Chamber and committees

Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for MSPs to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

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Question reference: S6W-43588

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Monday, 09 February 2026
Current Status: Answer expected on 23 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answers to questions S6W-32146 and S6W-43022 by Neil Gray on 19 December 2024 and 27 January 2026 respectively, and in light of it being able to provide a breakdown in its answer to question S6W-32146, whether it will provide the information requested in question S6W-43022, regarding a detailed breakdown of the £100 million allocated to reform and improvement measures.

Question reference: S6W-43587

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Monday, 09 February 2026
Current Status: Answer expected on 23 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S6W-43013 by Neil Gray on 27 January 2026, regarding the additional £135.5 million allocated to planned care in 2025-26, whether it plans to baseline this funding into 2026-27.

Question reference: S6T-02884

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Monday, 09 February 2026
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 10 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports that a former Chief Nursing Officer offered the parents of Sophia Smith £20,000 and a holiday following her death in the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in 2017.

Question reference: S6W-43206

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Current Status: Answered by Tom Arthur on 5 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government, regarding its draft Budget 2026-27, what its response is to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities' (COSLA) assessment that, despite calling for an additional £750 million for social care, there is no additional funding for social care after pay uplifts.

The Scottish Government are fully aware that the budgetary pressures on the Health and Social Care system in 2026-27 have never been greater. After the disappointing UK Government Spending Review in June, we called on the UK Chancellor to increase funding, but they failed to deliver anything like the scale of change required.

Nevertheless, the draft Budget 2026-27 will provide almost £22.5 billion investment in health and social care services exceeding consequentials and providing a real terms uplift to enable more sustainable and resilient services. This includes investment of over £2.3 billion for social care, delivering our commitment to increase funding by 25%, and exceeding this by over £0.5 billion.

The Scottish Budget also provides a real terms increase to the Local Government Settlement, bringing it to almost £15.7 billion and while I recognise COSLA’s view that further funding is needed, there has never been greater pressures on public finances and simply increasing resource without wider reform risks leaving us in the same unsustainable position next year.

Question reference: S6W-43208

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Current Status: Answered by Tom Arthur on 5 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government, regarding its draft Budget 2026-27, what any projected funding gap for commissioned social care services will be to meet the obligated uplift to at least the real Living Wage in 2026-27 if this budget is passed.

The draft Budget 2026-27 sets out a further £160 million investment to enable the payment of the Real Living Wage to adult social care workers in commissioned services in the next financial year. This will take the total Scottish Government investment in adult social care pay to over £1.1 billion annually.

It is the legal obligation of all employers to pay the National Living Wage. The additional £160 million will fund the gap between the National Living Wage and the Real Living Wage, enabling Local Authorities to offer pay rates for adult social care workers in commissioned services of more than 5% above the National Living Wage rate. Therefore, there will be no funding gap.

Question reference: S6W-43207

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Current Status: Holding Answer by Tom Arthur on 4 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government, regarding its draft Budget 2026-27 budget and level 4 tables that were published in conjunction with its draft Budget, whether the baseline used to calculate the total funds to implement the 2026-27 pay uplift in commissioned social care services was the current real Living Wage amount of £12.60ph.

Question reference: S6W-43205

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Current Status: Holding Answer by Tom Arthur on 4 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government, regarding its draft Budget 2026-27, what its response is to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities' (COSLA) assessment that there is a £15 million funding gap in meeting the estimated £175 million cost of delivering the real Living Wage to adult social care workers.

Question reference: S6W-43234

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Current Status: Answered by Maree Todd on 3 February 2026

To ask the Scottish Government what additional funding will be made available to (a) West Dunbartonshire and (b) Argyll and Bute Council to fund the pledge to deliver free Learn to Swim sessions, which was set out in the draft Scottish Budget 2026-27.

The draft Scottish Budget 2026-27 delivers a significant uplift in funding to sport. This allows us to deliver on our key ambition of ensuring every child has the opportunity to learn basic swimming skills, building confidence and safety in and around water.

We will work with Scottish Swimming and sportscotland to design a phased national roll-out of the National School Swimming Framework, ensuring the funding is targeted into addressing inequalities in access to swimming lessons across all local authority areas. That work is due to commence imminently.

Question reference: S6W-43086

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Thursday, 15 January 2026
Current Status: Answered by Neil Gray on 29 January 2026

To ask the Scottish Government which NHS boards received brokerage funding in 2024-25, broken down by the amount.

Question reference: S6W-43084

Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Thursday, 15 January 2026
Current Status: Answered by Neil Gray on 28 January 2026

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the Scottish Spending Review 2026, how it plans to achieve a reduction of £384 million in 2026-27, £374 million in 2027-28 and £303 million in 2028-29 in efficiency savings in the health and social care portfolio, and how many jobs will be impacted each year as a result.

As set out in the Scottish Spending Review 2026, the majority of these efficiency and reform savings will come from the 3% target NHS Board recurring savings.

The NHS Scotland Finance Delivery Unit (FDU) is hosted by Scottish Government and aims to work with all NHS Boards to drive sustainable improvement, deliver insight and provide hands on capacity, for example, through the use of the ‘15 Box Grid’. Since the FDU was established in 2023, savings delivery in NHS Scotland has increased significantly, and recurring savings across NHS Scotland have doubled.

The FDU supports NHS Boards to achieve the 3% target by providing benchmarking and sharing best practice across NHS Boards. It also assesses local, regional and national opportunities, and sets the medium to long term financial forecast assumptions for NHS Scotland linking closely to the evolving work on reform.

On other operational efficiency and productivity savings, The Fiscal Sustainability Delivery Plan sets out measures and actions to deliver efficiencies including deprioritising lower impact spending and better targeting of existing resources. For example, we have established an Investment and Value Board to improve the evidence base for the impact of existing spending and new spending proposals, to drive evidence-based investment/disinvestment decisions.

Health efficiency and service renewal is also being taken forward through the NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan, the Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework, and Population Health Framework.

Our approach to health and social care reform and efficiency is multi-facetted, including service redesign, prevention and investment in technology. Our work on reform and change will be developed in partnership with trade union colleagues. It is not possible to provide the cumulative impact of all our actions on the number of jobs impacted each year.