This morning, the UK Statistics Authority reprimanded the First Minister for the misuse of statistics in response to my question on national health service waiting times at last week’s First Minister’s question time. The letter states:

“Waiting times are a major concern to patients and their families. The statistics informing debates about them must therefore be trustworthy, of suitable quality and useful. We are therefore extremely disappointed that it has been necessary for us to intervene in this way.”

This is the second time that this has happened recently. Will the First Minister take the opportunity to apologise to the chamber and to the country for misusing statistics in this way?

I will, as the Government always will, reflect carefully on anything that the Office for Statistics Regulation says. The statistics that I used were accurate and, as I understand it, are available to anybody on request and will be published by ISD Scotland. It is not the Scottish Government that decides what statistics ISD publish or do not publish; ISD decides that. I hope that we can have as much transparency and as many comprehensive statistics as possible, because that would demonstrate that the NHS is, on so many different measures, the best-performing NHS anywhere in the UK.