Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government’s funded Food for Life Scotland Programme currently operates within 15 local authorities with 19 ‘Food for Life Served Here’ awarded caterers across 1,336 sites in Scotland.

We continue to support the delivery of the Food for Life Programme which has had a primary focus on school meals with over 100,000 daily ‘Food for Life Served Here’ meals served in primaries, secondaries and additional support needs schools. Most recently over the past 12 months, 191 new local authority sites have achieved ‘Food for Life Served Here’.

Throughout financial year 2024-25, the Soil Association will continue to work with local authorities on maintaining accreditation as well as seeking to further embed Food for Life principles across the wider Scottish Public sector.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-29121 on 2 September 2024. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.

The Flood Resilience Strategy consultation document sought views on a range of flooding related matters, including how best to improve the long term resilience of coastal communities. The results of this consultation will help to inform the Flood Resilience Strategy. Both the Strategy and an analysis of the consultation responses will be published later in the year.

Cabinet minutes provide a full account of actions but are not a verbatim record. As such, it is not possible to determine with certainty when or how many times a particular topic has been discussed at Cabinet. The Cabinet discusses policies which relate to education and to child poverty on a regular basis.

The Scottish Government is committed to free school meal expansion and continues to work with partners in local government.

Expanding our woodlands alongside restoring peatlands are critical elements of our plans to reach net zero and address climate change.

Woodland creation and re-stocking in Scotland must comply with the UK Forestry Standard which defines deep peat as greater that 50 centimetres. The most recent review of the UK Forestry Standard in October 2023 considered whether the definition of deep peat for forestry in terms of carbon sequestration needed to be lowered. All UK nations agreed there was insufficient evidence to support a change. Evidence shows conifers are faster at sequestering carbon in the short term compared to broadleaves. Scotland will continue to prohibit planting on peats deeper than 50 centimetres.

Cultivation guidance for woodland creation was updated in 2021 to exclude the use of intensive cultivation techniques on organo-mineral soils with an organic layer over 10 centimetres in depth. The guidance update minimises disturbance to soils during woodland creation to reduce emissions and create an earlier positive soil carbon balance.

Since financial year 2021-22, the Scottish Government has awarded £1,860,000 to the Soil Association for the Food for Life Scotland programme.

A breakdown of funding for the last four financial years has been provided in the following table.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-29121 on 2 September 2024. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.

The Scottish Government has allocated (a) £42m in 2020-21 (b) £52m in 2021-22 (c) £63m in 2022-23 (d) £61m in 2023-24 and (e) £88m in 2024-25 to local authorities through the general capital grant to invest in flood protection and resilience measures.

However, the vast majority of funding available to councils is provided by means of a block grant from the Scottish Government. It is then the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them, including on flooding protection, on the basis of local needs and priorities, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

The funding has been distributed as follows:

The Flood Resilience Strategy consultation document refers to there being an estimated 284,000 properties across Scotland exposed to flooding. This figure was derived from the most recent version of the National Flood Risk Assessment (NFRA), which was prepared by SEPA. The figures per local authority from the NFRA are as follows: