One in seven Scots is currently on a waiting list, and senior clinicians have warned that the waiting times statistics that are published on nhsinform.scot are both inaccurate and misleading. I wrote to the UK Statistics Authority in October last year; it agreed and asked the Scottish Government to make changes. Six months later, very little has changed. Clinicians are still up in arms about the stats being skewed and the Scottish Government continues to use median waiting times and to mix emergency and elective care.

Will the First Minister now stop pulling the wool over people’s eyes and rectify that misleading data? Can he tell us whether he published the stats while knowing about the criticism of their flaws?