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Despite that, Scotland’s mental health has worsened, according to all measures. The most recent Scottish mental health survey found that the CAMHS waiting time target has never been met and that a total of 28,000 Scots are waiting for mental health support. We have seen the Government’s response, which has taken the form of an extortionate sticking plaster through more than £130 million being spent on locum psychiatrists over the past five years. As we have heard, health boards have been paying up to £837 per hour to plug the gaps. Does the minister’s idea of a robust NHS workforce strategy involve anything resembling such a figure? Does she consider such expenditure to be an appropriate and good-value use of taxpayers’ money?

There is a very powerful point to be made about the disaggregation of the finances of the refinery. It is very difficult to pick that apart, because Petroineos’s assets in France are bound up with Grangemouth’s assets.

Does the member agree that the key thing is the hydrocracker finances? Taking that offline has really hit the profitability of the refinery, but there is no visibility of what that gap is and how we could make that up with a counter investment proposal.

The manner in which projects were put forward by Glasgow City Council for levelling up funding was extremely opaque and involved gate keeping. Notwithstanding that, will the Deputy First Minister confirm when the Scottish Government’s regeneration funds, such as the vacant and derelict land investment programme and the regeneration capital grant fund, will be reopened, given that other projects are critically dependent on that funding?

I congratulate my colleague Ms Clark on lodging her members’ business motion, which I was happy to support. She adequately and comprehensively outlined the situation at Ardrossan, which, as other colleagues across the chamber have hinted at, is a symptom of a broader issue on the west coast of Scotland, in particular.

Scotland is unique among European countries in that our major ports have, in effect, been privatised—that has been the case for more than 30 years. The Clyde Port Authority, which was originally established through the merger in 1966 of the Clyde Navigation Trust, the Greenock Harbour Trust and the Clyde Lighthouses Trust, was managed as a trust port—in effect, a form of local authority—whereby it was democratically managed and democratically accountable until it was privatised under a statutory instrument of Parliament in 1992, the Clyde Port Authority Scheme 1991 Confirmation Order 1992. That happened with no real debate and no real public scrutiny; it was done in a very surreptitious manner. The order transferred the ownership of the entire port infrastructure and all the harbour authority responsibilities to a subsidiary of the Clyde Port Authority, Clydeport Ltd, which was in turn subject to a management buy-out in 1992. It was floated on the London Stock Exchange in December 1994 as Clydeport plc. In 2003, Clydeport was acquired by the private company Peel Ports, which remains its owner.

The difficulty with that is the scale of the company’s ownership. Clydeport is the largest port authority by geographic area in the UK—it covers 450 square miles of marine inshore land. It operates major infrastructure that the west coast economy depends on, including Greenock ocean terminal, the King George V dock in Glasgow, the Hunterston terminal, Ardrossan harbour, Greenock cruise terminal and Inchgreen dry dock, among other assets. Therefore, it is critical not just for the operation of lifeline ferry services, but for the entire economic development of the west of Scotland. A parliamentary debate on the subject has been lacking for some time.

In Scotland, we have a unique system, whereby we have three models of port ownership. We have private ports, of which Clydeport is one example, trust ports and local authority ports. The big problem with the privatised system of ports is that, while other countries are able to plan and invest in new port capacity in a coherent manner, so that they can, for example, align ferry procurement with port infrastructure development, in Scotland the state has, basically, abandoned its regulatory role. That means that private port owners are given port regulatory functions that should be state functions. In the UK, privatised ports have, in effect, been allowed to regulate themselves, which they have done, inevitably, in their own interests. That has been the case in the Clyde, the Forth and the Tay.

The member makes an interesting point. It is important to recognise that we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good: we are where we are and must chart a coherent way forward. I would say that we can achieve better equilibrium in Scotland through improved regulation.

There are two key pieces of extant regulation. The Harbours Act 1964 gives Scottish ministers the power to reconstitute harbour authorities through a harbour revision order or, in extreme circumstances, a harbour closure order. The Marine Navigation Act 2013 allows Scottish ministers to remove a harbour authority’s pilotage duties.

Those legislative tools are available for further discussion, but I urge the minister to consider something that would be analogous to the approach that we have taken in recent years to bus regulation. We saw the privatisation of buses in the 1980s but are now using the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 to improve regulation. That is not necessarily about nationalising bus companies; it is about having equilibrium through franchising or some form of oversight.

The new Clyde mission and the Glasgow city region deal might give us a mechanism to establish better oversight and governance of Clydeport. I am sure that Peel Ports would be happy to co-operate with that, given that it might help to cohere investment and to attract pension funds or others to invest in the development of the Clyde’s infrastructure. We have seen a rush of investment in ports on the east coast because of the ScotWind programme, but there has been a dearth of investment on the west coast. There have been recent improvements at the Greenock ocean terminal and hints of possible investment at Hunterston and Inchgreen, but Ardrossan is an investment desert, which has been a disaster for the local community and the wider Clyde economy.

I urge the minister to consider a deeper dive into the opportunity to improve regulation of the west coast ports because it is not only about improving services to local communities but about growing the entire national economy. With 450 square miles effectively part of a private fiefdom, we must look at improving that jurisdiction.

Health boards in Scotland spent £30 million on locum psychiatrists in 2022. Will the minister confirm whether she thinks that expenditure is best value for money, and say how much was spent on locum psychiatrists in the past financial year?

Will the minister take an intervention?

Does the member agree that the 10-year wait for compulsory sale orders is completely unacceptable?

Will the cabinet secretary give way on that point?

The minister has noted the pressure that the granting of refugee status to 2,709 people has put on homelessness services in Glasgow over the past year. However, I note that there are 2,641 long-term empty homes in Glasgow at present. Will the Government therefore introduce emergency legislation to force the compulsory sale of those unused homes and accelerate the mass compulsory purchase orders on those properties?