Chamber and committees

At present, the Scottish Government has no immediate plans to develop a national governance portal, however, Scottish Government officials will work with the SFC, Colleges Scotland, regional strategic boards, trade unions, student associations, and the College Development network through the Good Governance Steering Group to implement changes to college governance in the best possible way.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-12954 on 20 December. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx' .

Alongside the other UK governments, we are working to reform the producer responsibility system for batteries to increase battery recycling and make it easier for consumers to dispose of batteries responsibly. The four governments will be consulting on our approach in due course.

We recently consulted on proposals to increase household recycling quantity and quality, as part of our Waste Route Map. This included a co-design process with local authorities, waste service operators, and residents to develop better service design and delivery standards. This process will consider the scope for potential materials for future recycling services, such as batteries, alongside available markets and reprocessing capacity for collected materials.

The Scottish Government is supportive of the reintroduction of ferry services from Scotland to Europe.

My officials in Transport Scotland have engaged with a number of interested parties proposing such services and we will continue to engage with potential operators and Scotland’s main ports to provide information and advice on what the Scottish Government can offer in support of a viable commercial proposition. The Scottish Government and Transport Scotland have also been engaging with port and haulage stakeholders to explore options to increase trade moved through Scottish ports and we continue to work with Scotland’s main ports to explore the possibility of new ferry services to the Continent.

The outcome which the Scottish Government anticipated would be delivered through its appointment of a Chief Entrepreneur was to have someone with exceptional experience of growing start-up companies to scale with the credibility and influence necessary to command the respect of industry, investors and public sector leaders to take on a key role at the heart of government which covers designing, advising on and supporting effective programmes to successfully embed entrepreneurship across all sectors of the Scottish economy. This current appointment achieves that outcome. Under the terms of his contract, the Chief Entrepreneur will be in post for an initial term of two years.

The Chief Entrepreneur has had 9 meetings with education institutions 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 in this time will shortly be published through the FOI process.

The Scottish Government has not engaged with Ocado regarding its digital deposit return trial.

We would anticipate that industry will make extensive use of digital technology in delivering our Deposit Return Scheme (DRS), for example by developing an IT system to track payments made and received, adopting state-of-the-art reverse vending technology to prevent fraud, and using digital media to communicate with the public regarding DRS.

We are aware of the so-called ‘digital DRS’ as a proposed approach to delivering deposit return whereby consumers redeem deposits on scheme articles by scanning them with a smartphone before placing them in their kerbside recycling. We considered this approach during the policy-development process for DRS and the strong feedback from both industry and environmental NGOs was that the technology is not sufficiently mature for implementation on the timetable for our DRS.

The Scottish Government Graduate Development Programme is recruited bi-annually. Our last recruitment onto the programme was in 2021 meaning we were not scheduled to recruit in 2022. Our next intake for the programme will be in 2023.

The Scottish Government does not currently hold this information. The Animal and Plant Health Agency has been asked by Scottish Ministers to visit farmed salmon slaughter facilities in Scotland and to assess the need for further inspections. This will be carefully considered alongside any recommendations made by the UK Animal Welfare Committee working group, expected early next year, on the welfare of farmed fish at slaughter.

The woodland carbon market is making an important contribution towards our Net Zero targets. Scottish Forestry manages the Woodland Carbon Code which is a UK-wide carbon standard and underpins integrity in the woodland carbon market. The number of validated carbon credits from creating new woodlands in Scotland under the Woodland Carbon Code has risen by over 60% since March 2020. There has been a similar increase across the UK. These figures show that the 50% target has already been met. At the end of September 2022, 6.3 million validated credits had been generated across 249 woodland creation projects in Scotland. This means that these projects are predicted to sequester at least 6.3 million tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes.

The information requested is not held centrally.