The Scottish Government contributes to attracting and equipping skilled people for rural and Island areas to promote the rewarding careers available and the economic and environmental benefits of investing in skills in the land-based, aquaculture and environment.

Operational decisions, including course provision and staffing, are a matter for individual colleges, who are best placed to respond to emerging trends in skills needs at local and regional level.

We are engaging industries and employers across Scotland, and will continue to do so, as we reform the post school education and skills system.

The information requested is not held centrally by the Scottish Government. Decisions about the fees for hospital education services are a matter for local authorities and NHS boards to consider as appropriate.

This funding will be met from across Scottish Government portfolios through reprioritisation and demand-led savings from existing spending. Future year budgets will form part of the upcoming spending review.

The Scottish Government provided funding of over £1.1m from the Equality and Human Rights Fund to organisations working to promote LGBTQI+ equality in Scotland in 2024-25.

This funding provides support for a range of initiatives, including supporting policy development for LGBTQI+ people, research into the lives of the LGBTQI+ community and an LGBT helpline.

Detailed information on funding the Scottish Government has provided LGBTQI+ charities and organisations in the financial year 2024-25 has been published on our website. You can view this at Equality and Human Rights Fund: projects funded - gov.scot.

The Scottish Government is not planning to undertake a Council Tax revaluation. Any suggestion of a revaluation could only proceed if a broad political consensus in favour existed – no such consensus currently exists.

Any changes to Council Tax must also be informed by robust evidence and wide public consultation. Our joint programme of engagement with COSLA on options for reform is intended to inform that public debate. This process will run for a number of years. Consequently, any substantial reform thereafter, including any suggestion of revaluation, would require a mandate from a Scottish Parliament Election and will not be possible this decade.

The powers relevant are contained within the Local Government Finance Act 1992 and related regulations.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-38980 on 23 July 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 Scottish Government is working with COSLA through the Joint Working Group on public engagement on Council Tax Reform. We have procured the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) to carry out expert and independent analysis to support this work.

The analysis is planned to be published in September 2025, in advance of any engagement activity. The budget for this independent analysis is £49,750, and is being managed within the existing resources.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-38980 on 23 July 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.

We are engaging a range of stakeholders and women and girls with lived experience in the development of Scotland’s first equality strategy for women and girls.

The strategy will be co-designed with the First Minister’s National Advisory Council for Women and Girls (NACWG) and the Empowering Women Panel (EWP). The NACWG was established in 2017 to give advice to government on what needs to happen to tackle gender inequality in Scotland. The EWP was started in 2023 and is a group of 20 diverse women and girls from all parts of the country and all backgrounds who don’t normally have the chance to influence policy.

We are engaging widely and the first phase is ongoing, this will include:

• Inviting over 50 organisations to engage with the women and girls they work with to share their views on the development of the strategy.
• Two roundtables hosted by the NACWG with gender equality stakeholders and wider equality stakeholders to seek their expertise on the strategy.
• A round table with members of the Senior Leaders Forum to understand how the strategy can support public leaders to work collaboratively to deliver further progress in equality for women and girls.
• Individual meetings with stakeholders with key roles in the delivery of the strategy such as COSLA.
• A workshop with groups that hold gender critical views to ensure that we hear a breadth of views.
• Peer led research from the EWP seeking the views of diverse women on the development of the strategy.

The views and expertise from these meetings will be considered by the Scottish Government, NACWG and EWP and used to develop the content for the first phase of the strategy. There will be further opportunities to influence the strategy in phase two of its development due to commence later this year.

Scotland is guided by the recommendations of the UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC), an independent expert advisory group which advises all four nations of the United Kingdom on screening policy. Following their last review in 2017, the UK NSC currently does not recommend introducing a screening programme for GBS. However, they are closely monitoring the GBS3 trial, which is investigating whether testing pregnant women for GBS reduces the risk of infection in newborn babies compared to the current strategy in place in the UK. Results are expected towards the end of 2025 with a review of recommendations.

All pregnant women in Scotland are provided with a copy of Ready, Steady, Baby! in the antenatal period through their midwifery care and can choose to access the information online, if they prefer. This is a comprehensive guide to pregnancy, labour, birth and early parenthood up to eight weeks and contains specific information for women on Group B Strep (GBS). The Scottish Government has also provided funding to Group B Strep Support (GBSS) through our Improving Health and Wellbeing grant scheme in 2023-24 and 2024-25 to support the development of an online learning module on GBS for health professionals and GBSS’s public awareness and education campaign.

More broadly, the Scottish Government has commissioned Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) to develop a set of maternity standards for Scotland, designed to drive improvements in care at a local level, which are expected to publish in Spring 2026. We also welcomed the introduction of the HIS Safe Delivery of Care in acute settings maternity inspection programme in January 2025. These provide independent assessments of maternity services in acute settings and can provide reassurance to all parents and families, as well as identifying areas for improvement.