JOHN Swinney has said Labour “betrayed” pensioners with cuts to winter heating support payments as he was accused of overseeing a decline in the Scottish NHS.
The First Minister clashed with Anas Sarwar over the findings of an expert study which found that the performance of Scotland’s NHS was still declining after Covid while England’s was improving.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said that while “almost all measures of NHS performance have worsened over the last year” in Scotland, “most measures” in England had improved.
Sarwar said: “The IFS make the point [that] we had disproportionately higher spending here in Scotland and we have more staff – but we have poorer performance.
"That points to not staff being wrong, not resources being wrong, but a failure of leadership and a failure of government.
“Because the uncomfortable reality for John Swinney is that no public service in Scotland is safe from SNP incompetence.”
Swinney hit back after Sarwar said that Scotland needed a “new direction”, claiming that pensioners had been “betrayed” by Labour’s promise of change at the General Election.
The First Minister said: “If Mr Sarwar believes that the solution to all of our problems in Scotland is the election of a Labour government, I would ask him to go and have a conversation with pensioners in Scotland today.
NEW: John Swinney has accused the Labour party of 'betraying' pensioners across Scotland The First Minister recommended Anas Sarwar 'go and have a conversation with pensioners in Scotland today' pic.twitter.com/piItjnqORE
— The National (@ScotNational) November 28, 2024
“Because in the first few months of a Labour Government, pensioners in this country have been betrayed by the Labour Government, who promised change and all they did was slash the financial support for pensioners in our country by cutting the Winter Fuel Payments.
“If that’s what change means, Scotland doesn’t need change, it needs progress under an SNP Government.”
The clash came before an expected announcement that the Scottish Government would reinstate winter heating support payments slashed by Westminster.
It is not expected that the Scottish Government will restore the universal Winter Fuel Payments, which were scrapped by Labour earlier this year in favour of a means-tested scheme for only the poorest pensioners.
Scottish Labour had previously been intending to force a vote on the issue, calling on the SNP to mitigate UK Labour’s cuts.
