Chamber and committees

NHS Health Boards and local authorities are responsible for the provision of, and funding for, services for deaf children. This includes the provision of specific therapeutic approaches.

The Scottish Government funds the Scottish Sensory Centre and CALL Scotland to provide advice and training to school staff on support, including the use of assistive technology, for children and young people with specific communication and sensory needs.

Scottish Government and Education Scotland are currently developing options for a National Digital Academy. Details of timescales and funding will be available when these are complete.

The National e-Learning offer (a range of live, recorded and supported resources, funded by the Scottish Government and delivered in partnership with Education Scotland, ADES, the 6 regional improvement collaboratives, and EIS) continues to be delivered.

Historic Environment Scotland (HES) is the lead public body on the investigation of, care for and promotion of Scotland's historic environment. HES published retrofit guidance for traditional buildings in November 2021 at Guide to Energy Retrofit of Traditional Buildings | Hist Env Scotland (historicenvironment.scot) . The Scottish Government values their technical expertise and regularly relies on their work and input to help define the approach to retrofitting traditional and listed buildings.

For example, following a series of stakeholder workshops held in 2021, an expert Tenements Short Life Working Group was formed. A specific workshop looking at traditional and protected buildings was undertaken as part of this process and Historic Environment Scotland were a key participant in this group A. The Final Report and Recommendations of the Tenements Short Life Working Group will be published shortly.

We are committed to continuing to work closely with HES to shape our future proposals on a Heat in Buildings Standard to ensure the best outcome for traditional and protected homes and buildings and the people who live and use them.

Information on the percentage of plastic collected and recycled in Scotland, and outwith Scotland is available from SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) via its ‘waste from all sources’ data reporting tool: https://informatics.sepa.org.uk/WasteAllSources/

The consultation on the Scottish Biodiversity Framework closes on 14 December 2023. We will consider the analysis of responses and publish the final Strategy and Delivery Plan in Spring 2024, and the Biodiversity Investment Plan will follow shortly thereafter. This follows a short delay in producing the consultation on the Delivery Plan.

Since the independent Barclay Review of Non-Domestic Rates, we have implemented a range of key reforms and changes to the non-domestic rates system, some of which came into effect on 1 April 2023.

As set out in the Policy Memorandum, accompanying the Visitor Levy (Scotland) Bill, the policy intention is that a local authority can establish exemptions to a visitor levy scheme in its area as it believes are appropriate. The Bill therefore provides for a local authority to put such exemptions in place, which will be informed by advice in national guidance being developed by local government and business organisations in the Visitor Levy Expert Group.

The Health and Safety Executive (the HSE) operates across the UK including in Scotland under governance from the Department of Work and Pensions within the UK Government. The HSE is responsible for helping people be safer at work.

As part of their responsibilities for workplace safety, the HSE publishes workplace safety statistics for Scotland. In November 2022, they published the latest statistics:

Workplace health and safety statistics for Scotland, 2022 (hse.gov.uk)

In presenting these statistics, the HSE indicated that '... this report represents a profile of workplace health and safety in Scotland and its primary purpose is to provide Scotland specific equivalents of the statistics for Great Britain published across HSE’s Health and Safety Statistics pages. The figures also enable comparisons between Scotland and Great Britain to be made. However, any such comparative analysis should be interpreted with caution since any differences in health and safety outcomes are likely to be at least in part driven by differences in the industry sectors and occupations people work in.'

More specifically, the HSE has carried out a statistical analysis of fatalities in the workplace across the nations of the UK. On page 15 of their November 2022 report, they indicated the following:

'Over recent years, the fatal injury rate in Scotland has been consistently higher than that of Great Britain, but there is no difference in the rate of non-fatal injuries. One explanation is that in Scotland, a greater proportion of workers are employed in higher risk industry sectors or higher risk occupations, compared with Great Britain as a whole. It is possible to standardise fatal injury rates by adjusting them to account for differences in industry composition between countries and regions and a recent research report shows the effect this has on the relative rates of the countries and regions of Great Britain.

The following table shows estimates of the unstandardised and standardised country-specific fatal injury rates for the period 2015/16-2019/20 (the full report can be found at www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/adhoc analysis/updated-standardised-fatals.pdf) .

Number, un-standardised rate and standardised rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers (2015-16 – 2019-20)

The transfrontier shipments of waste is a reserved policy and details of waste exports outside of the UK are not published or held by Scottish Government, but are held by SEPA.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-22110 on 30 October 2023. 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 .