Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government recognises the impact that periods of imprisonment, including time on remand, can have on families. That is why we are committed to reducing the use of short-term imprisonment, including remand and increasing the use of community-based interventions.

SPS are committed to ensuring that people in prison are able to maintain contact with their family during their time in custody. The SPS Family Strategy puts families and family contact at the heart of supporting prisoners during their time in custody. The Strategy doesn’t differentiate between convicted or remand prisoners and recognises the positive contribution that close family contact and involvement can make in supporting the reintegration of prisoners back into the community.

SPS support family contact during a person's time in custody - including on remand - in a number of ways. This includes in-cell telephony, letters and family contact through visits. Under the Prison Rules, those remanded have a greater visits entitlement than those convicted. Remand prisoners have the opportunity of access to daily family visits in prisons holding remand prisoners.

The Scottish Government has provided £3.9m in grant funding for Prison Visitors Centres since 2016/17. Visitors Centres provide a range of support for families and work in partnership with other organisations to make referrals to more specialist advice and support services for things including financial support, childcare, housing support and welfare counselling. This is in addition to £138k p.a. provided to Families Outside, an organisation which supports families affected by imprisonment so that they can readily access appropriate information and support at a time they need it.

We will continue to work with partners to develop approaches in this area, learning from those with lived experience.

We recognise the importance of ensuring that support is available to people leaving custody, including those who have served a period on remand, to enable their reintegration. We know that short periods of imprisonment are not effective and don't address the underlying causes of offending and that is why this Government is committed to reducing the use of short sentences and remand.

For those individuals who do serve a period of remand, the Scottish Prison Service have a range of measures in place to support them during their time in custody and on release. This includes an initial induction process which assesses needs including general welfare, mental health and addiction so that support can be put in place for them during their time in custody. This is further supplemented by support for family contact, provision of housing advice (where needed), access to work and wage earning where appropriate and possible and access to social services through prison Links Centres to deal with immediate concerns regarding social issues.

It is recognised that circumstances where individuals are liberated from a period on remand straight from court can be challenging in terms of linking with local services. To support this, SPS have agreed with GEOAmey that they will provide liberation packs to those released at courts (including those who have been held on remand). These information packs are specific to the local area within which the individual is being liberated.

Specifically for women held on remand, the Shine PSP, funded by Scottish Government, provides support in the lead up to their liberation and beyond.

We will continue to work with partners to explore how we can improve support for people leaving remand.

The following tables show a breakdown of the number of children in households reassessed as homeless within one year, between one and two years, between two and three years, between three and four years and between four and five years for the years 2015-16 to 2020-21.

In order for a household with children to be reassessed as homeless all adults on the application must be the same as a previous application and children (any number of) must also have been present on the previous application. It is possible for the number of children to have changed between applications.

Information at individual household level cannot be provided due to data confidentiality.

Data on the number of cases of child abuse reported to social services are not collected centrally by the Scottish Government.

You may wish to note that Children’s Social Work Statistics are published annually, and although these do not give the information you have asked for, they do show the number of children on the child protection register and the number of concerns at the case conferences at which they were registered.

The Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 (“The 2014 Act”) first introduced and defined the term ‘early learning and childcare’ (ELC). Prior to the 2014 Act, there was no statutory duty to provide pre-school education to 2 year olds.

The 2014 Act increased the number of funded ELC hours for all 3 and 4 year olds and introduced the statutory duty to provide access to funded ELC for eligible 2 year olds.

Since 2014, data on the number of registrations of 2 year olds receiving funded ELC has been collected for the annual census of ELC [1] . Prior to 2014, data was collected on registrations for funded pre-school education . Prior to 2012, data was not collected on registrations for children aged 2.

The current ScotWind Leasing Round (the first to be administered by Crown Estate Scotland) is targeting 10GW of further offshore wind capacity, and offers significant inward investment opportunities in Scotland’s domestic supply chain, alongside the creation of new high value, high skilled jobs. Applicants to the Leasing Round are required to submit a Supply Chain Development Statement (SCDS) that sets out the anticipated level and location of supply chain impact, and the provision of jobs throughout the lifetime of the project. Crucially, those who do not comply with the commitments laid out in their SCDS can expect to face consequences ranging from financial penalties to an inability to progress to a seabed lease. The introduction of Supply Chain Development Statements demonstrates that the Scottish Government is serious about holding developers accountable if they do not honour their supply chain commitments and we fully expect developers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to be engaging with the domestic supply chain from the outset to ensure that those commitments come to fruition. We have also been calling for, and welcome, the additional conditionality required by the UK Government for supply chain commitments in future Contracts for Difference (CfD) rounds.

