Chamber and committees

The SPCB notes that members of the public can currently request a loved one’s 100th birthday to be recognised by the King and Queen Consort and it does not currently have any plans to facilitate requests for cards to be sent on behalf of the Scottish Parliament.

The SPCB notes that the UK Government currently facilitates a birthday message to be sent from the King and Queen Consort to mark a person’s 100th birthday and currently it does not have any plans to send cards on behalf of the Scottish Parliament. 

The Scottish Government is committed to continuing to work with partners across Tayside to support sustainable change, which ensures the safe and effective delivery of mental health services.

It is crucial that, as the workforce responds to additional pressures and challenges, leaders model and promote compassion. People working in health, social care and social work are the most significant asset for creating positive culture change.

Leaders must examine the needs of staff, ensuring their wellbeing is a priority to help them deal with the rapidly changing situation. This is why the Scottish Government has created Leading to Change, a national leadership development programme, which will be focused on growing compassionate and inclusive leaders who role model these values and create an open and welcoming culture that will help to improve recruitment and retention, and supports staff wellbeing.

To complement the wellbeing support available at a local level, we are continuing to provide a range of resources including the National Wellbeing Hub, a 24/7 National Wellbeing Helpline, confidential mental health treatment through the Workforce Specialist Service, Coaching for Wellbeing and funding for additional local psychological support.

We also continue to work with leaders across health, social care and social work, as well as hearing directly from staff, to understand where the current pressures are, and what further actions can be taken to mitigate their impact on staff wellbeing. Our ongoing response will be informed by a new Improving Wellbeing and Workforce Cultures strategy that will be launched in 2023. The Scottish Government is committed to improving the mental health and wellbeing of Scotland’s population and to ensuring everyone receives the best possible care and support from our health and care services. Delivering this can only be achieved with the right workforce capacity and capability. With substantial investment, we have record numbers of staff providing more varied support and services to a larger number of people than ever before.

Individual NHS Boards are responsible for undertaking the local workforce planning required to deliver safe and high quality services with a sustainable workforce. The Scottish Government works continuously with NHS Boards and Health and Social Care Partnerships to improve workforce planning. The report concurs with Scottish Government feedback to NHS Tayside on the content of its 3 year workforce plan, and draws attention to the need for the Board to ensure this links appropriately to the workforce required for mental and learning disability services in Tayside.

We are currently consulting on our strategic approach to workforce planning for mental health and wellbeing, this will contribute to the forthcoming Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy, which is due to be published in spring 2023.

We will also be working closely with partners to identify short, medium and long term actions for a Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Plan, to be published in 2023. The Plan will build on the National Health and Social Care Workforce Strategy, published in March 2022, which sets out a new framework to shape Scotland’s health and social care workforce over the next decade, placing training, wellbeing, job satisfaction, retention and the principles of Fair Work at its heart. It will look at the whole workforce journey and how we can plan for, attract, train, employ and nurture our mental health workforce.

The Scottish Government is supportive to the shipbuilding industry which has strategic importance to Scotland’s economy and its wider manufacturing base; and we actively engage with the industry, both with individual companies through our enterprise and skills agencies and collectively through the Aerospace and Defence Industry Group.

The Scottish Government will continue to support sustainable change and improvements in Tayside, to ensure the safe and effective delivery of mental health services.

To ensure that Tayside Mental Health Services have the resources needed to deliver on the recommendations contained in the Oversight Group’s Final Report, the Scottish Government will provide access to advice from Professional Advisors and Senior Officials in the Mental Health Directorate as partners in Tayside develop a detailed improvement plan. The plan will contain clear milestones and deliverables which progress key areas for action.

More widely, the Scottish Government has increased financial resources across Scotland, with NHS Mental Health expenditure rising from £1.1bn in 2019-20 to £1.25bn in 2020-21: an increase of £172m.

Alcohol duty is reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government would strongly recommend that the UK Government considers public health as part of any review to alcohol duty.

