Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government, including Social Security Scotland, have not incurred any additional costs in 2024-25 as a result of the Department for Work and Pensions administering a payment equivalent to Winter Fuel Payment to eligible Scottish clients in 2024.

Yes, everyone who accesses the safer drug consumption service will be offered Dry Blood Spot Testing (DBST) via the nursing staff and health care support workers. Sexual health nurses are integrated into the wider Hunter Street services and will support any positive test results and follow up treatment.

The Scottish Government currently has no plans to introduce a transition course for paramedics unable to find employment with the Scottish Ambulance Service.

The Scottish Government sets policies and frameworks at a national level, and it is the role of Health Boards, as the employers, to recruit graduates through a fair and consistent recruitment practice. When making recruitment decisions, Health Boards have to consider current turnover, retention, absence rates and budgets.

The Scottish Ambulance Service is in the process of recruiting paramedic positions for the remainder of the 2024-25 financial year.

We continue to work with SAS to explore how the role of a paramedic can expand into primary and secondary care further, offering new and different employment opportunities.

The key group responsible for co-ordinating the national cancer registries of all the UK nations, as well as the Republic of Ireland, is the UK and Ireland Association of Cancer Registries (UKIACR). Achieving consistency and comparability in the collection, analysis and reporting of cancer data are among the UKIACR’s Terms of Reference. The Director of the Scottish Cancer Registry represents Scotland on this group.

The UK and Ireland cancer registries all adhere, where possible, to the recommendations of the European Network of Cancer Registries (ENCR).

International training and deployments undertaken by UK officers are a matter for their individual services and no comparable data is available.

Further information and detail on all Police Scotland’s international activity can be obtained from the service’s International Business Development Manager who can be contacted at [email protected].

The new category under the Forestry Grant Scheme for projects to receive lower levels of grant intervention is designed specifically to help projects meet the requirements of the Woodland Carbon Code investment test for additionality. By reducing the amount of grant funding, a project is better able to demonstrate that revenues from carbon credits are needed for the project to be financially viable. The Woodland Carbon Code additionality test is consistent with additionality tests applied by other leading carbon standards globally.

The Scottish Police Authority budget for 2024-25 provides record funding of £1.55bn for policing, an increase of £92.7m despite difficult financial circumstances due to UKG austerity.

The allocation of this budget to policing priorities, is for the Chief Constable and Scottish Police Authority, including the allocation of resources to tackle cybercrime and fraud.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) does not hold the information requested. NHS Boards submit patient level records to the national waiting times datamart but the information provided on the clinical priority of a referral is not available for reporting as it isn’t quality assured. This is due to there being no agreed national definition on what constitutes an urgent or routine referral.

Statistics relating to the waits patients experience for a new outpatient appointment at a consultant-led clinic are published up to 30th June 2024 and can be found using the link https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/29135/newop_aug24.xlsx. The median and 90th percentile waits for cardiology in NHS Dumfries and Galloway, as well as a breakdown of the length of waits, can be found using the dropdowns in the 1.6 Table tab:

Please note, PHS does not publish the longest wait because this statistic can often reflect the wait of one of a very small number of patient records where there are inaccuracies in the information recorded at the time the data were extracted, and consequently the wait that can be derived is erroneously long.

To minimise this risk, PHS publishes the 90th percentile statistic (the length of time within which 9 out of 10 patients are seen) to provide a more reliable indication of the longest waits that are occurring, as this statistic is not susceptible to these outliers.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-30449 on 22 October 2024. 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 business rates incentivisation scheme (BRIS) was suspended in 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 due to the disruptive impact of COVID on NDR revenues, as confirmed in Local government finance circular 8/2021: business rates incentivisation scheme 2019-2022 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)there was therefore no revenue retained by any council in 2022-23, retentions generally affecting the following year’s non-domestic rates income.

Non-domestic rates incentivisation scheme (NDRIS, formerly BRIS) retention amounts relating to 2023-24 will be made available at the earliest opportunity, these amounts will be reported in councils provisional NDR outturn returns following the end of the current financial year.

Local government finance circular 1/2024: Non Domestic Rates Incentivisation Scheme 2023 to 2026 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) details final NDRIS targets for 2023-24 and provisional targets for 2024-25 and 2025-26.