Chamber and committees

In an extremely challenging financial climate, and following a worst case scenario UK Autumn Statement in which UK Ministers prioritised tax cuts over public spending, we have had to take difficult decisions in setting this budget. The amount Scotland has available to spend is still largely driven by the block grant, which is derived from the UK Government's spending decisions and continuing constraint on public expenditure. The block grant has fallen by 1.2% in real terms since 2022-23 and because of the UK Government’s failure to inflation-proof capital budgets, our capital spending power is due to contract by almost 10% in real terms over 5 years.

Despite this, I am pleased that this Government has committed £4.7 billion in capital and resource in 2024-25 for activities that will have a positive impact on delivery of our climate change goals, and funding of almost £3.9 billion for transport across Scotland.

A significant proportion of the expenditure in my portfolio is legally and contractually committed, and I have ensured that those commitments are met in full in this budget as well as allocating funding to support critical maintenance and renewal expenditure to ensure that the people of Scotland have access to a safe and reliable transport system.

I have considered equalities and fairer Scotland duties and progress towards our statutory targets for climate change and child poverty in prioritising the budget available to me. I refer to the Equalities and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement and Carbon Assessment published alongside this budget.

CalMac Ferries Limited are unable to provide the information requested as the data is not held in this format. CalMac do not measure vessels outage in days, as many technical issues are resolved in a number of hours.

I have provided reference to a previous Parliamentary Question S6W-15774 on 29 March 2023 with accompanying Bib number 64075, showing all weather related cancellation per vessel for the last 10 years. 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 .

Local authorities are responsible for the management of local roads and paths in their area, including design of low traffic neighbourhoods. The Scottish Government has provided guidance for these within the National Planning Framework , the “ Our Place ” website and Cycling by Design guidance.

The responsibility for the balancing of grid lies with the National Grid Electricity System Operator and wider system integration costs are set by the regulator, Ofgem. This data is not held by the Scottish Government.

Although the Scottish Government has not made an assessment of this, evidence from the Climate Change Committee suggests that integration costs could be around £10- 25/MWh for systems with up to 50-65% renewables but could increase further at higher penetrations. However, as the Committee on Climate Change note, it is challenging to estimate system integration costs and extensive assumptions are required to do so. Estimates of system integration costs are largely reliant on modelling. More details can be found here: Technical-Annex-Integrating-variable-renewables-into-the-UK-electricity-system.pdf (theccc.org.uk) .

As of January 2024:

• 25 Single Building Assessments have commenced. This includes one development where the Fire Risk Assessment of the External Wall (FRAEW) has been completed and the development remediated.
• 3 where an SBA has not yet been commissioned but pre-assessment discussions have been held with factors and agreement secured that an SBA will be commenced through the direct procurement pathway.

In September 2023, the Scottish Government launched the Community Bus Fund which supports local transport authorities to explore the options in the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 ("the 2019 Act") and improve public transport in their areas.

In 2023-2024 the Community Bus Fund made available £750,000 of resource funding for pathfinder projects, being developed by local authorities and regional transport partnerships. This funding was intended to support initial feasibility and preparatory work required for the 2019 Act, including franchising, partnerships and local authority run services. A further £5 million of capital funding in 2023-24 was allocated through the General Capital Grant to local authorities to improve bus services.

While the Scottish Government encourages local transport authorities to consider the full range of tools available to them under the 2019 Act, it is for them to determine what is best to address any transport challenges according to their local needs.

The Scottish Household Survey costs in the following table cover both the social survey (approximately 10,500 households interviewed per year) and the physical survey (approximately 3,000 residential properties inspected per year). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only 3,000 households were interviewed for the 2020 social survey, and the 2020 and 2021 social surveys were carried out by telephone rather than by the usual face-to-face method. There was no 2020 physical survey, and the 2021 physical survey inspections were external only, with information on internal aspects of the property collected from the householder by telephone.

The Scottish Government cannot direct the independent Scottish Housing Regulator to publish the daily rate of each person on its statutory managers list and, as such, will not be requesting that they do so.

Network Rail has an overall responsibility of the Scottish rail network infrastructure and Office of Rail and Road (ORR) holds Network Rail to account for the delivery of its obligations.

ORR publishes its quarterly and periodic (4-weekly) statistics on punctuality, reliability and causes of delay for passenger trains operating on the mainline network in Great Britain on its website: Passenger rail performance | ORR Data Portal .

Transport Focus carries out passenger satisfaction surveys on behalf of all train operating companies on the GB Rail network. In the last survey published in September 2023, ScotRail achieved one of the highest independent passenger satisfaction survey results amongst UK train operators, at 91%. This is a 2% increase from its previous score of 89% between December 2022 and March 2023.

It also represents a 1% increase in overall satisfaction with ScotRail since it came into public ownership.