Chamber and committees

The export of waste is a reserved matter.

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes is the international Convention that governs the movement of hazardous waste, to which the UK is a party. The Convention, as implemented in UK legislation, bans all exports of hazardous waste to developing countries. Control mechanisms on the shipment of other types of waste from Scotland to countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are governed by retained European legislation.

While waste export legislation is a matter for the UK Government, we continue to actively discuss waste shipment regulations, in light of our commitment to a truly circular economy, to ensure our environment is protected, and that all waste is managed responsibly and sustainably.

To meet these objectives, we are calling for further action from the UK Government to deliver its existing commitment to ban plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries, and bring forward further measures to influence global markets and reduce imported and exported emissions. This includes making progress on the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendation to “phase out” exports of waste by 2030, which would support Scotland’s transition to a fully circular economy.

The current business case plans to deliver around 800 joint replacements, 1,200 daycases and 700 local anaesthetic orthopaedic cases.

The hospital will specialise in orthopaedics but may carry out other low complexity surgical specialty procedures once open.

The National Treatment Centres are all new build centres that are being developed on existing hospital sites as either a new stand-alone facility or as an extension to the existing hospital building. The exception to this is the NTC in Highland that is being built on a new site that is not an existing hospital site.

Carrick Glen is the only NTC that is being developed from a previously independent sector facility.

The Scottish Government recognise that GPs are often the first port of call for people in distress, or those seeking mental health and wellbeing support. We are already investing to meet our commitment to ensure that every GP Practice will have access to a mental health and wellbeing service by 2026. This will create 1,000 additional staff who can help grow community mental health resilience and direct social prescribing. £1.5 million was allocated in 2021-22 to support local planning and development and we will continue to invest in this.

This new commitment builds on the significant investment already made to recruit additional mental health workers in primary care settings. At 1 January 2022, 263.5 WTE additional Mental Health Worker posts had been created in GP settings through Action 15 of the Mental Health Strategy and, at the 31 March 2021, 215.7 WTE Mental Health Worker posts had been created under the Primary Care Improvement Fund.

The implementation of these multi-disciplinary mental health and wellbeing services will ensure more timely access to assessment, support and treatment and they will be available to all age groups, including children and young people. These services will interface with wider community support, such as the Distress Brief Intervention model which provides an innovative alternative for staff in Primary Care who encounter people in distress who are assessed as not requiring emergency clinical intervention, but need emotional and practical support. DBI is now available nationally to those aged 16 or over, and we are also trialling DBI for 14/15 year olds.

Additionally, in 2021-22, we allocated around an extra £40 million to NHS to support implementation of the National Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Specification. However, not all children and young people who require mental health and wellbeing support require treatment by CAMHS. That is why we provided local authorities with £15 million last year to deliver a range of mental health and wellbeing support for children and young people experiencing emotional distress in their communities. There are now over 230 new supports and services available across Scotland that supported over 18,500 children and young people between June-December 2021. We have committed to double the investment in children and young people’s community mental health support by the end of this Parliament.

We know that providing emotional support to school age children is vital. As a result of our £16 Million per annum investment, every secondary school now has access to counselling support.

The National Suicide Prevention Leadership Group is setting up a Youth Advisory Group to bring together young people with lived experience of suicide, self-harm and poor mental health. This Group will ensure suicide prevention policies and approaches are designed to reach, and support, children and young people. This includes informing the new suicide prevention strategy which will publish in September. Finally, the NSPLG is planning a social media campaign over the coming months aimed at young people, with the objective of encouraging young people to talk more openly about suicide, and to seek help.

We are determined to ensure that NHS dental services emerge well-placed to care for the oral health of the whole population and we are now moving forward with NHS dental recovery.

We have seen in April that the revised payment arrangements combined with the relaxation of IPC measures are having a substantial positive impact in improving NHS patient access and ensuring the sector is able to quickly return to more normal levels of activity and clear the backlog.

The Scottish Government is supporting organisations across Scotland to tackle the climate emergency. This includes, a further £1 million this year for the continued rollout of Green Growth Accelerators to support local authorities to develop low carbon projects and deliver £100 million over the next five years to help businesses via the Green Jobs Fund. Bespoke advice and support for businesses is also available through the enterprise agencies, Zero Waste Scotland, Business Gateway and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency. We are also supporting workers to engage in a just transition through the £100,000 we have provided for union capacity building. Our framework of regional climate action hubs and climate action towns is also enabling communities to engage in collective climate action.

In alignment with the clinical model, there will be no HDU or ICU beds within the NTC.

We provide a wide range of antenatal support to help reduce the effects of poverty. For example, Best Start Foods provides pregnant women in receipt of benefits, with £18 every four weeks. To improve the nutrition of pregnant women, we provide free vitamins and are working, on a UK basis, to introduce mandatory fortification with folic acid. We provide £2.3m annually to NHS Boards to implement the Maternal and Infant Nutrition Framework (2011) and we have agreed standards with them to ensure early access to antenatal services where fetal growth, smoking/alcohol use, diet and maternal wellbeing is monitored.

In relation to (a), (b) and (c)(i), the Care Inspectorate does not hold data in relation to care homes that have closed. However, the number of adult care home services in the public, private and third sectors which have had their registrations cancelled in each of the last five years is in the following table: