Chamber and committees

A first release of Official Statistics on Winter Heating Payment will be published on 06 June 2023, covering up to 31 March 2023. Subject to disclosure control, the publication will include breakdowns of applications and payments by channel, including paper forms. The figures will also be reported as percentages of total applications received. These will be available on Social Security Scotland’s statistics publication page at:

https://www.socialsecurity.gov.scot/about/statistics/social-security-scotland-statistics-publications .

In line with the Code of Practice for Statistics, care will be taken to ensure that these publications are produced to a level of quality that meets users’ needs. Published data will be subject to disclosure control methods to protect the confidentiality of the data.

Data on the number of people who are eligible for the payment is not available.

The Scottish Government’s ambition, shared with COSLA, is for a trauma-informed workforce and services across Scotland. Since 2018, we have invested over £6 million in a National Trauma Training Programme, which provides freely available, evidence-based trauma training resources developed by NHS Education for Scotland (NES) and informed by experts by experience.

A trauma-informed approach has been incorporated into all learning plans for Social Security Scotland colleagues including recoveries officers. In addition to this, all recoveries officers undertake bespoke learning on understanding the potential impact of bereavement and having sensitive conversations. Specialist training in relation to vulnerability and debt collection has also been commissioned from Money Advice Scotland.

Due to the ongoing unprecedented challenging financial context the timetable for delivery of the remaining measures in the act has been revised in order to effectively fund the development and delivery of each provision. While full implementation of the Act will take place over a longer period of time, the revised timings will continue to deliver clear, tangible incremental progress, subject to parliamentary process:

• Firework Control Zone provisions will commence in advance of bonfire night 2023 as originally planned. Guidance for local authorities on how to consider and designate zones will be published to coincide with the powers coming into force.
• The personal fireworks licensing scheme will begin operating in autumn 2024 at the earliest – work is currently underway to procure and develop the IT system for this
• The implementation of the restricted days of supply and use provisions is paused to a future financial year. This includes the compensation regulation making power, which is attached specifically to restricted days of supply.

We will continue to monitor and evaluate the impact of each of the provisions as they are delivered to encourage the safer use of fireworks and reduce firework related harm and injury.

Social Security Scotland’s priority is to get decisions right first time and an extremely low number of re-determinations are carried out. The re-determination request rate for Child Disability Payment decisions made by Social Security Scotland is 4.6%, which indicates that the vast majority of clients are happy with the initial decision.

Re-determinations are an important part of the decision-making process as they give clients the opportunity to ask Social Security Scotland to look at their application afresh before lodging an appeal.

Child Disability Payment decisions are usually changed at re-determination stage because the client provides additional information that was not available when the initial decision was made. Social Security Scotland staff now make additional contact with clients at the initial decision stage. While this may add to overall processing times, it will help ensure that such information is available first time round.

Social Security Scotland directly employed 3,976 staff (headcount) as at December 2022. Of this amount, 69 were fixed term, fixed term student placements and modern apprentices. The remaining 3,907 staff were permanent.

Information on Social Security Scotland’s workforce are published quarterly with the most recent statistics from December 2022 published 14 March 2023, published workforce statistics .

Official Statistics covering the number of Scottish Child Payment applications received and processed are published as part of the regularly scheduled quarterly publication. The latest Scottish Child Payment statistical publication was released on 28 February 2023.

The next publication will be published on 30 May 2023 and will include information on the number of applications received and processed by the end of March 2023. Official Statistics for Scottish Child Payment can be found at: https://www.socialsecurity.gov.scot/about/statistics/social-security-scotland-statistics-publications

The requested information is not collected or held by the Scottish Government. This is a matter for NHSScotland Health Boards.

Officials from the Scottish Government are in touch with MG ALBA every week on detailed items of business. In addition, the Scottish Government has had more formal meetings with MG ALBA on 22 June 2022 and 15 March 2023.

These meetings covered a wide range of business outcomes including staffing, funding, performance figures, programme plans, projects and wider discussions with Ofcom, BBC and DCMS. For the year ahead the Scottish Government has arranged quarterly meetings with MG ALBA and these will continue to focus on our support for the channel.

While the decision to use rail is for the freight customer and its logistics provider, the Scottish Government has shown leadership in facilitating modal shift to rail with significant investment and innovative regulatory targets for 2019 to 2024 and 2024 to 2029.

The rail freight target is measured in net tonne miles and, due to the commercial nature of freight, tends to vary considerably from year to year. Currently, there has been an overall 7.6% drop in net tonne miles since 2018 due to a general contraction in the markets for various reasons, including the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic and the global economy.

New traffic to rail was 2.9 million net tonne miles in 2019-20 and 48.8 million net tonne miles in 2022-23. This reflects the five new rail freight services which have started in Scotland in the last twelve months including a cross border express logistics services .

The Director General and I had a constructive meeting in November last year during which we exchanged views on the depopulation challenges that both Scotland and Spain face and, following from the work done recently by officials in the Scottish Government’s Population and Migration team, proposed a policy exchange so that we can learn from the expertise in both countries.

The subject of Scottish independence was not an agenda item in discussion. However, Scottish ministers will always be polite enough during international meetings to answer any questions put to them about the Scottish Government's stated policies, including a legal, constitutionally sound referendum, as set out in our Programme for Government.