In 2024, there were seven meetings of the Scottish Offshore Wind Energy Council (SOWEC). In 2025, there were a further seven meetings of SOWEC. I attended two SOWEC meetings in 2024 in my role at the time as Minister for Energy, Just Transition and Fair Work and subsequently as Minister for Climate Action and one meeting in 2025. From June 2024 – June 2025, Dr Alasdair Allan MSP was Acting Minister for Climate Action and acting SOWEC Co-Chair, and attended one meeting of SOWEC in 2024 and one in 2025.

The Scottish Government has prioritised action on marine litter through the Marine Litter Strategy for Scotland. We published our refreshed Strategy in September 2022, which sets out a co-ordinated approach to address the amount of litter entering the marine environment, and supports the removal of debris that is already there. The Strategy contains multiple actions on the most problematic types of marine litter including sewage-related debris and wet wipes. We continue to work across the four nations to put an end to pollution caused by wet wipes containing plastic, with Scottish legislation forthcoming.

Health and safety legislation is a matter reserved to the UK Government, with the Health and Safety Executive as the regulator across Great Britain. The Scottish Government has no functions in relation to the funding available to the Health and Safety Executive.

The 2018 Oral Health Improvement Plan set out the Scottish Government’s intention to introduce enhanced service practitioners, working within the General Dental Service (GDS) or primary care/ high street environment. The aim of this proposal was to support more treatment delivery in a primary care setting rather than requiring referral to hospital, and included a system of accreditation for GDS dentists covering support, mentoring, governance, quality assurance and training.

The Scottish Government introduced the role of enhanced services practitioners in June 2019 in the domiciliary care sector, as set out in the following amendment to the Statement of Dental Remuneration: PCA(D)(2019)09 - Dentists with enhanced skills in domiciliary care: NHS (General Dental Services) (Scotland) regulations 2010 - amendments; Amendment no 136 to the Statement of Dental Remuneration.

Since the introduction of enhanced services practitioners in the domiciliary care sector, Government priorities have necessarily focused on supporting the dental sector through the Covid-19 pandemic, pandemic recovery, and implementing dental payment reform in November 2023 – the most significant change to the dental payment system in a generation, and a critical enabler to wider service sustainability into the long-term.

In June 2025, the Scottish Government published the Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework which further affirms our commitment to shift care into the community and away from hospital settings. As part of strategic work around Framework implementation, we are considering how best to reduce referrals to hospital dental services including the potential roll-out of wider enhanced skills dentists in primary care.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-42570 on 29 December 2025. 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.

In 2023, we published the Tobacco and Vaping Framework, which set out the Scottish Government’s ambition to create a tobacco-free generation by 2034. Progress towards this goal is measured against five key indicators, two of which relate to smoking and vaping behaviours among children:

• Prevalence of current smoking in children
• Prevalence of current vaping in children

To address a gap in child data, the Scottish Government commissioned a boosted Scotland sample in the ASH SmokeFree GB Youth survey starting in 2024. This enables annual monitoring of statistics for adolescents (ages 11-17) in Scotland on tobacco, vaping and nicotine products use, behaviours and attitudes.

Data on children’s use of tobacco, vapes and nicotine pouches among children from the Scottish sample is published annually. Results for 2024 and 2025 are available on the Scottish Government website Introduction - Vaping and smoking among Scottish adolescents: ASH SmokeFree GB Youth survey 2024 results - gov.scot.

The principles of the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 should be given effect to in any intervention in the affairs of an adult lacking capacity. One of these principles is that the views of interested parties should be taken account of when determining if an intervention is to be made and what intervention is to be made. This includes those who are acting as power of attorney.

Uptake for child flu vaccinations by Health Board level is not published by Public Health Scotland.

We recommend contacting NHS Highland’s Immunisation Team directly, as they may be able to provide you with additional management information data.

While the latest Action on Smoking and Health Smokefree GB Youth Survey shows that only a very small percentage (3%) of children in Scotland reported ever using nicotine pouches in 2024 and 2025, I am concerned about these products and their appeal to children and young people.

We know from existing evidence that other nicotine products, including cigarettes, can negatively impact an individual’s oral health and increase the risk of gum disease, however there is currently limited clinical evidence on the impact of nicotine pouches specifically. Scottish Government will continue to review the evidence and take any appropriate and necessary action required to support the oral health of children and young people.

In the meantime we continue to offer free regular NHS dental examinations to everyone in Scotland, to enable risk factors to be identified and recorded. NHS dental services also offer enhanced preventative treatment, including smoking cessation advice, for all patients including children and young people.

The Scottish Government recognises both the importance of gaining a better understanding of Whole Time Equivalence (WTE) within the primary care dental workforce, and the potential limitations associated with existing headcount data. In response, a dental workforce survey was published on 31st October 2024 which provides an insight into the WTE distribution of primary care dentists across NHS Boards and can be found at the following link: Dental Workforce Survey 2024 | Turas Data Intelligence.

The Scottish Government is also currently working with NHS Education for Scotland as part of a Short Life Working Group on data. The focus of this work is to seek to create a more holistic data set for dental statistics, including regular measurement of the Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) of the dental workforce, to better support workforce planning processes and alleviate dental access pressures.