Chamber and committees

The potential carbon footprint of the vehicles used in Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme was factored into the modelling work carried out during the scheme’s development and the work concluded that scheme will reduce CO2 emissions by 4 million tonnes over 25 years – the equivalent to taking 83,000 cars off the road.

More information is contained in the Strategic Environmental Assessment Addendum published on 22 December 2021, which you can read here .

I am pleased to inform Parliament that Scottish Government has today published its improvement plan for air quality.

The improvement plan confirms that the Scottish Government welcomes and accepts all six of ESS’s recommendations.

https://www.gov.scot/isbn/9781805256229

As at Friday 24 March, Social Security Scotland had concluded the final processing of client data and expect all automatic payments to be made by 31 March.

This means that throughout February and March almost 400,000 low income households will have automatically received £50 financial support towards their energy bills for this winter.

In line with our policy, every eligible household in Scotland will have received reliable support, regardless of the weather or where they live. At a time when energy bills are increasing, this investment of over £20 million will have provided an important financial contribution to many low income households, including those with disabled people, young children and older people, many of whom would not have received a £25 Cold Weather Payment in previous years.

Even though there is no statutory requirement to do so, I have already made the decision to uprate Winter Heating Payment in April 2023 by 10.1%, to £55.05, recognising the difficulties people are facing and will be facing going forward.

There are a very small number of payments requiring manual intervention prior to being processed, for example where we are awaiting further information from the eligible person, and Social Security Scotland is taking all measures to ensure that those final payments are made as soon as possible.

A first release of Official Statistics on Winter Heating Payment will be published on
‎ 6 June 2023 and then on an annual basis in future. These will be available on Social Security Scotland’s statistics publication page at:

https://www.socialsecurity.gov.scot/about/statistics/social-security-scotland-statistics-publications .

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-16208 on‎ 27 March 2023, which provided an update on Winter Heating Payment. 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 reviewed the article Night shift work and risk of aggressive prostate cancer in the Norwegian Offshore Petroleum Workers (NOPW) cohort and notes its findings.

We strongly encourage all employers to adopt Fair Work practices and apply a flexible approach regarding continuous and prolonged night shift working to protect the health and wellbeing of the workforce.

Producers who want to sell scheme articles to consumers in Scotland on or after 16 August 2023 must be registered with SEPA.

The DRS scheme administrator, Circularity Scotland Ltd (CSL) estimates that the registration process takes approximately six weeks to complete. This is similar to schemes operating elsewhere in Europe.

If producers have questions about registration, or other DRS-related matters, they should contact CSL as soon as possible.

FOI/202300342482 asked for the interim recommendations of the Temporary Accommodation Task and Finish Group, and the date these were received.

The response to FOI/202300342482, which included a copy of the interim recommendations, was issued to the requester on 7 March 2023 within the 20 working day timeframe. After completing the necessary pre-publication process, the FOI was published on the Scottish Government website on 16 March 2023 and can be accessed here .

MV Hebrides and MV Isle of Lewis have Changing Places toilets onboard. There are 22 Accessible Toilets between the major and small vessels however, on 9 of the small vessels there are no Accessible Toilet facilities.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-16005 on 25 March 2023. 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 2022-23 the Scottish Government has provided £2,259,987 to NHS Boards as set out in the following table.