TheParliament is supposed to be about the lived experiences of Scots. Five years ago, Scots elected a Scottish Government on a clear promise to make this a Covid recovery Parliament. Let us not forget that John Swinney was the Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery. But we did not get recovery, did we? Instead, the SNP Government lost its way and took Scotland backwards. On almost every measure, things are now worse than they were five years ago. Waiting times are worse, homelessness numbers are worse, crime is up, police officer numbers are down and educational attainment is poorer. In 2021, John Swinney was the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills and promised that we would have 3,500 extra teachers. Instead, we have 810 fewer teachers compared with 2021. John Swinney and the SNP have failed. After 20 years, more of the same will not cut it, will it?

In the course of the Government’s term of office, we have taken steps to improve the lives of people in Scotland, whether that is in delivering a stronger economy, which has been delivered against the tides of austerity and the inflation surge in 2022, or in the health service, where waiting times have come down for eight months in a row as a consequence of the Government’s actions. In education, levels of attainment in our schools are rising and the poverty-related attainment gap is narrowing. The SNP Government is delivering on the priorities of the people of Scotland. We are determined to serve the people of Scotland, and we are determined to improve the lives of the people of Scotland.

I just read out the facts in the record of failure. Let us not forget that John Swinney was the education secretary who marked down working-class kids during the pandemic. When he did that, he told teachers that he did not trust their judgment and young people that he did not believe in their ability.

However, it is not just in the classrooms that he is failing our young people. The number of homeless children in 2021 was 7,500. Today, the figure stands at more than 10,000—there are 10,000 children without a home to call their own on the SNP’s watch. There are starker and more serious failures, too. The number of Scots who are sleeping rough on our streets has increased by 66 per cent since 2021, and almost 5,000 of our fellow Scots have lost their lives since 2021 to a drug deaths crisis that the SNP said was a national emergency. Will John Swinney be honest and accept that that is not a record of success but a record of failure that he should be apologising for?

The Government has to wrestle with a whole number of different challenges. Since 2021, we have had to wrestle with the significant levels of inflation that have arisen as a consequence of the invasion of Ukraine and all that flowed from that. Despite that, the Scottish Government is building more houses per head of population than are being built in any other part of the United Kingdom, so as to provide action on homelessness. The Government has taken action to invest more than £120 million in the past two years on ensuring that void accommodation is put back into use, so that thousands of families can get back into accommodation as a consequence of our actions. That is a Government acting to address the issues that are faced by people in Scotland and ensuring that we deliver better opportunities and better prospects for the people of our country.

What Scots will hear from that is that John Swinney thinks that 10,000 homeless children is a measure of the Government’s success, rather than a measure of its failure.

I started my public service as a national health service dentist, and fixing our NHS is personal to me. The SNP promised an NHS recovery but failed. At the election in 2021, 549,000 Scots were on an NHS waiting list. The figure is now 786,000. In 2021, around 1,200 Scots were waiting more than two years for treatment. Today, that figure is—shamefully—almost 6,400.

The SNP has had 20 years in power. If it knew how to fix the problems in our NHS, our schools and more, it would have done it by now. That is why Scotland needs change and a new Government that will fix the SNP’s mess, get the basics right and build a better future for our country, Scotland.

They don’t want you.

Let us hear one another.

Five years ago, the SNP promised recovery and failed. Is it not the case that the next five years must be about Scotland recovering from John Swinney and the failing SNP?

One of the things that Anas Sarwar failed to mention in his commentary about the national health service is that, since 2021, we have had the Covid pandemic, which created significant disruption to our national health service. What is the Government doing about that? The Government is ensuring that waits of over a year have decreased for eight consecutive months across new out-patient and in-patient day cases. New out-patient waits of more than a year have more than halved. In 80 per cent of disciplines in the national health service, there are no waiting times whatever beyond 52 weeks. That is the Government taking action to improve the circumstances in the national health service.

Anas Sarwar talked about a potential change of Government. People in Scotland need to be really wary about all of this. Anas Sarwar stood here a couple of years ago and argued for a change of Government in the United Kingdom. We got a change of Government, but what else did we get? We got the increase in employer national insurance contributions, which is damaging the economy, and we got the actions that have been taken to remove winter fuel payments; we have had failure after failure from the UK Government. Now, Anas Sarwar turns round and says that everybody was foolish to vote for that man Keir Starmer, whom he had argued that we should all vote for. That tells us that Mr Sarwar is a man of poor judgment that the people of Scotland should not listen to and will not listen to on 7 May.