 over the past decade. Drug deaths in Fife last year were almost double what they were in 2010, each one of them a tragic waste of life.

I has a meeting recently with some of the residents of Linktown in Kirkcaldy, who have a particular problem with that issue. Residents are deeply worried; they told me about families in which mothers had had four children, but only one child now remained alive because of the scale of drug deaths and the problem that we have. That is one example of why it is so frustrating to hear the SNP continuing to chunter on about independence and trying to distract from the very real problems across our communities, rather than getting on and solving them.

We were told that the referendum on Scottish independence was a once-in-a-generation referendum, and the Scottish people gave their verdict very clearly. There are so many issues that the SNP’s mismanagement, neglect and under-investment have caused over the last almost two decades, yet the SNP continues to show almost no interest in fixing them and tackling the problems that it already has the powers to solve. It is long past time that the SNP took devolution seriously and used it to improve the lives of our people.