NICOLA Sturgeon has admitted the legal treatment time guarantee she introduced as health secretary six years ago has now been broken more than 100,000 times.

However the First Minister defended it, saying it had also been met 1.6m times and the SNP Government was now investing heavily and taking steps to improve performance.

LibDem leader Willie Rennie told MSPs that if anyone else had broken the law that often they would be “in Barlinnie”, yet ministers expected the breaches to continue for years.

The sharp exchange at First Minister’s Questions followed the publication of two controversial reports on the NHS this week.

On Tuesday, Health Secretary Jeane Freeman’s Waiting Times Improvement Plan confirmed key targets would continue to be missed until 2021, including Ms Sturgeon’s 2012 guarantee that patients would be treated for inpatient or day surgery within 12 weeks.

Between April and June this year, less than three quarters of patients were treated on time.

On Thursday, the Auditor General’s report on NHS Scotland in 2017/18 also said it was “not financially sustainable in its current form” and performance was on the slide.

At FMQs, Mr Rennie said: “The law states that patients will be guaranteed NHS treatment within 12 weeks. This is the First Minister’s law, from when she was health secretary.

“It was an SNP flagship law that helped them take power in 2007... a law the government has broken over 100,000 times. But on Tuesday the government said they would keep on breaking the law for another three years.”

“If a member of the public was to break the law this many times, they would serve time in Barlinnie. Why is it when the SNP breaks the law they think they can get away Scot free?”

Ms Sturgeon replied: “It is true that the 12-week treatment time guarantee has not been adhered to more than 100,000 times, but 1.6m patients have been treated within the time.

“There are now fewer people waiting more than 12 weeks for treatment than was the case when the SNP Government came into office.”

“I do not shy away from the challenges that our health service - in common with health services across the United Kingdom and further afield - faces. We have put in place plans around both investment and reform to ensure that we meet the targets and that the quality of care is what patients expect.”

Ms Sturgeon also repeated an apology, first given last year, to women who had suffered as a result of transvaginal mesh implants.

With mesh campaigner Elaine Holmes in the public gallery, acting Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw said the implants were “the greatest self-inflicted health scandal since the Thalidomide scandal in the 1960s”.

Ms Sturgeon said: “For the avoidance of any doubt and without any equivocation, I say today on behalf of the Scottish Government that I apologise unreservedly to any woman who has suffered because of mesh procedures.”

She said ministers would look at extending the blue badge scheme to mesh sufferers, and confirmed a report into a previous ‘whitewash’ review of mesh would be published soon.

Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said the Auditor General’s report was a “damning indictment” of SNP mismanagement.

He claimed £1.1bn had been cut from the NHS in ‘efficiency savings’ since Ms Sturgeon became First Minister almost four years ago.

He said there were “too many staff under too much pressure, too many patients waiting far too long and too many health boards having to make swingeing cuts”.

For the Auditor General to conclude the NHS was not financially sustainable after 11 years of the SNP in power was “nothing less than an abject failure of government”, he said.

Ms Sturgeon said the report did not include recent medium-term plans to raise the health budget by £3.3bn by 2023, equivalent to real terms annual growth of 2.9%.

She rejected the £1.1bn cuts figure, saying the Auditor’s report noted real terms growth in the health budget of 7.7% over the past decade.

She said: “The Fraser of Allander Institute predicts the health resource budget is likely to have to increase by around 2% per year to stand still.

“We are providing resources over and above that, and I think that significantly changes the comment about financial sustainability.”