Chamber and committees

Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for MSPs to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

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Question reference: S6W-21006

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Tuesday, 05 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Mairi McAllan on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what the total value of any cash settlements awarded to defenders in any civil or criminal cases regarding Low Emission Zones has been to date.

Question reference: S6W-21005

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Tuesday, 05 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Mairi McAllan on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government how many legal challenges have been brought to date regarding Edinburgh’s Low Emission Zone.

Question reference: S6W-20853

Asked by: Liam Kerr, MSP for North East Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 25 August 2023
Current Status: Answered by Natalie Don on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide a breakdown of summer school programme funding that it made available in (a) 2021, (b) 2022 and (c) 2023, also broken down by local authority area.

The Scottish Government provided funding for summer programmes by calendar year below:

1. Total funding for the summer of 2021 - £15 million allocated to 32 local authorities via General Revenue Grant, and an additional £5 million provided to national public bodies and partners

2. Total funding for the summer of 2022 - £10 million allocated to 32 local authorities via General Revenue Grant

3. Total funding for the summer of 2023- £4 million allocated to 32 local authorities via General Revenue GrantThis funding provided in 2021 and 2022 was specifically aimed at developing additional plans for summer programmes on top of existing local provision to help children and families recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The additional £4million funding provided for the 2023 summer programme was to mitigate some of the costs, and to relieve financial pressures many local authorities noted they would experience associated with pre-planned summer activity.The detailed breakdown of funding made available to each local authority can be found in the following table:

Local Authority	2021 Allocation	2022 Allocation	2023 Allocation
Aberdeen City	£418,000	£279,262	£107,169
Aberdeenshire	£562,000	£355,229	£143,271
Angus	£335,000	£211,328	£83,227
Argyll & Bute	£232,000	£134,711	£55,450
Clackmannanshire	£162,000	£109,837	£46,553
Dumfries & Galloway	£529,000	£329,037	£135,492
Dundee City	£432,000	£293,671	£122,373
East Ayrshire	£405,000	£278,454	£107,297
East Dunbartonshire	£184,000	£105,186	£44,909
East Lothian	£277,000	£161,537	£64,931
East Renfrewshire	£187,000	£118,349	£46,851
Edinburgh, City of	£846,000	£575,459	£230,693
Eilean Siar	£78,000	£45,906	£17,994
Falkirk	£443,000	£286,300	£116,317
Fife	£1,160,000	£740,209	£299,516
Glasgow City	£2,249,000	£1,665,024	£662,910
Highland	£721,000	£465,403	£177,451
Inverclyde	£201,000	£131,096	£57,965
Midlothian	£252,000	£161,643	£65,939
Moray	£256,000	£173,447	£67,937
North Ayrshire	£452,000	£323,894	£131,670 2
North Lanarkshire	£1,104,000	£765,665	£294,095
Orkney Islands	£68,000	£40,589	£16,638
Perth & Kinross	£397,000	£242,363	£98,712
Renfrewshire	£436,000	£292,415	£120,655
Scottish Borders	£353,000	£208,377	£86,853
Shetland Islands	£53,000	£49,195	£13,852
South Ayrshire	£295,000	£189,380	£77,964
South Lanarkshire	£882,000	£576,816	£227,778
Stirling	£213,000	£138,819	£55,560
West Dunbartonshire	£276,000	£197,643	£80,212
West Lothian	£541,000	£353,756	£141,766

Question reference: S6W-21250

Asked by: Rachael Hamilton, MSP for Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Monday, 11 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Mairi Gougeon on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government how it will ensure that the payments structure under the Agriculture Bill will be clear regarding (a) the conditionality attached to each proposed tier of support and (b) how funding would be delivered to each tier.

Question reference: S6W-21102

Asked by: Roz McCall, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 07 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Natalie Don on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government how many childminders it estimates left the profession in each year from 2018 to 2022.

