Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to continuing to invest in NHS dentistry in rural areas, which is why we have updated the Recruitment and Retention Allowance to reflect the particular challenges in attracting dentists to work in more remote areas.

Dentists, who meet all the requirements and are providing GDS in a Classification 1 area, will receive:

• £25,000 paid over two years, at £12,500 per annum, for dentists in sub-part A of the first part of a dental list;
• £12,500 paid over one year for dentists undertaking VT.

Dentists, who meet all the requirements and are providing GDS in a Classification 2 area, will receive:

• £15,000 paid over two years, at £7,500 per annum, for dentists in sub-part A of the first part of a dental list;
• £7,500 paid over one year for dentists undertaking VT.

Local authorities play a vital role in the success of the Scottish Government’s Super Sponsor Scheme. They are uniquely placed to provide the support required to ensure those arriving are given the warmest possible welcome. This includes working with displaced people to identify and meet immediate and longer term needs. This will see displaced people registered with GP and school, provision of local information on services and area, advice and support to access benefits, receipt of initial financial support if required until benefits are accessed and paid, and advice and support on accessing further/higher education.

A full description of local authority responsibilities in supporting displaced people from Ukraine can be found in the Local Authority Guidance published by the Scottish Government.

Education authorities have duties under the Education (Additional Support for Learning) Act (2004) to identify, provide for and review the additional support needs of their pupils. This includes needs arising from the disruption caused by the mobility and deployment of a parent or carer in the Armed Forces and would include mental health and/or pastoral supports as appropriate.

We continue to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing through the provision of counselling through schools. This is now in place across secondary schools in Scotland. We have also introduced new guidance to support whole school approaches to mental health and wellbeing, complementing the work that education authorities and schools already do to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing.

Children of service personnel in Scotland will have their needs met by the supports outlined above and as such there are no plans to introduce a Service Pupil Premium.

The Scottish Government is modifying homelessness legislation in September 2022 to suspend the power of Scottish local authorities to refer a person who is homeless or threatened with homelessness to another local authority in Scotland on the grounds of their local connection. This will not affect processes in place related to social housing. This change was recommended by the independent Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group in 2018 and will give people in housing crisis more choice about where they live and access to the support they need.

Homelessness stakeholders support the principle of the suspension of local connection referrals. Some concerns have been raised by those local authorities with the highest volume of homelessness presentations. As the timing of the change was the primary concern, the Scottish Government delayed amending the legislation on three occasions, most recently in March 2022 due to the potential impact on homelessness services of the Ukrainian resettlement scheme.

The Scottish Government has put in place a robust monitoring and evaluation framework to measure any impact on local authorities’ homelessness and support services. The Ministerial Statement on Local Connection, published in March 2021, allows for appropriate action to be taken should the capacity of a local authority to meet its homelessness and housing duties be adversely affected by the legislative change.

The Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers and Scottish Women’s Aid have raised concerns about people who have restrictions on their movement, for example, people subject to multi-agency public protection agency (MAPPA) arrangements and convicted perpetrators of domestic abuse. The change to local connection legislation will not override existing protocols to manage these matters.

Any other concerns will be addressed as they arise through regular engagement with stakeholders. Appropriate mitigations and support will be put in place where there is evidence that this is needed.

Evacuation alert systems were introduced to all new high rise domestic buildings over 18m to assist the Fire and Rescue Service in the unlikely event of a partial or full evacuation of the building following the outbreak of fire.

The guidance in the technical handbooks is not retrospective and applied to new buildings or conversions from 1 October 2019. Local authority building standards services hold building warrant records, which should show which buildings have evacuation alert systems installed.

The percentage of the population registered with a NHS dentist in Scotland is broken down by NHS Board rather than council area and is published by Public Health Scotland (PHS). As of September 2021, the percentage of patients who are not registered with a NHS dentist is as follows:-

Ayrshire and Arran

• 15.3% of children
• 1% of adults

Borders

• 14.6% of children
• 15.7% of adults

Dumfries and Galloway

• 13.7% of children
• 8.5% of adults

Lanarkshire

• 13.2% of children
• 0% of adults

Lothian

• 16.1% of children
• 7.9% of adults

There are currently no plans to translate the guidance into formal regulations, however the Scottish Government keeps this under review.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on individuals who have personal emergency evacuation plans (PEEPs). Further information on fire safety and PEEPs can be found in the Practical Fire Safety Guidance for Existing Specialised Housing and Similar Premises and Practical Fire Safety Guidance for Existing Specialised Housing and Similar Premises .

Local authorities receive a notional element for housing activities in their general and capital grant funding, but it is for each authority to determine how its funding is used and we do not collect data on allocation.

The Scottish Government Practical Fire Safety Guidance for Existing High Rise Domestic Buildings includes a template and advice on carrying out a fire risk assessment of the building. The outcome of this assessment will give an idea of the relative risk of the premises and what mitigations might be helpful.

The Scottish Government worked with key partners including the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Her Majesty's Fire Service Inspectorate for Scotland when drafting the guidance. The guidance was widely consulted on setting out the reasoning for the approach taken.

As this requires a large data table to answer, a response has been provided through the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 63543).

This data is a subset of the most recent National Statistics on Police Recorded Crime 2021-22, which are available on the Scottish Government website here: https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2021-2022/