Chamber and committees

Refugee Festival Scotland is coordinated by Scottish Refugee Council. The Festival did not run in 2020 due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Direct Funding

The Scottish Government did not provide any direct funding for Refugee Festival Scotland between 2020-2025.

Indirect Funding

In August 2020, the New Scots partnership secured funding from the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) for the New Scots Refugee Integration Delivery Project (NSRIDP) to enhance the delivery of the New Scots refugee integration strategy. The project was led by the Scottish Government in partnership with COSLA, Scottish Refugee Council and the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow.

A total of £6 million of EU funding was secured, for a £6.6 million project running between October 2020 and December 2023, with the Scottish Government required to provide 10% match funding for the project. The project ended following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.

During the project lifespan, the following funding was included for Scottish Refugee Council to deliver Refugee Festival Scotland:

• 2020-21: £5,207.80
• 2021-22: £65,085.80
• 2022-23: £63,035.46
• 2023-24: £114,866.51

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-37757 on 30 May 2025. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers

The approach to pay for staff at the Scottish National Investment Bank aligns with other UK development banks and reflects the need to attract and retain staff with the necessary skills, experience and expertise from the financial services sector.

The Bank now has £786 million of investment commitments and has crowded in over £1.4 billion of third-party co-investment, bringing the total committed by, or alongside the Bank, to over £2.1 billion.

The Bank posted their first operating profit in 2023-24 of £3.2 million and have recently published their annual Impact Report up to the end of December 2024. The Report included these highlights:

• 207,042 people positively impacted by investments since launch
• 742 new homes supported since launch
• 3,091 jobs directly or indirectly supported during 2024
• £227 million supply chain spend in Scotland since launch
• 135,531 tCO2e avoided or removed since launch, equivalent to removing over 72,000 cars from our roads

Considering these positive results, the Bank and the management are delivering value for money.

The criteria for the Long Term Incentive Plan (LTIP) are developed by the Bank’s Remuneration and Nominations Committee for the start of each financial year. This committee is a subset of the Bank’s Board and do not themselves benefit from the LTIP scheme. Ministers review and approve the criteria suggested by the committee but have no role after that and are not involved in agreeing or approving any staff payments.

Once the LTIP criteria are agreed, the Bank’s Remuneration and Nominations Committee is responsible for assessing how the Bank’s staff have performed against them and approve any payments.

The Bank’s Annual Report and Accounts include a Report from the Chair of the Bank’s Remunerations and Nominations Committee which might be of interest (see page 96 onwards).

Health and Social Care Partnerships provide Public Health Scotland with a weekly snapshot of the current demand for Care at Home services. The data includes information on the total number of hours of care that people were waiting to receive, following an assessment of their needs. This information is available via the following weblink: Dashboard - People requiring a social care assessment and care at home services.

Please note that the information does not include the reasons why these hours of care were yet to be provided, nor does the Scottish Government hold information on local social care staffing levels.

The information requested is not held centrally for all years requested.

However, weekly data on the number of people waiting for a social care assessment is published monthly by Public Health Scotland at Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) level. The dashboard can be accessed via the following link:

People requiring a Social Care assessment and Care at Home services

Data is available from 24 October 2022 onwards. Comparisons over time should be made with caution due to a change in definitions implemented in January 2024.

Comparison of figures between HSCPs should also be made with caution and should be done in conjunction with the data quality notes available in the dashboard.

Not all Partnerships were able to provide all data. The data quality section of the dashboard provides more information on each of the partnerships' ability to provide data.

The Scottish Government is committed to improving the collection and use of data in health and social care, ultimately to improve outcomes for people.

For example:

a) We have set up the Social Care Data and Intelligence Programme Board (SCDIPB) to support and optimise the development and analysis of social care data. The Board is working to implement the recommendations of the Care Home Data Review (https://www.gov.scot/publications/care-home-data-review-full-report/) to streamline and improve the collection and use of social care data. Changes to TURAS Care Management have also reduced the data burden on care homes, providing a picture of available beds, occupancy and pausing duplicate data collections.

b) We have made significant progress in the data made available to General Practice, such as the collection of weekly capacity and pressures data provided by NHS Health Boards, and monthly activity data published by Public Health Scotland (PHS). We have also commissioned NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) to develop a Primary Care Data and Intelligence platform for March 2026, which will provide a single point of controlled access to general practice data.

c) In addition, we continue to improve NHS data collections by developing new diagnostic activity statistics and new data on Hospital at Home. This is being undertaken in collaboration with PHS and NHS NSS as set out in Scotland’s Data Strategy for Health and Social Care, published in February 2023. The Strategy sets out our commitments to improve the collection, use and sharing of data, more information can be found at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/data-strategy-health-social-care-2/.

While the Scottish Government has overall responsibility for health and social care support policy in Scotland, it is for local Integration Joint Boards (IJBs) to ensure that social care support services are in place to provide their population with the appropriate support in the right place and at the right time.

The Scottish Government does not hold data which would answer this question.

However, data up to 2022/23 on Social Care eligibility and waiting times is publicly available at Local Authority level via the following weblink:

Social care: eligibility criteria and waiting times Scotland 2022-2023 - gov.scot

Data showing the time waited between referral first contact and completion of a community care assessment service in the final quarter of each financial year can be found in the ‘waiting times new clients’ tab of the Excel workbook which accompanies the publication.

Data showing the time waited between completion of a community care assessment and delivery of a new personal care service in the final quarter of each financial year can be found in the ‘Waiting times new personal care clients’ tab of the Excel workbook which accompanies the publication.

However there are a number of caveats with these data:

• The data return template sent to LAs is aggregate, and only grouped time periods are collected. Therefore it is not possible to calculate an average waiting time - only a distribution of time periods is possible.
• Many local authorities have reported difficulty in providing the information asked for in this data collection and therefore not all data is available for every year.
• Due to the gaps in the Local Authority level data, we cannot effectively aggregate to Health Board. Completeness levels for each LA can be found within the ‘Data completeness’ tab of the Excel workbook which accompanies the publication.

Due to the issues faced in collecting this data from LAs and due to the lack of completeness, this data collection has been paused while we explore alternative methods of obtaining higher quality information on eligibility criteria and the length of time people wait for services. Therefore the most recent data available is for
2022-23.

Management decisions on the detail of Scottish Government staff resourcing and divisional structures, to ensure the right capacity and capability to deliver Ministerial priorities, are primarily a matter for the Civil Service.

The Scottish Government understands the pressures faced and have invested a record £21.7 billion in health and social care in 2025-26, which includes almost £2.2 billion for social care and integration

However, it is important to note that while the Scottish Government has overall responsibility for health and social care support policy in Scotland, decisions on how best to deliver services to local communities are ultimately for integration authorities and locally elected representatives to make.

While service delivery is ultimately a local responsibility, it is worth noting that the Scottish Government is taking action to reduce waiting times on a national level. On 31 March 2025 we published the NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan which sets out a clear plan to reduce waiting times and delayed discharges.

The Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework, which is scheduled to be published in June 2025, will also focus on the key reform areas that will drive our model of service to be more preventative, to find risk factors sooner and raise the level of early intervention and proactive care.