Chamber and committees

Scottish Government is working closely with industry to refresh the Life Sciences Strategy for Scotland 2025 Vision which was published in 2017. The new strategy will set out ambitions for the Life Sciences in Scotland from 2025 - 2035 and is expected to be published in the Autumn of this year.

Violence against women and girls is a fundamental violation of human rights and has no place in our vision for a safe, strong, successful Scotland.

Our Equally Safe Delivery Plan contains a range of actions to build a robust and joined up approach to the prevention of violence against women and girls across all education settings in Scotland. Action 4.3 commits us to consider how we connect and share data with other public protection areas and use data and evidence to support conversations to prevent and reduce harm and to improve outcomes for adult and child victim-survivors of VAWG.

Tackling the difficult issues of having the right data for improvement and assurance and risk escalation at local and national level, is a workplan priority for the National Public Protection Leadership Group (NPPLG). A medium-term action for the NPPLG will look at how we progress interconnectedness of strands to inform policy and practice. The work of the Scottish Government Cross-Government Public Protection Team will complement the work of the NPPLG and support this action.

In relation to adult victim-survivors, the Adult Support and Protection National Minimum Dataset collects data on primary harm, including categories on physical harm’, ‘sexual harm’, ‘psychological/ emotional harm’ and ‘domestic abuse’. This data is shared with Local Health and Social Care Partnerships on a quarterly basis as unpublished management information and can be used to inform broader local discussions on public protection.

Adult Support and Protection contribute to the Equally Safe strategy as a partner in public protection and data will be available from wider sources.

For child victim-survivors, the Scottish Government are continuously looking to improve local and national data and evidence around child protection. A National Child Protection Data Group with members from the Scottish Government, Care Inspectorate and the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection (CELCIS) oversees this work. The group meets regularly and organises annual in-person events to bring together individuals with an interest in local and national child protection data from across the country.

A national dataset is published on an annual basis to support the publication of the Scottish Government’s annual children’s social work statistics. The publication of these statistics is important to allow us to follow long term trends in child protection data. The data collection specification has been revised to ensure alignment with the National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland 2021 – updated 2023. Child protection registrations linked to domestic abuse are collected as part of this publication.

A minimum data set for Child Protection Committees (CPCs) has been developed which aims to support the delivery of continuous improvement and self-evaluation responsibilities. The minimum dataset is a ‘package’ of data collation, presentation, analysis, reporting and scrutiny supports to support child protection improvement, local planning and service development, and expanded analytical capacity. Child Protection Committees can supplement the minimum dataset with additional information depending on the needs of their area. Version 2 of the minimum dataset for Child Protection Committees was launched in June 2021 and aligns with the National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland.

Since 2021, our partners CELCIS have administered the Children’s Care and Protection Data Community of Practice Scotland Knowledge Hub site. The site is open to all people interested in children’s data. The Hub will facilitate a more co-ordinated strategic approach to sharing learning and to help inform local planning and service development.

The Scottish Government is taking bold and ambitious action to reform and renew our health and social care systems, with a clear focus on prevention as a cornerstone of our long-term visions where people live longer, are healthier and lead more fulfilling lives.

Through the Scotland's Population Health Framework - gov.scot and the Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework - gov.scot, both published in June 2025, we have set out a strategic and joined-up approach to improving population health and reducing the burden of disease on the NHS. These frameworks work hand in hand to embed prevention across all levels of planning, delivery and accountability.

The PHF focuses on the primary prevention space, on what creates, sustains and protects good health across our society and communities in Scotland. The PHF is based on five key interconnected prevention drivers of health and wellbeing - prevention focused systems; social and economic factors; places and communities; enabling healthy living; and equitable access to health and care.

Working across these five areas is crucial because as much as 80% of what affects health happens outside the health and care system. The NHS is just one part of the whole system – local government, public agencies and a range of sectors and organisations all must have a laser focus on preventing ill health.

Increasing preventative care in the NHS is at the heart of the twinned SRF, which places prevention and early intervention at its core. We recognise that our current model of health and social care focuses most of its resources (workforce, finance, infrastructure) on caring for established sickness or care needs – and for this reason we have focused much of our renewal framework on how to change this.

The SRF sets out five key principles for renewal which provide an evidence-based and value-driven foundation from which to plan, make decisions, and deliver change. The first of these principles is the Prevention Principle – focusing on prevention and proactive early intervention across the continuum of care to realise long term wellbeing and reduce the burden of disease.

