Chamber and committees

The Scottish Milk and Healthy Snack Scheme expands and improves on the UK Nursery Milk Scheme, which it replaced in August 2021, promoting better health outcomes for children through a nutritious and varied diet. All pre-school child care settings who are registered with the Care Inspectorate are eligible to apply to the Scheme if a child in that setting attends for 2 hours or more each day. When a settings registers to the scheme each child will be provided with a serving of milk or non-dairy alternative and a portion of fruit or vegetable every day they attend the pre-school setting.

• The budget for the Scottish Milk and Healthy Snack Scheme in 2022-23 is £12.5 million compared to £9.5 million in 2021-22.

We aim to ensure that all children and young people in Scotland have access to appropriate support for their mental health, at the right time, without stigma. We know that the Covid-19 pandemic has been exceptionally difficult for the mental health and wellbeing of many children, young people and their families.

Last year, we provided local authorities with £15 million to fund new and enhanced community-based mental health supports for children and young people. We will issue a further £15 million to councils this year, with almost £1.8 million going to the local authorities in Lanarkshire.

The services include supports for positive mental wellbeing as well as emotional distress, and are focussed on prevention and early intervention. The funding gives councils the flexibility to implement supports on the basis of local priorities. Establishing these services is a significant step forward in supporting the mental health of our children and young people; making sure they receive the help they need when they need it.

There are currently twenty community-based services in place across Lanarkshire, with further supports in development. For example, North Lanarkshire Council have put in place the ‘Active & Creative Communities’ projects, which offer sporting activities that promote mental health and wellbeing for children and young people aged nine and over. These include ‘Street Soccer’, a targeted resource supported by youth workers and coaches who can offer mentoring and link young people into other supports to help meet their wellbeing needs.

In South Lanarkshire, the ‘early help hub’ provides strengths-based support to families by listening to what they need at the earliest opportunity and ensuring they are on a pathway that meets their needs. Instead of waiting until families meet social work intervention thresholds, the hub works alongside families to determine what interventions may prevent problems escalating.

The local authorities in Lanarkshire have advised us that over 3,250 children and young people used community-based services in the region, in the second half of last year.

In addition, advice and support to parents with young children is available throughout Scotland through the ‘Wellbeing for Wee Ones Hub’ on Parent Club and the ‘Solihull Online child development programmes’. These resources provide families with young children with easy ways to support their mental health and wellbeing.

We also continue to invest in a range of measures to support children and young people in looking after their own mental health and wellbeing. This includes providing enhanced digital resources on mental health and wellbeing available via the ‘Aye Feel’ website and social marketing campaigns, managed by Young Scot and through the ‘Mind Yer Time’ resource supported by the Scottish Youth Parliament.

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.

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

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

The Baird and ANCHOR project forms part of the Scottish Government's ongoing commitment to renew and improve NHS facilities and is forecast to cost £233.2 million, in line with the approved business case.

The ANCHOR Centre is expected to be brought into operation in September 2023, followed by the Baird Family Hospital in March 2024.

I am pleased to confirm the publication today of the Scottish Government’s consultation on legislative proposals arising from Dame Elish Angiolini’s report into Police Complaints Handling, Investigations and Misconduct Issues.

The consultation is available via the Scottish Government website, as well as it’s Citizen Space portal at https://consult.gov.scot/ and Police Complaints, Investigations and Misconduct: A Consultation and will run until 16 August 2022.

Once the consultation has closed and the responses analysed, a summary of this analysis will be published publicly and I will ensure Parliament is kept informed.

We wish to hear from those interested in police complaints and conduct, including those who may have previously had a negative experience in dealing with police. The responses will inform how to improve transparency and further strengthen public confidence in the police.

We commend the significant progress already made by partners to drive improvements in this area, and their ongoing commitment to deliver change.

Through the Scottish Government-funded Living Wage Employer Accreditation scheme over 85 percent of workers receive at least the real Living Wage in Scotland. We are taking a range of action to further increase this number, including:

• Funding for Poverty Alliance to deliver Living Wage and Living Hours Accreditation and Making Living Wage Place recognition.
• ?Building on over £2.4bn worth of public sector funding between April 2019 and March 2021, including £619.8 million worth of contracts, through Fair Work First we are applying real Living Wage criteria to encourage employers to pay workers fairly.
• From October 2021, we are mandating payment of the real Living Wage in Scottish Government contracts wherever relevant and proportionate.
• Through the Bute House Agreement, by summer 2022, we will make it a requirement for public sector grant recipients to pay at least the real Living Wage to all employees, within the limits on devolved competence.
• Our funding agreement with COSLA to deliver Early Learning and Childcare expansion allows local authorities to pay sustainable rates that enables private and third sector services to pay at least the real Living Wage to staff delivering funded provision.
• We have led the way in increasing the minimum hourly rates of pay for the adult social care workforce among the four UK nations. In April 2022, the minimum hourly rate for those providing direct adult social care increased to £10.50 per hour - up from £10.02 which was introduced in December.
• Our Retail Strategy commits to delivering a Fair Work Agreement that retailers can sign up to and demonstrate their commitment to improve fair work, helping to reduce in-work poverty.