The Scottish Government believes that the stronger the beverage, the higher the duty should be, as it is the alcohol that causes the harms and stronger alcoholic drinks allow for faster consumption of alcohol. This is in line with the rationale behind our world leading minimum unit pricing policy which targets high strength, low-cost alcohol.

Our Alcohol Framework sets out our priorities for preventing alcohol-related harm. We take a whole population approach to tackling alcohol-related harms, in line with the World Health Organization’s focus on affordability, availability and attractiveness of alcohol.

Alcohol duty is reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government would strongly recommend that the UK Government considers public health as part of any review to alcohol duty.

We have made no assessment of the impact of the six-month freeze on alcohol duty on alcohol harm in Scotland. We remain committed to reducing alcohol related harms, in line with the World Health Organization’s focus on affordability, availability and attractiveness of alcohol.

The Glasgow Science Centre (GSC) is owned by the GSC Charitable Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of Scottish Enterprise (SE). The Scottish Government is providing £5.5 million to SE to cover refurbishment work to GSC’s main buildings. A further £800,000 has been allocated to the work from SE’s budget. The work includes replacement of the titanium roof covering, installation of a new building management system and partial renewal of external glazing. The work does not include the IMAX Theatre.

Setting VAT rates is reserved to the UK Government, and remains a decision for HM Treasury. This issue affects heritage properties across all four nations of the UK and provides an opportunity for the UK Government to respond proactively to the global climate emergency. I wrote to Nigel Huddlestone MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Sport, Tourism, Heritage and Civil Society, in February last year making the case for a VAT reduction to encourage and promote energy efficiency improvements in traditional buildings, unfortunately the UK Government has not indicated any willingness to consider the issue at this time.

The Scottish Government has already recognised in its housing strategy, Housing to 2040 , that reductions in VAT on household repairs would encourage home renovation in Scotland, and better equip homes for the challenges posed by climate change and the transition to net zero.

The Historic Environment Scotland publication, Guide to Energy Retrofit of Traditional Buildings addresses the common assumption that it is harder to improve the energy efficiency of older buildings, and enables the owners of traditional and historic properties in Scotland to make informed choices about the options available.

The Scottish Government will continue to call on the UK Government to introduce VAT reductions for traditional buildings and to work with stakeholders, including Historic Environment Scotland, to develop further solutions to transition Scotland’s historic buildings to net zero emissions while respecting and preserving their special characteristics.

The Scottish Government is using a range of interventions across its policies to advance the Race Equality Framework and human rights for all minority ethnic groups, one of which is the Interim Governance Group.

The Interim Governance Group is a short-life working group with a specific remit to provide advice and feedback to Scottish Ministers on establishing long-term anti-racist infrastructure. Its membership includes those with experiences of intersecting marginalisation(s) and the realities of systemic racism and expertise in tackling it. Individuals were also appointed on the basis of having extensive knowledge and/or experience of policy making in Scotland, and design and implementation of policy/systems. More information on the remit and membership of the group is available here: https://www.gov.scot/groups/interim-governance-group-to-develop-national-anti-racist-infrastructure/

The intention is that the work of the IGG will support the development of improved infrastructure and accountability that has a positive impact on the lives of all racialised minority communities. Racialised outcomes are not experienced uniformly, and effective interventions need to take specific experiences into account. In Scotland, this includes important disparities impacting Black/minority ethnic groups.

Ensuring that communities are engaged with policy developments, including in long-term oversight and governance, is of utmost importance, and we are looking to explore mechanisms and routes to achieve that in the best way possible. Policy areas focussed on anti-racism and race equality are actively engaging with a range of stakeholders and communities as part of their work. The Interim Governance Group has commissioned a programme of community engagement, to both disseminate information about forthcoming anti-racist policy infrastructure and to gather community members' and organisations' perspectives on how it can work best to deliver genuine change-making policy and practice in Scotland.