Chamber and committees

NHS Health Boards must ensure that everyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, has equitable access to mental health care.

If a patient is dissatisfied with their care or access to services, they should first raise their concerns with their local Health Board. If unsatisfied with the response, they can also escalate the matter to the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) for an independent review.

We acknowledge that Highland has some of the highest rates of Huntington disease, we do not hold information to compare this to the rest of the country.

The fixed fee system was introduced over 25 years ago, in 1999. The initial move to fixed fees in 1999 was designed to reverse the substantial growth in costs seen throughout the 1990s and which led to significant reforms both in Scotland and England and Wales.

Fixed payments and block fees reduce the administrative burden on providers and streamlines the accounts process. That system was designed upon a basis that solicitors should be paid fixed sums for specified work recognising that different cases will require different amounts of work, and that different cases will have different degrees of profitability, but over the total population of summary criminal cases that a solicitor undertakes in a year, the sums that will be paid from the legal aid fund will provide reasonable remuneration. Solicitors can “opt out” of the respective fixed/block fee regime and charge on a ‘time and line’ basis in certain circumstances.

One of our short-term priorities for Legal Aid Reform, which arose from the Legal Aid Payment Panel is to progress fee review planning and collaborate with stakeholders on reform of legal aid fees in 2025. I intend to publish the Legal Aid Reform Discussion paper shortly.

Despite the powers to mandate community benefits being reserved to the UK Government, Scotland has made significant progress with the voluntary approach through the Scottish Government’s Good Practice Principles (GPPs) for Onshore Developments, which recommends community benefit equivalent to £5,000 per MW per annum. This was first published in the GPPs in 2014 and maintained in the 2019 refresh, following a public consultation and co-development with communities and industry. These Principles have been widely adopted with over £30 million offered to Scottish communities in the last 12 months.

We are currently undertaking a consultation on our Good Practice Principles for onshore and offshore renewable energy developments, which closes on the 11 April. We want to gather a wide range of views to ensure Scottish guidance supports sustainable and meaningful outcomes, and encourage everyone to take part in the consultation.

Our current bee keeping supplier uses the wax from their hives, including the Scottish Parliament, to supply the beeswax used for the Great Seal of Scotland.  We do not receive or make any payment in relation to this.

We have produced 144 jars in the last five years. Each jar is 227g. We received 99 jars in the financial year 2022/23 and 45 jars in 2024/25.

Violence towards anyone is unacceptable and the safety of our children, young people and staff at school is paramount.

Since May 2023, we have responded to schools’ concerns about relationships and behaviour in a number of ways. This includes the publication of new guidance on gender-based violence in March 2024, updating our guidance on mobile phones and anti-bullying, and providing £900k to local authorities to support training of support staff.

In August 2024, we published a joint relationships and behaviour in schools action plan with COSLA. The action plan sets out 20 actions to be taken over the next three years at both national and local level to help support schools to improve relationships and behaviour. This includes a number of actions under the theme of reducing violence and harm in schools.

In addition, through implementation of the Violence Prevention Framework for Scotland, we have invested over £4m in the last two years to help prevent and reduce violence across Scotland. In 2024-25, £2m of this investment is being used to support delivery of prevention activity focussed specially towards young people in collaboration with a range of partners. This includes:

• £156,000 to support the delivery of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), a peer mentoring programme , delivered in schools and supported by Education Scotland.
• £337,000, to support Medics Against Violence who run a number of violence prevention programmes, including a secondary school programme carried out by volunteer medics, centred around educating young people about the impacts and consequences of violence and how to keep themselves and their peers safe, and;
• £56,000, to support the Police Scotland Youth Volunteers Programme, aimed at young people aged 13-18, which provides the opportunity to engage positively within their local community.
• £297,000 to support The No Knives, Better Lives engagement programme through Youthlink Scotland, which is focussed on preventing the incidence of violence including knife carrying amongst young people and provides resources, training and support to local partners.
• The creation and launch of the Quit Fighting for Likes campaign, for practitioners to use to have conversations with young people, to help them explore the harm caused through the filming and sharing of violent incidents on social media.

Officials from the Scottish Government, Forestry and Land Scotland, Scottish Forestry and NatureScot are working together with counterparts in the Swedish Government and its agencies to explore opportunities for collaboration on the development of technical skills and techniques and best practices in respect to peatland restoration.

With an emphasis on workforce planning and training, our dialogue with our Swedish partners seeks to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our restoration efforts, while providing a platform to promote Scottish expertise with a key partner.

Myself and the Minister for Agriculture and Connectivity have not met formally with the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation since we were appointed to our roles in May 2024.

Despite the increase in resource funding for 2025-26, the Scottish Government recognises the challenges across the college sector.

The Scottish Government engages regularly with the college sector on a range of issues, including the 2025-26 budget, via Colleges Scotland.