Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to improving the lives of people in Scotland in its first 100 days. I committed to opening the First Homes Fund during a parliamentary statement on 27 May and the Fund itself launched within 4 weeks on 24 June. This is a demand led fund where the criteria is first time buyers who have not previously owned a residential property and have a mortgage in principle. It is a scheme designed to support deposit top ups for first time buyers who are able to sustain a mortgage. All applicants are supported by the scheme administering agents who process applications through to settlement. We will publish First Homes Fund data in due course.

In Scotland, Patient Access Schemes (PAS) offering discounts by pharmaceutical companies to list prices of medicines are considered by the Patient Access Scheme Advisory Group (PASAG) and are commercial-in-confidence. Therefore this information is not held centrally.

The Scottish Government published a national consensus statement in September 2024, to support Health Boards to consider how best to implement these weight loss medicines. It is a matter for individual Health Boards to consider the implementation of any new medicine within their services in order to meet the needs of their local population in a safe and clinically appropriate way. This includes determining which criteria they apply in prescribing obesity medicines to individuals, and for taking appropriate phased steps to make them available across their services.

As of July 2026, 492 practices (around 55% of the total in Scotland) have successfully migrated. 91% (372 of 408) of practices using the previous version of Vision have migrated to the Cloud hosted version, and 25% (120 of 480) of practices previously using EMIS have migrated.

This is broken down by Boards as follows:

NHS Ayrshire and Arran (1), NHS Borders (4), NHS Dumfries and Galloway (25), NHS Fife (1), NHS Forth Valley (10), NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (68), NHS Grampian (66), NHS Highland (49), NHS Lanarkshire (97), NHS Lothian (103), NHS Orkney (5), NHS Shetland (0), NHS Tayside (60), NHS Western Isles (1), The State Hospital (1) and Scottish Prison Service (1).

The Scottish Government remains committed to improving audiology services across Scotland and we continue to work closely with stakeholders to determine how best to move the provision of audiology care into community settings.

On 27 August 2026, I wrote to the Health, Care and Sport Committee to provide an update on my meeting with NHS Heads of Service, community audiology providers and other key stakeholders as part of this government’s 100 days prospectus. This meeting centred on a draft proposal for development of a Target Operating Model for audiology, and my letter sets out more detail on the Scottish Government’s immediate priorities for audiology services. It can be read in full here: 20260827 Minister for Community Care to Convener | Scottish Parliament Website

As this work is at an early stage and discussions with stakeholders are ongoing, a more detailed delivery plan will follow in due course.

As this is an operational matter for Scottish Water I have asked them to respond. Their reply is as follows:

"Environmental Standards Scotland has previously welcomed that Scottish Water and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) are working to develop an approach to identify overflows where action is needed to prevent dry weather spills from happening.

In the first instance, Scottish Water responds to and carries out any operational interventions to check for blockages, misconnections or other potential faults where any overflow events appear to be happening in dry weather. Scottish Water has also proposed a definition for dry day overflow events and is working in the background to investigate overflows using data from Event Duration Monitors installed as part of commitments made in its ‘Improving Urban Waters Route map’. Where overflow events are confirmed to be occurring in dry weather because of insufficient capacity in the sewerage system, a process is being developed whereby these will be identified as Unsatisfactory Intermittent Discharges (UIDs) and will be agreed with SEPA as a priority for improvement."

The information requested on the number of NHS Boards that currently provide audiology services through community providers is not held centrally by the Scottish Government. Audiology services are operated by NHS Health Boards, which hold information on their own service delivery arrangements.

For 2026-27, the Scottish Government has allocated an additional £1 million in funding for community audiology policy, increasing total funding to £1.2 million. This additional funding underlines our commitment to support community audiology policy development and the Service Renewal Framework vision to shift the balance of care to the community. This funding will also continue to fund the “Near You” service run by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID). The service is operating in five Scottish health board areas and provides hearing checks and after-care support to hearing aid users, including maintenance, battery replacement, sign-posting and peer support, and we have signalled our intention to go further in our manifesto.

The information requested on audiology waiting times is not held centrally by the Scottish Government. Information on waiting times within individual NHS Health Board areas is held by, and is therefore a matter for, the respective NHS Health Boards.

The Scottish Government remains committed to improving audiology services across Scotland and we continue to work closely with partners to determine how best to move the provision of audiology care into community settings. On 27 August 2026, I wrote to the Health, Care and Sport Committee to provide an update on my meeting with NHS Heads of Service, community audiology providers and other key stakeholders as part of this government’s 100 days prospectus. This meeting centred on a draft proposal for development of a Target Operating Model for audiology, and my letter sets out more detail on the Scottish Government’s immediate priorities for audiology services. It can be read in full here: 20260827 Minister for Community Care to Convener | Scottish Parliament Website

The Scottish Government's Transport to Health Delivery Plan, published in October 2024, aims to ensure that access to healthcare is fully considered within NHS Board planning and service delivery.

As part of the commitments set out in the Plan, sections 120 and 121 of the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 came into force on 22 September 2023. These provisions require Health Boards to engage with community transport providers and to consider the social and economic impacts of non-emergency patient transport services.

We continue to engage with NHS Boards on a range of issues relevant to service delivery, including transport-related challenges, and monitor the ongoing implementation of the statutory requirements. We will shortly write to Boards to seek their next annual progress update.

We recognise that effective collaboration between NHS Boards, Regional Transport Partnerships and other relevant partners is essential to improving transport to healthcare. We therefore continue to work closely with Regional Transport Partnerships to support progress in this area.

The Scottish Government Bonds Programme was developed following a recommendation from the independent Investor Panel that Scotland should consider issuing debt in capital markets to diversify funding sources, strengthen investor engagement, raise Scotland's profile with investors and establish a market track record.

The Critical Success Factors in the Outline Business Case were developed to assess options against these aims, as well as requirements relating to affordability, deliverability and achievability.

The Scottish Government has no plans to revisit the Outline Business Case or revise the Critical Success Factors. A wholesale issuance aimed at institutional investors remains the most cost-effective approach for an inaugural transaction and best supports the programme's objectives.

Future issuances may consider alternative structures where these offer value for money and support the programme's strategic objectives.

Migrations began in 2022 and we do not hold information on service desk contacts for the full period of the migration programme.

We have provided data from 9 December 2025, when OneAdvanced took over support desk arrangements, to 23 August 2026 showing the number of calls logged to the service help desk broken down by Health Board area.

There were 2,658 issues logged with OneAdvanced .These ranged from routine requests, such as password resets, to more significant issues, including system slowness and disconnections, and include reports from long-term Vision users, new users and recently migrated practices.

The highest numbers of issues were recorded in NHS Lothian (580), NHS Grampian (483), NHS Lanarkshire (469), NHS Tayside (403), NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (372) and NHS Highland (196). Other NHS Boards reported NHS Forth Valley (70), NHS Dumfries and Galloway (59), NHS Orkney (10), NHS Borders (5), NHS Western Isles (4) and NHS Ayrshire and Arran (3) issues. No issues were recorded for NHS Fife, while Public Services Delivery Scotland recorded 2 issues.