Chamber and committees

As the owner of the site, Petroineos holds responsibility for any liabilities associated with remediation and would be expected to work with the relevant authorities to ensure compliance with all applicable environmental, planning and regulatory requirements.

The Scottish Government will consider all viable propositions for securing the long term and sustainable future of Grangemouth industrial cluster including all opportunities that support securing new investment, highly skilled jobs and sustainable economic development.

Scottish Government recognise the unique challenges New Scots face, including the recognition of overseas qualifications. This is a known barrier to employment.

Through the New Scots strategy, a strategy involving wider partners including those involved in employability support, a number of partners including third sector and local authorities are working with New Scots to support the recognition of their qualifications.

The listing by Historic Environment Scotland (HES) recognises the historical importance of HMP Barlinnie, not only to our prisons and criminal justice system, but to Scotland as a whole.

Following this listing, HES and other relevant bodies will advise on its implications for the future of HMP Barlinnie, its permissible uses and alterations, and the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Government will take time to carefully consider this.

People displaced from Ukraine who live in Scotland are covered by the Scottish Government’s New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy. Recognition of qualifications is a known barrier to employment for New Scots.

As mentioned in the response to PQ S6W-42431 on 17 December 2025, it is ultimately for the professions’ independent regulators to determine the process for recognition of relevant qualifications and experience for professionally qualified New Scots, including displaced people from Ukraine.

Action 3.4 of the New Scots Delivery Plan covers working with Scottish professional bodies to understand and promote recognition pathways for industries and identified sectors.

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 works closely with public sector organisations to ensure that relevant lessons are identified and shared after incidents and/or exercises, in the form of Cyber Resilience Early Warning (CREW) notices to the sector.

The Public Sector Cyber Resilience Network brings together all cyber and information professionals from across the sector regularly to share good practice and consider common challenges. After the cyber attack on Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, Chief Executive Malcolm Burr presented to the network on 28 February 2024 and provided an overview of the attack, an update on recovery progress, and highlighted the key lessons identified.

The Scottish Government uses lessons from all incidents to inform the action plans which support the Strategic Framework for a Cyber Resilient Scotland and shape the support provided to the sector.

The Scottish Government encourages all public sector organisations to proactively manage their cyber risks, ensure that appropriate cyber security arrangements are in place and that robust, regularly tested incident response plans are developed and maintained.

Since the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar the attack, the Scottish Government has:

provided cyber awareness training to 295 public sector board members and senior managers to improve cyber governance

• updated and promoted cyber incident response plan templates and scenario playbooks to the sector
• updated the Public Sector Cyber Resilience Framework, including key actions informed by the immediate lessons from the attack
• provided facilitated cyber exercising opportunities for 250 public sector cyber professionals to improve their cyber incident response arrangements.
• provided £1.085m since 2023 to upskill cyber security staff working in the public sector
• provided daily threat and intelligence to the public sector to empower the sector to detect threats early and ensure mitigation measures are in place quickly.

As I set out in my letter to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee on 16 December, official engagement is ongoing between the Scottish and UK Governments to resolve outstanding legislative competence issues within the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill.

This includes considering provisions in the Bill around employment protections for people who opt not to be involved in assisted dying, which may relate to the reserved matter of employment and industrial relations (section H1 of schedule 5 of the Scotland Act 1998).

No correspondence or communication has taken place with regard to the impact this may have on Scotland’s economy.

A link to the 16 December letter is available here: https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/committees/current-and-previous-committees/session-6-health-social-care-and-sport-committee/correspondence/2025/ad-bill-cab-sec-hsc-section-30.

The Scottish Government are not intending to ask for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to submit a disposal and marketing plan for the category A-listed East House at Gartnavel Royal Hospital for residential conversion. The Scottish Government will however continue to engage with NHS GG&C on the issue and if circumstances change, a disposal and marketing plan could be requested.

The provision of Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts is reserved to the UK Government and managed by the Home Office.

The Scottish Government has no control over asylum accommodation and support and we would not expect the Home Office to discuss contractual matters with us.

We are proud of Scotland’s world class strengths in semiconductors technologies which form a part of our critical technologies supercluster. We are committed to supporting its growth through our national cluster building initiative to support economic growth and resilience. The supercluster is a significant economic asset of strategic importance for both Scotland and the UK and is on track to reach £10 billion turnover by 2035.

As global leaders like Micron focus on advanced memory and AI chips, there will be rising demand for high-end packaging, testing, and integration. This is a Scottish strength and makes the new National Advanced Semiconductor Packaging and Integration Centre (NASPIC) under NMIS more important and valuable.

The global semiconductor market has long been vulnerable to market fluctuations and we believe there is much the UK Government can do to strengthen national supply chain sovereignty, particularly on energy costs and greater capital investment in semiconductor fabs.