Chamber and committees

Work to scope out what the fund will deliver and how it will be managed is underway. Transport Scotland is engaging with key stakeholders on this and will confirm details in due course. However, the fund will look to build on the work undertaken through both the Bus Partnership Fund and Community Bus Fund with renewed focus on bus priority infrastructure to help address the negative impacts of congestion on bus services, and support local public transport improvements.

Our Public Sector Reform (PSR) programme is making a vital contribution to improving outcomes and achieving sustainable public finances in the longer term. We have set out a clear programme of PSR to Parliament, with a strong focus on the data, levers and workforce that will drive efficiency. To enable this work, we will implement an Invest to Save fund in 2025-26, backed by up to £30 million of new funding. This fund will support the cost of change to deliver improvements in efficiency, effectiveness and productivity, including cashable savings which will be recycled back into the fund, and we will work towards creating a self-sustaining fund.

Scotland’s volunteers make a fantastic contribution to people’s lives and our communities.

The Scottish Government provide direct funding to national and local intermediaries to support the national and local volunteering infrastructure. This includes funding for Volunteer Scotland to implement Scotland’s Volunteering Action Plan. This long-term plan seeks to increase participation and reduce barriers to volunteering for all. The Scottish Government also funds the local Third Sector Interface network who support volunteering across all 32 local authorities as well as funding youth volunteering and the Volunteering Support Fund.

Volunteer Scotland has strategic leadership of volunteering, including provision of a national advice centre and delivery of research. We very much welcome the launch, in September, of a national volunteering recruitment campaign, led by Volunteer Scotland, to address volunteer shortages. This will provide volunteer involving organisations with practical guidance and promotion materials to help attract and retain volunteers.

The Scottish Government recognises the important role that grandparents have in many families bringing up children, particularly following parental separation.

When the Children (Scotland) Bill (now the Children (Scotland) Act 2020 (the 2020 Act)) was introduced, the Scottish Government considered whether to include a presumption or right for grandchildren to have contact with their grandparents.

However, no such provision was included.A presumption in favour of a particular group of adults could cut across the driving principle of the legislation that the welfare of the child must be the paramount consideration in any contact or residence case.

We have no plans to change the law in this area at the present time.It remains possible for any person with an interest in a child, including a grandparent, to apply to the court to seek an order under section 11 of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 (the 1995 Act), which is the key provision in relation to contact and residence.

Section 16 of the 2020 Act sets out additional factors that the court must consider when deciding whether or not to make an order under section 11 of the 1995 Act.It provides that the court must consider the effect the order might have on the child’s important relationships with other people.This could include the child’s grandparents. Section 16 is not yet in force but the Scottish Government will consider in 2025 which further sections of the 2020 Act could be commenced.

The Scottish Government has produced the Charter for Grandchildren as part of the Your Parenting Plan. The Charter sets out that grandchildren can expect to maintain contact with their wider family except in very exceptional circumstances.

As set out in the 2023-24 Programme for Government, the Scottish Government has been reviewing its policy in relation to drinking water and wastewater with a view to bringing forward new primary legislation as soon as practicable. As part of the review, it is considering how the water industry needs to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

A consultation on detailed policy measures will be published in Spring 2025 and we would welcome all views and contributions.

The Scottish Government has received representations from retail representative organisations including the Scottish Retail Consortium, Scottish Grocers’ Federation and others through correspondence, and meetings with Ministers including the New Deal for Business Non-Domestic Rates Sub-group.

It was not possible to fund all the Scottish Government’s priorities in the budget but, despite the financial challenges, the budget continues to support businesses and communities with a competitive non-domestic rates regime including the reintroduction of a 40% relief for hospitality.

The freeze to the Basic Property Rate in 2025-26 is estimated to save ratepayers £9m a year compared to an inflationary increase, and our generous relief package is worth an estimated £731 million next year and includes reliefs which will benefit properties in the retail and leisure sectors such as the most generous small business rates relief in the UK. In combination, we estimate that around half of the properties in the Retail, Hospitality and Leisure sectors will continue to pay no rates in Scotland in 2025-26.

Information on the schools which meet the PE target is available from the school contact details dataset.

The percentage of primary schools meeting the target of providing at least two hours of PE per week as of July 2024 is 99.6%

In 2022-23 the Scottish Government provided SCQF with total funding of £44,000, and then a further £30,000 in 2023-24 to deliver its small scale Learning for Sustainability (LfS) grant fund to ensure there is a better offer on LfS-related qualifications for learners. In both financial years SCQF then allocated funding from this pot to individual projects within the overall funding amount – proposals were invited and then assessed and decided by an assessment panel involving officials and run by SCQF, based on agreed criteria. Ministers were not involved in final funding decisions to applicants.

In 2023-24 the International Sustainability Diploma, developed by the Futures Institute at Dollar Academy (FIDA), was successful in securing £6,030 of funding to support its accreditation at SCQF Level 6 and the course’s promotion to other schools and centres. The course is being piloted in approximately seven schools this year with the intention to scale it up further following this initial pilot phase.

In response to the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment, the Scottish Government committed to undertaking further work to develop a consistent, high quality interdisciplinary learning (IDL) offer that provides all young people with an experience and in time, a qualification, that is valued by employers and further and higher education. An IDL working group is bringing together relevant partners already active in this space to take this work forward, including Dollar Academy and Powering Futures.

The following table provides the number of recorded injury road collisions where a police officer attended the scene and ‘poor or defective road surface’ was recorded as a contributory factor.

As this is recorded as a single contributory factor, it is not possible to distinguish between collisions involving defective road surfaces and collisions involving poor road surfaces.