Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) are committed to ensuring the safety of firefighters. In the draft budget for 2025-26, the Scottish Government will provide SFRS with an additional £18.8 million, which includes £4 million extra Capital funding to enable SFRS to continue to improve facilities for firefighters.

The SFRS Contaminants Group continues to make progress in improving processes and procedures and in December 2024 SFRS announced investment of £3.2 million in additional sets of firefighting personal protective equipment so that clothing can be thoroughly cleaned more often. The Service is also making significant capital investment in the refurbishment of stations, which will help to reduce prolonged exposure to fire contaminants.

SFRS has an ongoing innovation project related to fire contaminants in progress, this as part of Scottish Government CivTech programme. CivTech is a Scottish Government innovation accelerator programme that brings public and private sector organisations together to identify and work on innovation projects. The project is working to identify ways to track fire fighter exposure to contaminants and improve health monitoring.

In February 2023 the Scottish Government was made aware of an escape of approximately 80,000 fish during transport. The fish originated from Loch Shin and were loaded at Lochinver; the loss occurred en route to Orkney.

No formal assessment of the impact was made by the Scottish Government or its bodies as the incident took place during transport. The regulatory framework requires the circumstances which give rise to a significant risk of escape or actual escape of fish on or in the vicinity of a fish farm to be reported under the Aquatic Animal Health Regulations (Scotland) 2009 as amended. As drafted, the regulations do not require losses during transportation, which are less common, to be reported, although businesses often do as it is good practice.

The transporter involved in the incident has taken action to prevent similar events in future.

As published by Scottish Water on its website at https://www.scottishwater.co.uk/Your-Home/Your-Waste-Water/Overflows/Prioritisation-of-Sewer-Overflows-in-Scotland, there are some 4,080 CSOs on its network.

Scottish Water publishes data on all monitored overflows on its website, and recently launched an overflow map at https://www.scottishwater.co.uk/Your-Home/Your-Waste-Water/Overflows/Live-Overflow-Map. The overflow map lists the number of monitored overflows by local authority.

More detailed information is available from Scottish Water upon request.

The information requested is not collected or held centrally by the Scottish Government and would require to be obtained from Health Boards.

The Annual Reports for the NHS Clinical Negligence and Other Risks Indemnity Scheme (CNORIS) provide details of the scheme along with the number and value of claims made during each financial year and historical values.

The Annual Reports, which also cover information available in terms of categorisation of claims, are published online at Access annual reports for the scheme | National Services Scotland.

The flood resilience budget sits within the local government settlement and for 2025-26 is £121.5 million. An additional £15 million has been set aside in the draft 2025-2026 Scottish Budget to support the delivery of the new Flood Resilience Strategy, wider flooding resilience and coastal adaptation work.

The information requested is not collected or held centrally by the Scottish Government and would require to be obtained from Health Boards.

The Annual Reports for the NHS Clinical Negligence and Other Risks Indemnity Scheme (CNORIS) provide details of the scheme along with the number and value of claims made during each financial year and historical values.

The Annual Reports, which also cover information available in terms of categorisation of claims, are published online at Access annual reports for the scheme | National Services Scotland.

Some settlements are paid through a smaller lump sum together with periodic payments. Detail of these Periodic Payment Orders may be found at page 9.

The Scottish Government opposes any form of interference in Scottish politics and elections. We use the powers we have available to protect the integrity of the democratic process. To prevent foreign interference, we work closely with the UK Government, for example by taking part in exercises with the Defending Democracy Programme. This programme seeks to identify and address threats to elections and electoral processes including foreign interference, disinformation, physical and cyber threats to democratic institutions and representatives.

We will have the full support of the national agencies, for example the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA), who are on the frontline in detecting and exposing foreign interference in the run up to the Scottish Parliament Election to be held on 7 May 2026.

The following table shows the percentage of criminal cases reported to COPFS by Police Scotland.

Public Health Scotland publish information on drug related hospital admissions. Data from 1996-97 to 2022-23 is available at https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/drug-related-hospital-statistics/drug-related-hospital-statistics-scotland-2022-to-2023/. The release of data covering 2023-24 is expected in the spring. The accompanying Data Explorer Dashboard provides a more comprehensive breakdown of the statistics, including by age.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-32136 on 18 December 2024. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found athttps://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.