We are committed to improving health and wellbeing across Scotland by focusing on prevention at every stage – from helping people stay well, to detecting problems early, to supporting those living with long-term conditions. And this is why, the first change commitment in the SRF is Major Change 1- Prevention, which focuses on services that prevent disease, enable early detection and effectively manage chronic and long-term conditions.

We are determined to reduce avoidable cardiovascular deaths, by a fifth over 20 years by ensuring people receive timely and high-quality care. That is why by March 2026, we are investing just under £10 million in providing extra GP appointments to support 100,000 patients who may be at risk, due to obesity, smoking, or high blood sugar, blood pressure or cholesterol. This is part of our cardiovascular disease risk factors programme and has a particular focus on supporting people living in areas of deprivation. 95% of practices in Scotland have signed up to provide the service.

By finding risk factors sooner we can support individuals – for instance, if a person is overweight or obese and has developed type 2 diabetes, there is a range of options that their healthcare team can consider with the person. This includes the new national Type 2 Diabetes Remission programme, which is a national digital intensive weight management programme which will support 3,000 people recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. We have invested £4.5 million over three years into this programme, and we expect to help around 40% of people to achieve remission from the condition by the end of their first year in the programme, which will improve each person's health significantly.

This aligns closely to our new Long Term Conditions Framework, which we working to publish by the end of 2025. The Framework will improve the quality of care and support for people living with long term conditions. This includes helping people manage their conditions well, avoid complications and maintain their independence and quality of life.

Another example of work is how we can use pharmacogenetics in prevention. Pharmacogenetics is how a person’s genetics affect their response to certain drugs. We have invested £1.1 million to support testing of recent stroke patients to determine if they have a genetic variation that impairs the benefits of a drug commonly prescribed to reduce the risk of secondary stroke and which would mean an alternative drug should be considered for them. Around 60,000 stroke patients will be tested, with approximately 20,000 expected to be moved to more effective medication, with potential savings of £30 million in future health costs.

Similarly, a programme to provide a genetic test for newborn babies will also receive £800,000 funding to determine if they have a genetic variation which puts them at risk of permanent hearing loss if they are treated with a common emergency antibiotic. 10,000 newborns will be tested, with those at risk of adverse reactions moved to safer antibiotics, helping prevent profound hearing loss and saving an estimated £8 million in health and education costs over their childhood.

Prevention work is also vital for mental health and wellbeing. We are already implementing the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy and updating our delivery plan, recognising how inequalities can affect mental health and understanding the connection between mental and physical health needs. Our approach includes prevention, early support, and ongoing care for those living with mental health conditions.

We continue to invest in community-based prevention and wellbeing initiatives. The Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund for adults has provided £81 million over five years, supporting thousands of local projects focused on prevention and early intervention, with a further £15 million committed in 2026-27. We have also invested over £65 million since 2020 in community mental health support for children, young people and families, which reached almost 80,000 people in 2024-25, and will continue with the baselining of this £15 million per annum funding into local authority budgets from 2025-26. In addition, we have ensured access to counselling services in secondary schools across Scotland, and we continue to support local authorities with £16m a year.

We are committed to a whole-system approach to prevention, ensuring that NHS Scotland is not only equipped to treat illness but is actively working to prevent it, reduce inequalities and improve health outcomes for all. The examples I have given today demonstrate only some of our renewal efforts, and we will all have to lead and drive this shift to focus more on prevention within the NHS to make the impact we need.

As part of our Equally Safe governance arrangements, we have a progress reporting cycle in place which will see an annual progress report published by the end of this year, providing updates on the actions it contains and sets out the work that will be undertaken over the next period.

An interim progress report is also compiled for the Equally Safe Joint Strategic Board to monitor progress, the most recent one in February 2025. I would be more than happy to share a copy of this with the elected member.

The Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR), the source of the Businesses in Scotland publication, is not a public register. The IDBR is a statistical register, built from a range of survey return data, administrative data and estimated data.

The IDBR data are held by the Scottish Government on behalf of the United Kingdom Statistics Authority and are classified as ‘personal information’ according to the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. The 2007 Act requires that the Scottish Government must not disclose the personal information, held on behalf of the United Kingdom Statistics Authority, unless directly authorised by the UK National Statistician. Authority will only be given in exceptional circumstances.

Asking businesses permission to publish the information they return on a named basis would very likely result in reduced overall response rates. Additionally it may affect the quality of the data response.

Information on businesses in Scotland is publicly available from the Companies House register. A downloadable snapshot containing basic data for live companies on the Companies House register is available at:

https://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html