Chamber and committees

We are committed to co-developing and co-designing our agricultural policies with industry and rural partners.

The Scottish Government has set out instructions for developers to follow regarding pre-application consultation in our Good Practice Guidance document, which is available online, alongside other guidance documents: https://www.gov.scot/policies/energy-infrastructure/energy-consents/.

In addition, the Scottish Government have been working with the UK Government on strengthening community consultation for electricity infrastructure consenting in Scotland as part of the UK Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill. The proposed reforms will make pre-application consultation for electricity infrastructure projects a statutory requirement. It will also introduce an Acceptance Stage where Scottish Ministers can decline to accept applications which have not fulfilled the necessary requirements, thereby increasing local input into project proposals.

The Scottish Government’s Aviation Statement explicitly calls for a more positive and constructive conversation about aviation and its many benefits, while committing to working with the sector on decarbonisation.

The Minister for Agriculture and Connectivity recently attended the first meeting of the Sustainable Aviation Scotland Group, which involves several senior aviation stakeholders, to encourage greater collaboration on reducing aviation emissions.

A Ministerial roundtable will be held this year to discuss the infrastructure required to enable electric and hydrogen flight, which is expected to be particularly suitable for the Highlands and Islands. Final arrangements are being made but the roundtable will include stakeholders from across the aviation sector.

The Scottish Government has not itself carried out analysis on the comparative costs of undergrounding energy transmission infrastructure and these will vary on a project to project basis. There are a number of industry commissioned reports that demonstrate both in general and on a project specific basis that underground cables are initially more expensive than overhead lines.

As the independent energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem is responsible for protecting energy consumers’ interests. Transmission network companies are regulated by Ofgem and when developing projects they must have consideration of their license obligations which require them to be economic and efficient in respect of costs to the consumer. The cost of undergrounding as compared to other forms of transmission infrastructure will be an important consideration for Ofgem assessing the transmission network companies investment plans and agreeing the costs that can be recovered from bill payers.

The mental health and emotional wellbeing of children and young people in Scotland is of paramount importance. Since 2021 we have provided our local authority partners with £16 million a year in funding to ensure that all school pupils aged 10 and above and all secondary schools in Scotland have access to school counselling services.

It is for local authorities to determine how they deliver the counselling service in their area. Our local authority partners have confirmed that access to counselling support services are in place across Scotland. Information on the number of counsellors employed is available in summary reports, for the time periods January to June 2021, July to December 2021, January to June 2022, July to December 2022 and January to June 2023. This information can be found on the Scottish Government website at: Access to counsellors in secondary schools and children and young people’s community mental health services – summary reports - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

Information prior to 2021 is not held. From April 2024 counselling reports moved from six-monthly to annual reporting and information for the July 2023 to March 2024 period is currently being analysed.

The Scottish Government is committed to improving care for people with chronic pain, by delivering the actions in the Pain Management Service Delivery Framework Implementation Plan at pace.

The Implementation Plan outlines actions to expand skills and knowledge on chronic pain across local services and scaling-up new ways of working to improve the consistency and resilience of local pain services.

The Scottish Government’s budget for the coming year has now been passed by Parliament and will invest a record £21.7 billion in Scotland’s health and social care services, including £200 million to reduce waiting lists and improve capacity.

By March 2026, we expect no-one to wait longer than 12 months for a new outpatient appointment, inpatient treatment or day case treatment with more than 150,000 extra patients seen as a result.

The latest data showing the number of school leavers in each initial destination (three months after the end of the school year) by local authority and nationally for each year since 2009-10 can be found in Table L2.1a in the supplementary tables published alongside the Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations, No. 7: 2025 edition. The supplementary tables with data on initial destinations are available here: https://www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-for-attainment-and-initial-leaver-destinations-no-7-2025-edition/documents/.

The latest data showing the number of school leavers in each follow-up destination (nine months after the end of the school year) by local authority and nationally for each year since 2009-10 can be found in Table L2.2 in the supplementary tables published alongside the Summary statistics for Follow-Up Leaver Destinations, No. 6: 2024 Edition. The supplementary tables with data on follow-up destinations are available here: https://www.gov.scot/publications/summary-statistics-follow-up-leaver-destinations-no-6-2024-edition/documents/.

Whilst this is an operational matter for ScotRail, under the SQUIRe inspection regime, the Scottish Government expects that all toilets on board ScotRail trains are fully functioning.

I was pleased to welcome the launch of Police Scotland’s plans to tackle retail crime last month, which is being funded by an additional £3 million from the Scottish Government.

I hope to see these plans make a difference to the rates of shoplifting Scotland has seen in recent months, and we will continue to liaise closely with Police Scotland as their planned actions are rolled out.

We have increased police funding year-on-year since 2016-17, investing more than £14.6 billion since the creation of Police Scotland in 2013. The Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government has initiated planning for the next Scottish Spending Review, that will identify opportunities to optimise the use of Scottish Government funding over the longer term.

The conclusion of the UK Government’s 2025 spending review will provide key funding information to underpin the Scottish Government’s own multi-year spending review. Provision of funding in future years will also be part of discussions with the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland to understand the budget requirement to deliver their three-year business plan.

As noted in my previous response on 6 January 2025 (S6W-32278 on 6 January 2025),applicants already have to agree to specific terms and conditions when signing up for the scheme, however we are working to strengthen these through changes to application forms to specify expected standards of behaviour when travelling and development of a behaviour code linked to operator’s conditions of carriage and existing legal protections.

We are exploring the legal means to suspend access to concessionary travel for perpetrators of persistent antisocial behaviour of any age, and this will inform development timescales. The National Concessionary Travel Schemes in Scotland are provided on a universal statutory basis, therefore detailed and thorough consideration of any process and penalty must be undertaken to ensure consistency and fairness.

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