Chamber and committees

Plans to update the Marriage (Scotland) Act 1977 will be informed by the responses to our planned Family Law consultation. The draft consultation is currently being finalised and we expect to be in a position to launch the consultation by the end of this year.

As announced by the First Minister of 3 November 2025, health boards have been allocated an additional £25.5 million this year to allow them to deliver more planned activity for the longest waiting patients.

We have already allocated £110 million of additional funding this year, targeted at the speciality areas where it can have the biggest impact against the longest waits. Now we are providing a further boost to deliver more appointments and procedures, taking the total additional funding to £135.5 million for 2025-26.

The following tables set out the allocation of this funding in the Highlands and Islands region, broken down by health board and Planned Care speciality.

Table 1. NHS Highland

The Health and Social Care Standards, published in 2017, set out the expectation that care should be provided by health and social care professionals based on the most relevant evidence, guidance and best practice, as is appropriate to their profession and patient group

I refer the Member to the answer to question S6W-41594 on 10 November 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.

Incineration permit conditions required by the Pollution Prevention and Control (Scotland) Regulations 2012 prevent the incineration of separately collected recyclable waste.

The Scottish Government is supporting diversion of recyclable material from residual waste. We are making one of the biggest investments in a generation to modernise recycling in Scotland through the Recycling Improvement Fund. A total of £66.6 million has now been allocated to 27 local authorities for 48 projects to increase the quantity and quality of recycling across Scotland. We are funding a range of improvements, including more frequent recycling collections, the extension of food and garden waste collections, and boosting Scotland’s capacity to recycle problematic materials like plastic films. The household waste recycling rate increased from 43.5% in 2023 to 44.3% in 2024.

Local authorities in Scotland will also see around £150 million per year in funding to support collection of household packaging waste through extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging. These payments will start from November 2025.

Our plans to co-design a new household recycling Code of Practice are set out in the Circular Economy & Waste Route Map. The new, statutory Code of Practice will increase consistency, making the right choices the easier choices for households to maximise diversion of recyclable waste from disposal. This is alongside giving local authorities more powers to tackle persistent, deliberate contamination of recycling and waste bines, mirroring powers that are already available to local authorities in England and Wales, to ensure that recyclable material is correctly disposed of.

Scotland’s Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccination programme for older adults and an RSV vaccination programme for pregnant women, providing protection to newborn babies, launched on 12 August 2024.

RSV Vaccination is currently offered every year to those turning 75 years of age:

• In 2024-25 this included invites for all those turning 75 between 1 August 24 – 31 July 25.
• In 2025-26 this includes invites for all those turning 75 between 1 August 25 – 31 July 26.

In 2024-25 there was also a catch-up programme and all those aged 75 to 80 years (i.e. 79 years + 364 days) as of 1 August 24 were invited forward.

Those eligible in previous years of the programme, who did not come forward at the time, remain eligible indefinitely and can come forward at any point in the future, should they request vaccination.

The Public Health Scotland Vaccination Surveillance Dashboard includes data on the number of RSV vaccinations administered for both the pregnancy and older adult programmes. The dashboard can be found at https://scotland.shinyapps.io/phs-vaccination-surveillance/.

The data for older adults does not display how many people have been eligible to receive the vaccine, but it does include a percentage uptake figure and the number of vaccinations administered. The data published is available at national and Health Board level, for both 2024-25 and 2025-26.

The data published for the maternal programme is only available at a national level.

Three projects supported through the Hydrogen Innovation Scheme have requested no cost time extensions in order to fulfil their project outcomes. These requests have been granted by the Scottish Government and those projects currently remain active. The Scheme will come to a close in March 2026.

The Scottish Government does not hold the information requested.

According to the most recent Children’s Social Work Statistics, there are around 4,000 children in kinship care in Scotland. In a recent review of the Scottish Recommended Allowance for Foster and Kinship carers (SRA), of the 131 kinship carers who responded, 41% agreed that the financial support given to carers was fairer since the SRA was introduced, 37% said it had improved their finances, and 22% said it was sufficient to meet the full costs of looking after children in their care.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-41296 on 10 November 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.