Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is monitoring with Creative Scotland the position of cultural organisations in the current crisis. The Creative Scotland board meets on 19 December to consider the option of using its UK National Lottery reserves to help maintain standstill funding for Regularly Funded Organisations through 2023-24.

This would include support for Eden Court which receives £500,000 per year. Creative Scotland will also offer ongoing flexibility in the use of existing Regular Funding, whilst also exploring support for organisations and the sector to innovate and explore new ways of working.

The Scottish Government recognises that this is an incredibly worrying time for the culture sector as a whole and is in regular dialogue with the sector. We are holding a series of roundtables including one planned for Inverness in January 2023.

The Chief Entrepreneur has had 24 formal meetings with businesses since his appointment, not including daily engagements through email, social media and wider events. These engagements reflect the urgency and drive which the Chief Entrepreneur has brought to his work in government as well as the broad base of engagement and relationship building required in order to successfully embed entrepreneurship across all sectors of the Scottish economy. A list of all engagements undertaken by the Chief Entrepreneur during this period will shortly be published through the FOI process.

The Scottish Government is clear that there is no place for harassment or abuse in any form in the workplace and that everyone has the right to go to work without fear of intimidation.

Equality Law and Employment Law, are reserved to the UK Parliament. In the absence of powers over employment law, the Scottish Government will do all it can within devolved powers to promote and embed fair and inclusive working practices. We encourage all employers to have in place robust workplace policies for preventing and handling issues such as bullying or harassment.

On 9 December 2022 we published a refreshed Fair Work Action Plan which brings together our original Fair Work, Gender Pay Gap and Disabled People’s Employment action plans, along with the actions from our new Anti-Racist Employment Strategy . It takes forward the next phase of actions to drive forward Fair Work and will make it easier for employers and partners to access information on the critical role Fair Work has to play in achieving positive economic benefits on an individual and collective level. The action plan highlights the issue of sexual harassment at work and offers a case study in the Equally Safe initiative funded by Scottish Government.

The Scottish Government’s Fair Work First approach asks employers in receipt of public sector funding to commit to Fair Work criteria, including ‘action to tackle the gender pay gap’ and ‘offer of flexible and family friendly working from day one of employment’. Going forward we will ensure relevant guidance includes good practice and signposting to advice and tools for employers on preventing and tackling sexual harassment at work, such as the Close the Gap Equally Safe at Work resource.

The Scottish Government welcomes the inquiry and acknowledges that the submissions made to the inquiry by people affected in England and Wales will correlate with the experiences we have heard about in Scotland.

We remain committed to taking steps to address the challenges for the people who have been affected by historical adoption practices in Scotland.

Network Rail advise that the list of 18 high priority stations to have tactile paving installed is as follows:

Transport Scotland conducts machine-based based surveys using specialist vehicles each year to gather information on the surface integrity of the road; the friction characteristics of the surface; and the structural capacity (strength) of the underling road construction. This is similar in nature to the Scottish Road Maintenance Condition Survey conducted by Scottish Local Authorities and it provides an annual snapshot of the road condition across the network. This is supplemented with a series of targeted inspections completed under the term maintenance contract to obtain specific information about the road asset. The combined information is used to determine maintenance programmes and investment requirements.

The information you have requested is not held centrally by the Scottish Government.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that all children and young people receive at least two hours of physical education per school week in primary schools, and at least two 50-minute periods of physical education per school week in secondary schools - between secondaries 1 and 4.

Under the provisions of Curriculum for Excellence schools and education authorities have the flexibility to decide upon the content of their lessons at the local level by taking into account the needs and circumstances of all children and young people in attendance. This includes taking decisions locally about the content of their PE lessons, where they can offer swimming lessons to their pupils if they wish to do so.

The Scottish Government meets regularly with NHS Lothian in relation to their current status on the NHS board performance escalation framework, this involves the Board working through and reporting progress against a formal Recovery Plan that covers all the BAA recommended actions.

Of the 36 BAA recommendations that NHS Lothian are progressing 81% have been completed. The remaining recommendations are well in progress with NHS Lothian ensuring that these are fully embedded with the evidence to support that prior to considering them as completed. All of the urgent recommendations are complete, over 70% of the high status recommendations are complete and almost 80% of the medium status recommendations are complete.

The Scottish Government continue to work to support and monitor the progress towards the completion of the remaining recommendations.

This information is not held centrally. Public Health Scotland do not hold the information that would allow us to identify individuals who have been referred to other countries within the UK.

We have made an initial £3 million available from our £10m long COVID Support Fund over this financial year to provide NHS Boards and partners with additional resource to respond to the needs of people with long COVID in their areas.

Territorial NHS Boards’ 2022-23 funding from the long COVID Support Fund has been split into two tranches. The first tranche (70%) was provided to NHS Boards in June. The second tranche (30%) will be made later in the financial year following progress reporting.

This is a well-established practice for the allocation of health board funding to account for any slippage in programme delivery, and is used across a range of policy areas.

The following table outlines the organisations to which funding has been made available for 2022-23, and the associated amounts. The full amount spent for 2022-23 will only be known at the end of the financial year.