Chamber and committees

I refer the member to the answer to the question S6W-34075 on 18 February 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

The Scottish Government recognises that the third sector needs stability and certainty in order to thrive and to help the Government to deliver on its policy agenda. The Programme for Government 2024 commits the Government to continuing to invest in the third sector across the Scottish Government, making improvements to grant making.

We have listened to the views of the Sector and have committed to progress Fairer Funding within the bounds of affordability. In the first instance this includes implementing a multi-year funding pilot and improving the timeliness of grant notifications. Subsequently we will go on to evaluate the impact of the Pilot and make further improvements to the grant making process, including consideration of reporting requirements and grant conditions in order to ensure grants make the greatest impact possible for beneficiaries.

The Scottish Government currently has no plans in place to implement mobile care units for rural areas across Scotland. It would be for NHS Boards to determine best use of available resources and implement this initiative locally, should they feel the service meets the needs of their local population.

The Scottish Government does not collect data on the audiology workforce.

Responsibility for delivery and commissioning of services lies at a local level - with local authorities, NHS Boards and integrated health and social care partnerships. Operational decisions, including whether there is a need for audiologists, are therefore matters for those bodies to make and should take into account the numbers of patients in their local areas.

(a)The latest available information on convictions is for the financial year 2022-23.

Number of people convicted for speeding offences on trunk roads, where main crime, in Scottish Courts, by court location (LA), 2018-19 to 2022-23.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on the number of penalties issued for drink or drug driving offences committed specifically on trunk roads. The Criminal Proceedings database does not contain this level of detail - we are unable to break down the data by 'trunk road'.

The Fairer Funding pilot consists of grants to the third sector in Scotland totalling £61.7 million in 2025-26 and £63.2 million in 2026-27. The challenging financial position means that the total volume of multi-year funding agreements is balanced against other priorities and our ability to take a measured financial risk within each portfolio area. However, the sums involved are substantial and have been welcomed by the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations and by the third sector organisations involved. The Pilot is an important first step to move forward with multi-year funding.

Work is underway to improve our visibility of grants issued by the Scottish Government to the third sector. The previous electronic accounting system did not reliably classify whether or not grant spend is allocated to the third sector. This therefore means that collating grant information remains a manual exercise across all portfolios whilst the reporting framework associated with the new system (Oracle Cloud) is fully developed. Oracle Cloud was adopted in October 2024 and is being used to make payments made to grant recipients. However, for effective analysis, a data set of an entire financial year or more is likely to be required to produce meaningful insights.

The estimated non-domestic rates revenue from energy transmission infrastructure from 2022-2023 to 2024-2025 is presented in Table 1. This includes overhead transmission lines and pylons, underground lines, and sub-stations, operating at or above 132kV. We are unable to separately estimate the amounts related to pylon infrastructure only.

There are no Scottish Government levies charged on the basis of pylon height or size. We are not aware of any other levies charged on this basis.

Table 1: Estimated non-domestic rates income from electricity transmission infrastructure

In 2015, FSS took the decision to establish the Scottish National Database (SND). as part of its strategic commitment to address recommendations of the Scudamore Expert Advisory Group, which was established by Scottish Ministers in February 2013, to review the lessons learned from the Horsemeat incident.

The report recommended that:

“The New Food Body should ensure that integrated IT systems are in place for recording data relating to official controls and other interventions at food businesses. These systems should be mandated for use by all competent authorities in Scotland”.

Following successful pilot of SND the system was rolled out across all 32 Scottish Local Authorities with completion in January 2018.

SND allows the real time collection of food law intervention data direct from the Local Authority Management Information Systems via a secure portal.

This technology allows:

• Data information can be used in a more strategic way, to enable datasets to be linked and give new insights and analysis.
• Significant reduction in the administrative burden placed on LAs in preparing and sending data to FSS.
• LAs in Scotland already have well established MIS systems and procedures, the approach was implemented without impacting on the day to day operations of their systems.
• A toolset for reporting has been introduced. This provides the means for FSS and LAs to co-create a comprehensive suite of dashboards and reports to serve across all of the enforcement community.
• The Food Law enforcement community in Scotland should be more robust and adaptable to future changes in the regulatory landscape, by having a flexible means to collect expanded datasets and a more effective means of horizon scanning.

FSS is currently working with Scottish Government Digital teams under the CivTech Programme to explore a digital system that will be open to businesses and Local Authorities to provide effective means to enhance our digital systems.