Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has been in regular dialogue with Creative Scotland regarding the draft Scottish Budget for 2023-2024. Officials meet regularly with Creative Scotland. The Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture had a regular meeting with the Chair of Creative Scotland on 21 December. The Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture also called the Chair of Creative Scotland on the 15 December once the Scottish Government draft budget had been published.

The Risk Management Committee is scheduled to meet on 21 March 2023.

The Scottish Government has had recent conversations with the UK Government in relation to the GREAT Talent Campaign. During this conversation, we requested a final evaluation to be shared with specific Scotland demographics.

The GREAT campaign is funded and monitored by the UK Government and questions relating to it are best directed to them. The Scottish Government does work alongside a range of partners in the Brand Scotland collaboration, which seeks to build our global reputation and present Scotland as a dynamic, fair and inclusive country in which to live/work, study, visit and do business. The campaigns run by Brand Scotland are designed to raise awareness of Scotland and can often be the first interaction between overseas businesses that encourages them to engage with our agencies on investment and buying opportunities.

An example of this is the Brand Scotland business focused campaign called Think Scotland which from April 2021 to March 2022 led to over 94 million global impressions of Scotland specific content and over 28 Million views of video content which was served directly to SDI target customers. This was supplemented with a further 500k social engagements on Scotland specific social channels and over 2 million visitor sessions to the Scotland.org website and over 379 visitor sessions to the SDI website. All of this campaign activity resulted in 873 calls, leads, enquiries being generated for relevant Inward investment or Trade teams to follow up on and a further 53 engagements generated from this activity with an estimated 650 further jobs in the pipeline for SDI to take forward.

The Scottish Government has not provided any funding support to Red Rock Power in relation to its offshore wind activities in Scotland. Officials last met with Red Rock Power in November 2022 to discuss progress on their development of the Inch Cape Offshore Wind farm off the coast of Angus.

Scottish Ministers are committed to protecting the natural environment which is demonstrated across a wide range of policy areas including biodiversity. A new global biodiversity framework was agreed at the UN CBD COP15 meeting in Montreal, in December 2022, with the aim of protecting and restoring biodiversity across the world. This framework includes a ‘whole of government’ approach – which we were successful in advocating for through the Edinburgh Process for biodiversity - and ‘whole of society’ approach.

We recognise the importance of biodiversity and the urgent need for action at all levels to tackle the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, to ensure a nature-positive world. In Scotland we will continue to work to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 and reversing declines by 2045, through our new Scottish Biodiversity Strategy and Delivery Plan.

Scottish Government officials have engaged regularly with the Department for Work and Pensions throughout the development of Winter Heating Payment. This engagement has covered discussion about policy as well as data requirements, system design and delivery of Winter Heating Payment. Regular engagement continues.

The groups and sub-groups named in response to question S6W-12170 that have an allocated budget are:

• Scottish Science Advisory Council £32,000
• Youth Work Strategy Review Group - £3,500
• National Bairns’ Hoose Governance Group - £14,400
• Race Equality & Anti-Racism in Education Programme Board - £350,000
• Gender Equality Taskforce in Education & Learning - £50,000

The other groups and sub-groups named in the previous response do not have allocated budgets. Any incidental costs associated with the running of these groups are covered by the relevant departments’ budgets.

In response to the request for members and leaders of the groups and sub-groups names in the answer to question SW6-12170, this information is available from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 63939).

The Scottish Government Trade & Investment (T&I) Envoy programme is voluntary in nature and is not remunerated or pensioned.

Trade & Investment Envoys are entitled to reclaim all reasonable expenses incurred while performing their T&I Envoy duties as requested by the Scottish Government, including the costs of travel, accommodation, meals etc., which are reimbursed at Civil Service rates.

The Workforce Development Group is newly established and had its first meeting on 29 November 2022. The group will meet bi-monthly with the next meeting scheduled for 30 January 2023.

Scottish Government officials engaged with the Met Office during the initial development of Winter Heating Payment policy. This was prior to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and included discussions about how cold weather events are identified for Cold Weather Payment and the location of weather stations. Further engagement took place at official level in 2021 and 2022.