Chamber and committees

Our suicide prevention strategy Creating Hope Together, and our new Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Action Plan - both of which are joint publications with COSLA - have a strong and consistent focus on training across our workforce and our communities to enable people to better understand and support people affected by suicide.

In the recently published Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Action Plan, we committed to build on the work currently being undertaken as part of the Health and Social Care (HSC) Workforce Strategy to improve mental health and wellbeing workforce data, including on equalities.

Through our engagement on the Action Plan, we identified the need for improved comprehensive workforce data at national, regional, and service levels on the mental health and wellbeing workforce in order to enable planning of support and services. This includes addressing issues raised around access to workforce data, inconsistency, and accuracy of current workforce, as well as the need to better understand all roles within workforce.

We are continuing to support the timely reporting of workforce and trainee data for existing systems through our ongoing and constructive engagement with NHS Education for Scotland (NES), Health Improvement Scotland (HIS), Public Health Scotland (PHS), Health Boards and also with service leads directly on data improvement for existing systems.

This supports the future development and publication of Scotland’s first Mental Health and Wellbeing workforce technical document. As part of a phased approach, this will initially focus on the core workforce. We are now working with key partners to take this forward, with publication committed as a medium term timescale for delivery within the Workforce Action Plan.

The Scottish Government remains fully committed to enhancing community audiology services. We are continuing to work closely with NHS Boards, Independent Providers and the Third Sector to develop fully integrated and sustainable audiology care and treatment located closer to the local communities being served. Our approach will continue to be informed by holistic consultation with the audiology sector, as well as by outcomes from the recently published Independent Review of Audiology services in Scotland.

The Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Education and Training Strategic Advisory Group brings together senior leaders from key sectors and organisations to support a whole system approach to meet the ambitions of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy.

The group has held two meetings since it was established, which focused on initially on the development of the recently published Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Action Plan. The next meeting is due to take place on 11 January 2024 at which the group will consider the programme of work for implementing the education and training aspects of the Strategy’s Delivery Plan and Workforce Action Plan.

Scottish Government fund peatland restoration via the Peatland Action partnership. The individual delivery partners that make up this partnership apply their own grant offer terms and conditions regarding protections and restrictions on the land that receives money from them for undertaking peatland restoration. I would refer the MSP to those organisations for further information.

At a programme level, the Peatland ACTION Monitoring Strategy ( https://www.nature.scot/doc/peatland-action-monitoring-strategy ) is putting in place a structured approach to monitoring sites that have had their peatland restored to evidence whether we are delivering effective restoration.

In its November 2023 independent assessment of progress on climate adaptation, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommended that the Scottish Government “should set specific and quantified targets for levels of resilience across Scottish society under each outcome” of the next Scottish National Adaptation Plan.

The Scottish Government is considering all recommendations from the CCC on the structure of the next adaptation plan. Public consultation on a draft of the next adaptation plan is anticipated in early-2024 and we have asked the CCC to provide further views at this stage.

In its November 2023 independent assessment of progress on climate adaptation, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommended that the Scottish Government should include “a national assessment of the scale of current and future risks from weather-related cascading infrastructure failures” in the next Scottish National Adaptation Plan (SNAP3).

The Scottish Government is considering all recommendations from the CCC on the structure of the next adaptation plan. Public consultation on a draft of the next adaptation plan is anticipated in early-2024 and we have asked the CCC to provide further views at this stage.

The Scottish Government is committed to promoting and advancing Natural Flood Management (NFM) as one of a range of measures to adapt to current and future water-related environmental pressures.

The Scottish Government has provided funding over a number of years to both the Eddleston Water research catchment and Allan Water improvement project to help develop an evidence base to improve understanding of NFM. This evidence helps stakeholders understand its considerable value from a biodiversity perspective, and potential value as a complementary measure to improve flood resilience across catchments. Evidence already produced from these projects have indicated that NFM can help to delay flood peaks, deliver multiple environmental benefits and help mitigate the impacts of climate change. Evidence also indicates that flood risk reduction is limited in more extreme events.

The Scottish Government funds the Centre of Expertise on Water (CREW), and the James Hutton Institute to conduct both short and long-term research projects assessing the effectiveness of nature-based flood management solutions.

Our five year Strategic Water Research Programme (2022-2027) is funding the “Achieving Multi-Purpose Nature-Based Solutions” research project which is currently working to explore how to work at scales and across sectors to deliver urban and rural nature-based solutions that make a significant contribution to meeting society’s needs.

We are currently engaging with the UK Government on plans to implement the Electricity Networks Commissioner’s recommendations and will update local authorities and Heads of Planning Scotland at the appropriate stage.

The 25-year contract for HMP Kilmarnock under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) for a privately constructed and operationally managed prison expires on 16 March 2024. The decision to bring HMP Kilmarnock into public management and ownership and not to tender for a new private contract was taken in 2021. This is in line with Scottish Government policy that prisons should be owned and managed by the public sector, which has been in place since 2007.

The cost of private sector prison contracts depend on the market conditions at that particular point in time and in order to establish the cost of a new private sector contract for HMP Kilmarnock from 2024 this would have to be put out to tender. In line with Government’s long-running policy on private prisons the decision was made not to put it out to tender.

SPS is working to agree proposals for a transitional operating model, and a target operating model, which is to be adopted within the first year of the prison transferring to the public sector.