Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to improving outcomes for babies and children and funds key initiatives, including the established Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) led by Healthcare Improvement Scotland. SPSP Perinatal currently supports NHS Boards to improve outcomes by reducing stillbirth, neonatal morbidity and mortality. The SPSP Paediatric Collaborative, launched in September 2023, aims to improve the recognition and response to clinical deterioration in children and young people.

The Scottish Government continue to fund and participate in UK-wide audits including Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries – UK (MBRRACE-UK), which undertakes surveillance on Perinatal deaths and makes recommendations for improvement, and are considered carefully with an expectation NHS Boards will review their local data and act on emerging themes. We wrote to NHS Boards on 12 September 2024 to ensure they have taken account of the MBRRACE-UK reports and National Records of Scotland data, and to seek assurances from those with higher-than-average rates that work is underway to understand and learn from the possible factors which may have contributed to these deaths.

Since October 2021 a National Hub has been in place to review and learn from the deaths of all babies, children and young people in Scotland. Commissioned and funded by Scottish Government, the National Hub is jointly hosted by Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Care Inspectorate. A principal aim of the National Hub is to channel the learning from child death reviews to inform change and improvement and ultimately help reduce future preventable child deaths.

NHS Dumfries and Galloway has confirmed that they are aware of the higher than usual rates within their NHS Board as published by National Records of Scotland, Births, Deaths and Other Vital Events - Quarterly Figures: Second Quarter, and have proactively been interrogating the findings to be assured that the numbers can be explained within the local context and not attributed to any shortcomings in care. It is important to note that quarterly National Records of Scotland publications data contains relatively small numbers, and the rates are subject to large percentage fluctuations.

The Scottish Government supports Screen Scotland, our dedicated public agency for screen, through Grant-in-Aid funding, with £10.25m in Financial Year 2024-25.

As set out in our Programme for Government, we will continue to support Screen Scotland to deliver their Strategy to 2030-31, ensuring the screen sector can reach our goal of £1 billion Gross Value Added to the Scottish economy by 2030, up from £627m in 2021.

Screen Scotland will also continue their excellent work in skills and education, making a career in film and television more accessible for more young people in Scotland, and helping our sector to stay globally competitive for future generations.

Since it was first established in 2018, Screen Scotland, has been instrumental to the success of our screen sector. By nurturing locally-originated content as well as attracting international inward investment, Screen Scotland ensures that the sector continues to grow strongly and sustainably.

The Scottish Government is clear that there is no place for religious or racial intolerance, including Islamophobia, in Scotland’s schools.

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence aims to develop a society based on social justice, equality and respect, and provides opportunities for pupils to develop their understanding of various forms of discrimination and their intersectional impact, including Islamophobia. The curriculum is clear in saying that responsible citizens must understand different beliefs and cultures, and have respect for others.

Education Scotland provides teachers with a range of resources to help them navigate sensitive or controversial topics, including discrimination on the basis of religious belief, and to help foster good relations. Recently their online Inclusion, Wellbeing and Equalities Professional Learning Framework has been updated to specifically include a Developing Religious Literacy component.

In addition, by taking an intersectional approach, the work of the Scottish Government’s Anti-Racism in Education Programme addresses many of the issues at the heart of Islamophobia. Actions which have been taken forward include:

• Developing a set of Anti-Racist Principles for the curriculum;
• Providing racial literacy professional development, through the award winning Building Racial Literacy Programme;
• Publishing an Anti-Racist Action Guide aimed at empowering local authorities to better support their minority ethnic workforce;
• Developing guidance to address racism and racist incidents in schools, to empower the workforce to recognise and tackle racism and prejudice in all of its forms.

Over 13,100 families have benefited from the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) programme since it began in 2010 with, on average, over 81% of mothers offered the programme taking it up.

A refresh of the Rail Services Decarbonisation Action Plan, informed by current progress with rolling stock procurement, is currently expected to conclude in early 2025.

Since 2016, the Scottish Government has provided funding to ensure that adult social care workers, delivering direct care in commissioned services, are paid at least the Real Living Wage (RLW). This pay uplift has been extended to workers delivering direct care to children and young people in commissioned services for the first time this financial year. We have transferred £230 million to Local Government to deliver this £12 minimum wage for adult social care workers and a further £20 million has been transferred to support the uplift for children’s social care workers.

The Scottish Government is proud to be leading the way in increasing minimum hourly rates of pay for the social care workforce among the four UK nations.

We are working in partnership with key stakeholders – including trade unions, providers and COSLA – to introduce sectoral bargaining for the commissioned adult social care sector. Once developed and introduced, sectoral bargaining will encourage improvements in pay, and terms and conditions, and also take into consideration the varied roles and responsibilities across the sector.

The Scottish Government and our partners are also taking action to promote social care roles as an attractive career, support routes in to the sector, and enable career development.

In collaboration with COSLA, we established the Joint Social Services Taskforce (JSST) to address priority workforce issues. One of the JSST Workstreams led by the Scottish Social Services Council and NHS Education for Scotland, is the development of a new Career Opportunities Tool to map the range of roles and careers on offer in social care, and potential pathways open to new and existing staff.

The Scottish Government committed to review and improve our process of developing, implementing, and reviewing devolved regulation to meet our economic, environmental and societal aims within the National Strategy for Economic Transformation. While there are no current plans to implement a Primary Authority system for devolved regulation, we will consider the merit of Primary Authority provisions with business and regulatory stakeholders in line with the NSET commitment and New Deal for Business Group recommendations.

In his most recent letter to the NZET committee on 12 September, the interim Chief Executive of Ferguson Marine indicated that the handover date for MV Glen Sannox of 30 September 2024 was delayed by around two weeks. Following successful Builder’s LNG sea trials the vessel is on track for delivery by mid-October 2024.

Following delivery there will be a period of familiarisation needed by the operator, usually around 6-8 weeks, to conduct further owner’s sea and berthing trials and conduct final operational readiness preparations before she is ready to enter service.

CalMac anticipate the vessel entering service on the Troon-Brodick route around the end of November based on current planning assumptions.

I met with representatives from Young Lives vs Cancer on 25 September 2024 to discuss their campaign.

Under the existing patient travel expenses schemes, financial support for travel to hospital is available for patients and authorised escorts, according to eligibility criteria and medical requirements. The families of patients with cancer aged under 18 who are receiving inpatient care can also already access financial support through the Young Patients Family Fund (YPFF).

Scottish Government has provided funding to Young Lives vs Cancer of £213,600 over two years (2023-2025) through the Children, Young People Families and Adult Learning (CYPFAL) fund. This funding supports the provision of advice on potential welfare benefits as well as direct grants to improve the emotional and mental wellbeing and reduce financial worries of young patients with cancer and their families.

There are no plans to expand the eligibility criteria for the YPFF at this time.

The Family Nurse Partnership has been carefully scaled up with quality since its introduction in 2010 and Scotland became the first country in the world to deliver FNP at scale in 2018.

The programme is delivered in 11 mainland health boards as follows:

• NHS Ayrshire and Arran
• NHS Borders
• NHS Dumfries and Galloway
• NHS Fife
• NHS Forth Valley
• NHS Grampian
• NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
• NHS Highland
• NHS Lanarkshire
• NHS Lothian
• NHS Tayside