The Scottish Government’s Grassroots Music Venues Stabilisation Fund (GMVSF) provided grassroots live music venues with emergency funds to help address the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and prevent closure. In total, £6.2 million of support was awarded to 85 venues throughout Scotland through two rounds of the GMVSF.

The recipients of the first round of GMVSF funding, awarded in September 2020, can be found here, broken down by (a) venue and (b) amount received: https://www.creativescotland.com/what-we-do/latest-news/archive/2020/09/funds-reach-grassroots-music-venues

The recipients of the second round of GMVSF funding, awarded in February 2021, can be found here, broken down by (a) venue and (b) amount received:

https://www.creativescotland.com/what-we-do/latest-news/archive/2021/02/funds-reach-grassroots-music-venues

The most recent long COVID statistics published by the Office for National Statistics on 5 August 2021 state that, over the four-week period ending 4 July 2021, an estimated 945,000 people living in private households in the UK reported experiencing long COVID (symptoms persisting more than four weeks after the first suspected coronavirus (COVID-19) episode that are not explained by something else). Of those people, an estimated 75,000 lived in Scotland.

According to the ONS August publication, as a proportion of the UK population, prevalence of self-reported long COVID was greatest in people aged 35 to 69 years and lowest for those aged two to 16 years. These detailed breakdowns are available only for the UK and not for each of the four nations, however, there is no reason to expect the age distribution to be different across the four nations of the UK. Detailed estimates are available at Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following coronavirus (COVID-19) infection in the UK - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) .

We do not currently have for Scotland a breakdown of people experiencing symptoms of long COVID by age. We are working with the EAVE II study, on which the University of Edinburgh and Public Health Scotland collaborate. Funded by the Medical Research Council, this study used pseudonymised GP and other patient data to track the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded across Scotland. This dataset is now being used in a separate project funded by the Chief Scientist Office to investigate long COVID, and will generate analysis of people assessed as having long COVID. Early results will be available later in 2021.

The Scottish Housing Regulator collects comprehensive data on sheltered housing provided by Local Authorities and other Social Housing Landlords. The latest published data, as at 31 March 2019, broken down by local authority, is available at:

https://www.housingregulator.gov.scot/media/1407/stock-by-provision-and-la-area-2019.xlsx . Data has been collected since 1999 but is not currently published by the Scottish Housing Regulator. This data has been published by Scottish Government from 2001 to 2013 (details below) and data for other years may be available from the Scottish Housing Regulator.

The latest available figures show that as at March 2019, there were 27,691 sheltered self-contained units (15,237 provided by Local Authorities and 12,454 provided by Housing Associations), 3,051 very sheltered self-contained units (769 provided by Local Authorities and 2,282 provided by Housing Associations) and 15,812 medium dependency self-contained units (6,673 provided by Local Authorities and 12,139 provided by Housing Associations).

The Scottish Government also collects information on the number of sheltered homes provided by local authorities. This data is available from 2001 to 2019, but excludes all local authorities which have transferred their stock to Housing Associations.

Latest available Scottish Government annual statistics on the local authority provision of housing for older people, including the provision of sheltered, very sheltered, and medium dependency housing up to 2019, are published at

https://www.gov.scot/publications/housing-statistics-scotland-2019-key-trends-summary/ , with detailed local authority level Excel tables available at https://www.gov.scot/publications/housing-statistics-housing-for-older-people-and-people-with-disabilities/ . These tables include Scottish Housing Regulator data from 2001 to 2013 on sheltered housing provided by Housing Associations.

The Scottish Government has not carried out specific analysis on this issue.

There are complexities and a variety of international travel possibilities within the global international oil and gas industry. Risk of Covid infection for workers travelling to and from installations on the UK continental shelf (UKCS) cannot be attributed to any single factor, but a comprehensive range of infection control measures has been implemented to reduce this to as low as reasonably practicable.

The regulation of occupational health and safety is reserved to the UK Government. Statutory responsibilities for enforcement in the offshore oil and gas industry lies with the Health and Safety Executive.

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 employers have a statutory duty to protect the health and safety of their employees, to undertake appropriate risk assessments and to put in place appropriate mitigations.

The Scottish Government has no statutory involvement in workplace health and safety regulation.