Chamber and committees

In 2022, the Scottish Government was notified of 12 cyber incidents under our Notifiable Scottish Public Sector Cyber Incidents Policy and Procedure.

The Scottish Government will not provide further details as this would likely cause substantial harm to the effective conduct of public affairs and the secure delivery of our public services.

This, combined with other publicly available information, would likely allow identification of the organisations that reported cyber incidents under the procedure. It would therefore undermine the confidentiality of the policy procedure and adversely affect the trust and openness with which organisations currently report incidents and participate in the reporting process.Making further information on the timing of past cyber incidents publicly available would have a negative impact on the cyber security and resilience of the public sector.

In Scotland, there is a range of financial and practical support available to adopted and fostered children and young people, and their families. This year, the Scottish Government has provided funding of over £500,000 to third sector organisations, including Adoption UK Scotland and the Fostering Network, to provide the help that adoptive and foster families may require.

The Scottish Government has no plans to introduce an adoption/foster care box of essentials for families. Adoptive parents and foster carers are, however, eligible to register for a Baby Box through their appointed social worker if they are caring for a child between 0 – 6 months.

The Scottish Government remains committed to introducing a high quality and clinically safe thrombectomy service in Scotland. As a result of the Emergency Budget Review, the thrombectomy service was not reduced, rather the expansion of the service was paused.

The budget for thrombectomy and development of a refreshed stroke improvement plan has been increased from £8.6 million for 2022-23 to £12.5 million in 2023-24. Prior to the 2023-24 budget announcement, the delivery of a national thrombectomy service had already received over £16 million of investment.

Work is ongoing to establish the most effective means of further expanding access to thrombectomy, including how the increased budget will be best used in recruiting staff to maximise the number of patients able to benefit from this treatment.

We are also in discussions with National Services Division, to ensure that decisions taken on potential expansions of the thrombectomy service consider the wider access requirements of patients across Scotland and ensure access is as equitable as possible.

The Scottish Government does not have a reporting system in place to track instances of damp and mould in all socially rented homes.

Data on the presence of mould and damp is collected through the Scottish House Condition Survey (SHCS), including from a sample of about 700 social rented homes each year.

Survey results from the SHCS provide an indication of the prevalence of mould and damp in social rented housing. These results are expressed in the following table as percentages of homes with and without mould and damp.

It should be noted that as these results are based on a sample survey, the level of accuracy on the results can vary between +/-1% and +/-3%, as shown in the table. This means that the changes between years in prevalence in mould and damp estimated from the SHCS may not be statistically significant as they are within the margins of error of the survey estimates.

Table 1: Percentage of social sector dwellings with presence of mould and (any rising or penetrating) damp, SHCS 2012 to 2019

The Scottish Hospice Leadership Group discussed these issues at their meeting in November 2022, which was attended by a Scottish Government official.

In the Chamber on 15 December the First Minister said that we will undertake to ensure that discussions take place directly with the sector.

The Government plans to introduce a new Housing Bill this year. The timing and scope of that Bill is subject to ongoing review an consideration as we continue to deliver our emergency response to support tenants through the ongoing cost of living crisis.

We have reached an agreement with social landlords on below-inflation rent increases for the next financial year.

Organisations representing social landlords have announced their members’ plans for average rent increases for 2023-24, which will keep rents significantly below private market levels.

Under the Cost of Living (Tenant Protection) Act 2022, rents are effectively frozen in the social rented sectors until 31 March 2023. Decisions on future plans for the private sector rent freeze, as well as other measures contained in the Act, will be announced in the coming weeks.

We expect the Scottish Local Authorities Renumeration Committee to provide its report and recommendations to the Government in Autumn 2023.

Once this is provided, the Scottish Government will consult with COSLA on a response to the recommendations, and inform Parliament of our decisions as soon as possible thereafter.

The latest Scottish Government Private Sector Rent Statistics, Scotland, 2010 to 2022 was published on 29 th November 2022, which presents average private rents by property size and Broad Rental Market Areas between 2010 and 2022 (years to end September), based predominantly on advertised rent data. This is the lowest level of granularity available for the Scottish Government Private Rent Statistics. The figures cannot be disaggregated to local authority level as the data collection method used has not been designed for this purpose. and therefore the Scottish Government does not produce or publish rental data at local authority level. In addition, data is not held for the years prior to 2010.

In terms of average rents in the social rented sector, the Scottish Government Housing Revenue Account (HRA) Statistics publication contains a time series by local authority area (Table 8) of the average weekly rent on local authority HRA properties from 1997-98 onwards. These figures are also included alongside corresponding figures for housing association average rents by local authority area in an archived Scottish Government Housing Statistics publication table , although this table covers the period 2005-06 to 2012-13 only. More recent data on average rents in the social rented sector for local authority and housing association properties, including by property size, is published as part of Scottish Housing Regulator Charter Data outputs for the years 2013-14 onwards, available in the Scottish Housing Regulator Statistical Information webpages . The Charter Data figures are available at a social landlord level only, and so housing association figures are presented as landlord level averages rather than by the local authority location of their housing stock. However separate Scottish Housing Regulator stock data for the latest year 2021-22, available in the same Statistical Information webpages, includes information for on average rents split by both social landlord and local authority area for the year 2021-22.

Whilst there have been homes delivered in rural areas since 1999, this has only been reported on since 2015 -16. Data on new build affordable homes in rural areas is therefore provided from that year onwards in the following table below. Figures relating to 2021-22 will be published early in 2023. There were also non-new build homes provided and the final column in the table includes all affordable homes delivered in rural areas.