Boris Johnson has ridiculed the SNP Government’s plan to chop off the bottom of classroom doors to increase ventilation.
A bullish Prime Minister turned his fire on the Scottish Government plan as he clashed with the Ian Blackford MP.
The SNP Westminster leader challenged the Prime Minister about the cost of living crisis and asked Johnson’s government to “do something useful and scrap the regressive hike in National Insurance?”
Johnson said the April rise in National Insurance was essential to “clear the Covid backlog” in the NHS.
He added: “We have six million people already on the waiting list. I’m afraid that will go up.
“We need to be recruiting the staff now. That’s why we’re recruiting 50,000 more nurses, there are 11,000 more this year than there were last year.
“To his point, we’ve increased the starting salary for nurses by 12.8%.”
The Prime Minister then raised a laugh by highlighting SNP ministers plan to spend £300,000 on chopping off the bottom of classroom doors to improve ventilation and stop the spread of covid.
He added: “I must say that I think it’s peculiar that the Scottish nationalist party’s approach to healthcare now is to cut the bottom off doors in schools in Scotland, in order to improve ventilation.”
That was a reference to plans by Scottish Education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville to improve air quality in about 2,000 rooms that have been identified as having above average CO2 levels.
The scheme includes £1.6 million on air filters, £2.4 million for mechanical fans and £300,000 for doors to be “undercut to increase air flow”.
Scottish Labour and the Lib Dems have attacked the idea as a “lazy plan” when the real solution is to increase the number of ventilation units in schools.
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