First Minister’s Question Time – in the Scottish Parliament at on 19 September 2024.
Yesterday, I met the chief executive of the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland to discuss the condition of NHS Tayside’s Strathmartine learning disability unit. In the hour before our meeting, an overdue inspection report on the unit was released. The Dickensian conditions that it describes include rats falling from ceilings, mould on walls, rainwater pouring through cracks, insect infestations and the stench of urine throughout.
As far back as 2017, a Mental Welfare Commission report called for a decision “as soon as possible”. More reports saying the same followed in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024. David Strang’s devastating reviews of mental welfare in Tayside have sat on Government shelves for four years. Why does nothing ever, ever change?
I am very familiar with the issue, because I have constituents who are supported by the Strathmartine centre, and, as Mr Marra well knows, I have engaged personally and directly on the question in my constituency capacity. Mr Marra’s characterisation of the response to the report by David Strang is not an appropriate one. Update reports have been given to local members of Parliament about the steps that are being taken to improve mental health services in the Tayside area as a consequence of Mr Strang’s report.
As I set out in my response to Miles Briggs on the issue of capital investment in Edinburgh, there are capital challenges in the health service. There are existing plans to relocate to a single site for learning disability services at Moray royal hospital in Perth, in my constituency, and I look to NHS Tayside to advance those proposals as sustainably as it can in the current financial context. It is not fair for Mr Marra to characterise the report and the response in the fashion that he has.