Nicola Sturgeon refuses to sack Health Minister over 'failure to take NHS Tayside warnings seriously'

Nicola Sturgeon has refused to sack her embattled Health Minister after Scotland’s public spending watchdog said warnings about a scandal-hit health board’s financial crisis were not taken “seriously.”

The First Minister said she would continue to support Shona Robison despite Caroline Gardner, the Auditor General for Scotland, stating there was a "significant question" why the warnings about NHS Tayside were not heeded.

But Richard Leonard, the Scottish Labour leader, said the First Minister must "face up to the fact that the time has come for her Health Secretary to go".

He said NHS Tayside had been caught “raiding charity funds to pay the bills” and “fiddling the accounts” under the nose of Ms Robison, who is a Dundee MSP.

In a brutal session of First Minister’s Questions for the Health Minister, Ms Sturgeon faced a series of questions about problems in Scotland’s NHS, with even SNP backbenchers highlighting cuts and closures.

NHS Tayside has been propped up by more than £45 million of “brokerage” loans in recent years but it emerged last week that it had still dipped into its endowment fund when faced with a deficit in 2014. The fund is made up of donations from the public or bequests in wills.

To do this the health board had to temporarily suspend its constitution, as the money was going to retrospectively fund projects already approved by the board.

Ms Gardner said auditors had flagged that "as being something which was an unusual transaction which played into the growing picture of financial pressures at NHS Tayside".

She told Holyrood’s public audit committee: "There is a significant question about why, throughout the NHS system, warnings from auditors are not being taken seriously. The reason why is something you would need to ask of Scottish Government and of the board itself.

"In NHS Tayside these warnings have been sounded since 2013/14 very clearly".

Ms Gardner also expressed concerns about Ms Robison’s decision to parachute in Malcolm Wright as the board’s new interim chief executive. He already heads up NHS Grampian and she raised fears he would be overstretched.

Mr Leonard said: “The situation at NHS Tayside did not come as a surprise to anyone who was paying attention.

“Year after year the health board sought a bailout, year after year Audit Scotland warned that this was not sustainable, and year after year your government has been in denial about the scale of the problem.”

He said the board now needs to make £200 million of cuts over the next five years and it was “too late for Shona Robison to be an honest broker.”

Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour’s health spokesman, said four out of the five Holyrood parties raised NHS problems at First Minister’s Questions and this showed Ms Robison “has completely lost control of her brief.”

The SNP’s Jenny Gilruth highlighted that there was no out-of-hours GP coverage in Glenrothes, Fife for the first time in 70 years and Sandra White, her fellow Nationalist, disclosed that a minor injuries unit at Glasgow’s Yorkhill hospital was shutting. 

Ms Sturgeon accepted there had been "issues in Tayside for some time" but insisted that Ms Robison had “exercised her ministerial power, for the right reasons and in the right way” to improve the board’s leadership.

She said she would "continue to give my support as First Minister to the job the Health Secretary is doing to strengthen the leadership of the NHS Tayside board".