Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to keeping The Promise. As outlined in the 2021-22 Programme for Government, we are working with The Promise and other partners to redesign the Children’s Hearings System. Sheriff David Mackie has been appointed as Chair of the Hearings System Working Group which has been established to develop more detailed recommendations in the coming year. There will also be reforms to the Children’s Hearings System through children’s care and justice legislation to be introduced in this Parliament.

The Scottish Housing Regulator collects information from all social landlords on performance against the standards and outcomes of the Scottish Social Housing Charter. This includes the average length of time taken to complete emergency and non-emergency repairs during the reporting year. The published Scottish Housing Regulator Charter Data information is available at Statistical information | Scottish Housing Regulator .

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-05425 on 31 January 2022. 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 .

Care and Repair services operate throughout Scotland to offer independent advice and assistance to help homeowners repair, improve or adapt their homes so that they can live in comfort and safety in their own community. As of 1 March there were 27 care and repair offices in Scotland covering all local authority areas except West Lothian, with all providing help to vulnerable older and disabled people to install fire alarms under the government financed scheme.

The Scottish Government has provided £1.23 million to Care and Repair Scotland during 2021-22. This includes £1.1 million to support compliance with the new fire alarms legislation and £130,000 for its role as national coordinating body for Care and Repair services in Scotland .

The Scottish Government’s policy towards local authorities’ spending is to allow local authorities the financial freedom to operate independently. As such, the vast majority of homelessness funding provided to local authorities in the annual local government finance settlements since 1999 has been included in the block grant and is therefore not separately identifiable. It is therefore not possible to determine how much of the local government finance settlement each year supports work to tackle homelessness in any year.

However, the unquantified amounts within the block grant have been supplemented in recent years through identifiable sums added to the block grant, which are enhanced or reduced by the overall annual changes in the local government finance settlement. The additional resource, set out in the table below, was allocated to local authorities for the development and implementation of rapid rehousing transition plans and for preventing and responding to homelessness.

Severance arrangements and the scrutiny of severance cases follow the process set out in SPFM . This includes arrangements around voluntary exits and settlement agreements and use of confidentiality clauses.

• Data in relation to settlement and the number of confidentiality clauses in Scottish Government and Public bodies, NHSScotland and Scottish Funding Council overseen bodies is held from 2014 and, since then, has been provided to parliament annually – see links to previous reports . 2020-21 data will be published imminently.
• We do not hold information prior to 2014, nor do we hold information in respect of local authorities.

SG and public bodies, NHS and SFC Data. - CC = confidentiality clause.

The 2019-20 Scottish Budget included a £29.5 million provision for implementing the Scottish Government’s commitment to extend free personal care to all those under 65 who need it. The allocation given to each local authority in 2019-20 is included in the following table. This funding has been baselined into the Local Government Settlement.

Since May 2020, the Scottish Government has invested over £48 million in our Connecting Scotland programme, which provides people on low incomes with a device, connection with unlimited data for two years, as well as training and support. Since programme launch 60,000 digitally excluded people in total have been brought online. We are now working on an extension to the programme to reach 300,000 people by the end of this Parliament.

The programme is part of our wider package of support to help everyone in Scotland benefit fully from the advantages of the digital world – from broadband connectivity to digital skills training and support for schools and business.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6O-00814 on 3 March 2022 which is available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/ormain.aspx .