Chamber and committees

From April 2021 to the end of September 2023, the Heat in Buildings Programme has spent £340m, with an additional estimated spend of £163m over the remainder of this financial year.

• The programme forecasts are showing an increased demand that supports a continuing increase in capital support across the range of schemes offered by the HiBs programme. Final outturn will be based on actual demand for schemes and final budget allocations for 24-25 and beyond.
• We are continuing to make long term commitments to funding – for example, we have recently re-procured the Warmer Homes Scotland successor scheme at a contract value of £700 million over the next 5 years.

Scotland’s AI Strategy was published in March 2021. Taking account of recent and fast-paced technological developments and a growing international focus on the opportunities and threats which AI can offer, it is essential that Scotland has in place a strategy which keeps us on the forefront of those developments.

In a Scottish Parliament debate on 1 June 2023, I announced that I would ask the Scottish AI Alliance Leadership Group to undertake an independent review setting out what Scotland needs to do to optimise the benefits of AI. The review will set out recommendations on how we can maximise the potential of AI whilst minimising its risk and ensuring benefit for all.

The final review report and recommendations are expected to be available in early 2024, and will be shared publicly when available. The review is not a formal update of the strategy, more a refocus and refresh given the speed of development.

The budgets allocated are as follows:

I have commissioned an external research exercise to consider how best to progress the commitment to reduce class contact time by 90 minutes per week. Any reduction in class contact time will, additionally, require the agreement of the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers.

The research exercise will inform decisions on education workforce planning for future years, bringing together a range of factors, including current teacher numbers and pupil teacher ratios. The research is due to report by the end of December.

Glasgow City Council were awarded funding from the low carbon Vacant and Derelict Land Investment Programme (VDLIP) to support its project at Govan Graving Docks in February 2023.

The low carbon VDLIP is a capital programme which aims to tackle persistent vacant and derelict land and support place based approaches to delivering regeneration and sustainable inclusive growth, as part of a just transition to net-zero. It is available on a competitive basis to all Scottish local authorities and Clyde Gateway Urban Regeneration Company.

The VDLIP Independent Panel assess project proposals and make recommendations to Scottish Government on which projects should be funded, based on the aims and objectives of the fund.

A full list of projects warded funding from VDLIP is available at Low Carbon Fund: Vacant and Derelict Land Investment Programme projects - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) 

The fund will reopen for projects seeking funding for 2025-26 in April 2024.

The Scottish Government is committed to an infrastructure solution to address landslip risks at the A83 Rest and Be Thankful and shares the urgency communities and businesses place on maintaining and improving connectivity of this vital route.

The medium term solution consists of improvements to the existing Old Military Road through the Glen Croe corridor to make it a more resilient diversion route until the long term solution is in place. These improvements will improve the resilience of the diversion route, reduce journey times, and are the quickest to implement, of relatively lower cost and would have the least impacts overall across the range of criteria assessed of the medium term options considered.

A detailed programme for the proposed improvements is being developed. These include debris catch fences, temporary bunds, drainage improvements and widening and discrete realignment to improve bends and avoid flooding. It is expected that these works will be carried out on a phased basis starting later this year with Phase 1 which is realignment of the southern end of the route. It is anticipated that Phases 2 and 3 will commence in financial year 2024-25, subject to obtaining any necessary statutory authorisation consents. Construction of these phases is expected to take approximately 12 months subject to weather conditions.

The National Care Home Contract sets the rate for publicly funded care home placements and is negotiated annually between COSLA, Scottish Care and Scotland Excel. The Scottish Government is not a contractual party to it. We are pleased Scottish Care members voted to accept the 6% uplift offer from COSLA to agree the contract for 2023-4.

The Scottish Budget for 2023-4 provides record funding of over £19bn for health and social care, providing new investment of over £1bn and supporting recovery and reform to secure sustainable public services.

However, we recognise the challenges facing social care services such as energy costs, the costs of living and Brexit which has impacted the recruitment and retention of staff.

We continue to engage with the sector and other partners regularly to build a more sustainable workforce that feels truly valued and properly rewarded for their work.

Since being established in the winter of 2020 as part of the wider Winter Support Fund, the Scottish Government has made available a total of £48.47 million to date, to our third sector partners to deliver the Fuel Insecurity Fund. We have agreed a flexible approach to the delivery of support which ensures the Fund can be distributed quickly to those households who are at risk of self-rationing or self-disconnecting their energy use.

The Scottish Government does not hold the breakdown by local authority area, of individual fuel vouchers or household support payments made through our partners.

Our Fund partners work with their network of Scotland-wide referral partners to carefully assess eligible households for crisis support based on their individual circumstances and actual need.

The Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES) supports communities across Scotland to participate in, and benefit from, the energy transition to net zero emissions. Since its inception, CARES has offered funding of over £61 million to over 800 projects and helped support the installation of 58.6 MW of renewable energy.

CARES funding is allocated across financial years. The breakdown of funding offered to groups for financial years 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 by local authority area is set out in the following table.

CARES is a demand-led scheme, and so relies on organisations submitting successful applications for funding. This means that there is often a difference between the CARES budget and the funding offered to projects.

The figures provided below relate to the date when funding was offered, and so do not necessarily correlate to when the funding was drawn down or spent by communities.

Statistics relating to Adult Disability Payment are published quarterly – the latest releases covers the period to 31 st July 2023 and is available on the Social Security Scotland website:

Social Security Scotland - Adult Disability Payment: high level statistics to 31 July 2023

Table 1 of the publication provides statistics on the number of applicants there have been for Adult Disability Payment, and Table 8 provides statistics on processing times. We can't provide data on longest processing times as we are unable to report on individual cases.