Chamber and committees

£4,346 was allocated during 2022-2023 to NHS Health Boards for the provision of small hot food appliances for all doctors in training. Health Boards were invited to liaise with their local British Medical Association representative with regards to the number required and location of appliances.

Transport Scotland’s trunk road maintenance budget is not allocated on a route or part-route basis. It is distributed based upon need and prioritisation of schemes developed from regular inspections and condition surveys.

For financial year 2023-24, the current programmes identify a maintenance investment total of £5.22M for the A9 between Inverness and Scrabster, for schemes delivered through our North West Network Management Contract . Programmes across the contract will remain under review depending on new or emerging pressures.

The schemes include investment in Active Travel measures, road and bridge maintenance, road safety schemes and works to improve network resilience under emerging climate challenges (e.g. earthworks, larger drainage schemes)

This is in addition to ‘core operations’ (e.g. weekly inspections, incident response, winter treatments) which the contractor delivers across the whole of the North West unit throughout the life of the contract. These are paid through a tendered monthly rate that cannot be disaggregated for specific locations or extents.

The Cladding Stakeholder Group is an official level meeting. Issues raised by stakeholders are fed back to Ministers and considered as part of the Cladding Remediation Programme. The group has met on the following occasions:

Scotland is in a global competition to attract talent. By taking us out of the EU and ending free movement, the UK Government has recklessly hindered our ability to attract people to Scotland. We want to build Scotland’s reputation as a career destination, promoting our growth sectors to students and workers across the UK and beyond.

The Scottish Government will launch a Talent Attraction and Migration Service in 2023. The service will support people who are thinking of moving to Scotland or who have just moved here. It will provide good quality information and advice to help people and their dependents settle into their communities. The service will also support employers based in Scotland to use the immigration system to help meet their skills needs. We are conducting research to understand users' needs and the barriers they face. Once we have concluded this discovery work, we will identify suppliers to deliver the service.

Furthermore, our Rural Visa Pilot proposal, published in September 2022, offers settlement support to migrants to promote integration within pilot communities.

While the operation of transport links across the Corran Narrows is the responsibility of The Highland Council and any decisions on maintenance, upgrades, or options to replace ferries the I recently met with them to hear more about the Council’s plans for the route.

A success rate of tree planting is not recorded as such. The planting is designed to deliver specific objectives such as landscape integration, screening/shelter, and ecological enhancement etc. However, this does not necessarily mean 100% of the stock planted needs to establish in order to achieve the objectives. A number of annual inspections are carried out by the landscape architect throughout each year of the 5 year establishment period. These inspections determine whether the planting is on course to deliver the intended design outcomes, and can result in remedial actions for the contractor to carry out.

The planting design is for a relatively high density of approximately 1 plant per square metre. It is anticipated that some plants will fail due to natural competition or the challenges presented by local conditions. In areas where a significant proportion of plants fail then it would be more likely that replanting will be required, and this has been the philosophy adopted for the first few years of the maintenance period. It is estimated that approximately 25% of plants have failed to establish over the first three years since planting. The inspections have determined that approximately 15% of plant failures will require to be replaced in order to achieve the aims of the design.

Transport Scotland provides an annual subsidy through the Network Support Grant (NSG) to the bus industry, the aim of which is to keep fares more affordable and support bus operators to run services that might not otherwise be commercially viable.

Transport Scotland are supporting more services to be commercially viable with extra funding for a marketing campaign from Scottish Government, to encourage people back to bus. Scotland also encourages bus use with the most generous concessionary scheme in the UK, with over 2.3 million people, including everyone under 22 and over 60, and disabled people and companions, eligible for free bus travel. This complements our broad package of long-term investment in bus, including addressing congestion through bus priority infrastructure.

The Scottish Government are currently undertaking a programme of work to improve the Community Health Index (CHI) systems. The new CHI is a single national system replacing the existing eight separate CHI systems and is due to go live in late summer 2023.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6O-02056 on 23 March 2023 which is available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at Meeting of the Parliament: 23/03/2023 | Scottish Parliament Website

The content of the Bill has not been finalised but the majority of the measures being considered for inclusion have already been subject to consultation. In late 2021, the New Deal for Tenants consultation was issued seeking views on a wide range of rented sector reform measures, including the introduction of a national system of rent control. A joint Scottish Government/ COSLA consultation was held on proposals for new prevention of homelessness duties early in 2022. The responses to both consultations are informing the development of our proposals.