Question reference: S6W-21164

Asked by: Alexander Burnett, MSP for Aberdeenshire West, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 07 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Jenny Gilruth on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S6W-20478 by Jenny Gilruth on 5 September 2023, when the Strategic Board for Teacher Education will report on its study into issues around the recruitment and retention of teachers.

The Strategic Board for Teacher Education met on 4 September to consider their workplan including recruitment and retention issues. This work is ongoing and will be complemented by the project I am commissioning on education workforce modelling and research, which will be completed by the end of the year. The SBTE will use findings from the education workforce modelling and research project provide me with further advice on initial teacher education programmes.

Question reference: S6W-21058

Asked by: Monica Lennon, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 06 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Natalie Don on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what action it will take to increase the number of available early years and childcare places.

Scotland’s flagship 1140 policy is the most generous childcare offer in the UK, delivering high quality early learning and childcare to thousands of families.

There is nearly universal uptake for three and four year olds, and if families paid for this themselves it would cost them around £5,000 per child per year.

Independent research shows that 97% of parents were satisfied with the quality of the funded ELC they were receiving and 88% with a 3-5 year-old were satisfied that they could access it in a way that meets their needs.

Last week in the Programme for Government, the Scottish Government announced plans to develop local infrastructure and services needed to provide childcare for children from the age of nine months to the end of primary school in early adopter communities in six local authority areas in Scotland.

We are already delivering innovative school age childcare services to around 1,000 priority families through our early adopter work in four local authorities – Glasgow, Clackmannanshire, Dundee and Inverclyde. We will expand that to two additional areas – Fife and Shetland – and we will start to test innovative models of delivery to provide childcare for families with children from the age of nine months to the end of primary school. This investment will enable us to begin to create and test for the first time what an all-age childcare system will look like in Scotland.

The Programme for Government also set out plans to begin work to phase in an expanded national offer for more families with two-year-olds, focusing on those who will benefit most. We already offer 1140 hours of high quality funded early learning and childcare to around a quarter of families with two year olds who experience the most disadvantage. Over the next year we will work with local authorities and our partners in the sector to develop plans to expand access to around 40% of families in Scotland over time.

The Programme for Government also contained important commitments we have made to recruit 1,000 more childminders and to provide the necessary funding to increase pay to £12 per hour for early learning and childcare professionals delivering funded provision in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sector.

Question reference: S6W-21009

Asked by: Pam Duncan-Glancy, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 06 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Jenny Gilruth on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what data it holds on the reading ages of school children, and how it uses any such data.

Question reference: S6W-20889

Asked by: Rhoda Grant, MSP for Highlands and Islands, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Tuesday, 29 August 2023
Current Status: Answered by Mairi McAllan on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government how it plans to ensure that its recent statutory guidance on Scotland's Guiding Principles on the Environment is embedded in the process of developing a new agricultural policy framework.

The Scottish Government is committed to upholding high standards of environmental protection. The statutory guidance on Scotland’s Guiding Principles on the Environment will help ensure that these high standards are maintained through the policy development process. Once the duty to give due regard to the environmental principles comes into force later in the year, Ministers will be legally required to consider these principles in the development of new policies, including through the Strategic Environmental Assessment process. This requirement will encompass policies within the new agricultural policy framework. We have committed in our Programme for Government to ‘continue the Agricultural Reform Programme to produce more of our food sustainably, cut carbon emissions, and farm with nature, by increasing the uptake of carbon audits, soil testing, and biodiversity audits and funding to improve animal health’.

Question reference: S6W-21166

Asked by: Maurice Golden, MSP for North East Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 07 September 2023
Current Status: Answered by Mairi McAllan on 20 September 2023

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the progress of the five actions listed on page 25 of its report, Cleaner Air For Scotland 2: Towards a Better Place for Everyone, broken down by which actions (a) have been completed, (b) are underway and (c) have not yet started.

Year	Number of registered childminding services	Change from previous year
December 2018	5,108
December 2019	4,752	-356
December 2020	4,395	-357
December 2021	3,998	-397