Chamber and committees

The 2025-26 draft budget provides over £16.2 billion funding for NHS Boards, supporting services and including £1.34 billion funding for NHS Grampian - a real terms uplift.

In addition, increased capital investment of £139 million provides a 5% uplift to Boards’ core capital funding allocations as well as additional investment for priority maintenance and improvements across the NHS estate. To this end, we are working with all Boards, including NHS Grampian, to develop a whole-system NHS infrastructure plan which will support continued safe operation of existing facilities and inform longer-term investment priorities. The first part of this work – to assess immediate investment priorities across all Health Boards – is already well underway.

The information requested is not held centrally by the Scottish Government the member may wish to contact NHS Grampian directly for information.

For the non-Ministerial offices that the Scottish government holds employee information, our data shows no employees are assigned on our HR management information system to more than one non-Ministerial office.

Energy policy (including pre-payment meters) is mostly reserved to the UK Government, which means the Scottish Government has limited powers to intervene.

It is important that consumers are able to choose the most appropriate and manageable way of paying for their energy, and prepayment meters can, under certain circumstances, play an important part in providing flexibility and choice to households and businesses.

The Scottish Government has therefore not called for a permanent ban on the installation of prepayment meters – while strongly supporting the ban on forcibly installing meters for certain vulnerable customers.

We continue to call for more targeted support for vulnerable consumers, including those on prepayment meters, who are in greater risk of increased debt or self-disconnection.

Energy policy (including pre-payment meters) is mostly reserved to the UK Government, which unfortunately means that the Scottish Government has limited powers to intervene.

We continue to call for more targeted support for vulnerable consumers, including those on prepayment meters, who are in greater risk of increased debt or self-disconnection. This includes the urgent introduction of a social energy tariff mechanism as a much needed safety net for priority consumers.

The Scottish Government established a social tariff working group last November, bringing together stakeholders to co-design a deliverable social tariff policy, and we have committed to providing the outputs to the UK Government as soon as possible

The Scottish Government is not currently planning to establish an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) taskforce.

However, we are undertaking a range of actions to improve access to diagnosis and support for people with ADHD.

The Scottish Government is working with NHS Boards, community partners, and the National Autism Implementation Team (NAIT) to improve access to diagnosis, by supporting local health partners to develop, enhance and redesign existing local neurodevelopmental services.

We are working with NAIT to implement Adult Neurodevelopmental Pathways across Scotland. By implementing a single diagnostic pathway for autism and ADHD, and by adopting a stepped care model, we hope to ensure that diagnostic and post-diagnostic support is provided in a timely and effective fashion.

We also provide funding to NHS Education for Scotland (NES) to deliver training resources to meet the needs of staff working in ADHD services across health and social care. These include webinars on ‘Assessing ADHD’ and ‘Understanding ADHD in Girls and Women’, which are available to all NHS and Social Care staff via an online knowledge hub.

The Scottish House Condition Survey provides a snapshot of the Scottish housing stock in each survey year including the construction age and built form of Scottish domestic buildings. Within this it provides estimates of the number of dwellings with a prepayment meter for gas or electricity.

The most recent estimates of households with a prepayment meter are from 2023, and are presented in the following table:

Table 1: Number of PPM meters by type (000’s)

Work is ongoing to establish how the £16 million funding announced in the draft Scottish budget will be best used to maximise the number of patients able to benefit from thrombectomy.

The new Scottish Budget was presented to Parliament on 4 December 2024 with £16 million allocated to the further development of the thrombectomy service and stroke policy. This details Scottish Ministers spend proposals for the year ahead and the Scottish Parliament will then scrutinise this information through the Scottish Budget Bill. Further details on the Scottish Budget and the Health and Social Care portfolio budget Finance can be found at; Scottish Budget 2025 to 2026.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-33303 on 24 January 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/questions-and-answers

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