Chamber and committees

Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for MSPs to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

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Question reference: S6O-04652

Asked by: Elena Whitham, MSP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, Scottish National Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 07 May 2025
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 14 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on what further action it can take in the current parliamentary session to tackle abuse against women and girls.

Question reference: S6O-04669

Asked by: Willie Coffey, MSP for Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley, Scottish National Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 07 May 2025
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 15 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on how many school pupils are currently studying computing science and how this compares to recent years.

Question reference: S6O-04667

Asked by: Liam McArthur, MSP for Orkney Islands, Scottish Liberal Democrats
Date lodged: Wednesday, 07 May 2025
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 15 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what engagement it has undertaken with the education sector in island communities, such as Orkney, which are reportedly seeing increasing pressures around funding and staff retention, particularly in relation to the provision of additional support for learning.

Question reference: S6O-04666

Asked by: Stephanie Callaghan, MSP for Uddingston and Bellshill, Scottish National Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 07 May 2025
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 15 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government, regarding the provision of vocational skills training, whether it will provide an update on its response to the 2025 ClimateXChange report, Training provision in Scotland’s onshore wind and solar industries.

Question reference: S6W-37113

Asked by: Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 23 April 2025
Current Status: Answered by Paul McLennan on 7 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the reported assertion that its failure to deliver a sufficient number of affordable homes has directly contributed to rising homelessness and the breach of legal safeguards.

Although there has been increases in homelessness applications and non-compliance with statutory duties in some areas, 12 local authorities reduced the number of households in temporary accommodation in 2023-24 compared to 2022-23 and 20 councils reduced the number of children in temporary accommodation.

Increasing housing supply is key to reducing levels of homelessness. As part of our £768 million investment in affordable housing in 2025-26, we are providing targeted funding of £40 million in 2025-26 to the local authorities with the most sustained temporary accommodation pressures. 80% of this funding has been targeted to five local authorities in the central belt experiencing the most sustained temporary accommodation pressures to help increase the supply of social and affordable homes through acquisitions, including, where appropriate, properties suitable for larger families.

We continue to work with our partners to increase the delivery of more affordable homes, the majority of which will be for social rent. We are taking all possible actions to help deliver more high quality, permanent homes, providing the right homes in the right places, and ensure a settled home for everyone.

We have a strong track record in affordable housing by supporting the delivery of more than 136,000 affordable homes since 2007, with more than 97,000 of those being for social rent. We remain focused on delivering 110,000 affordable homes across Scotland by 2032 with at least 70% for social rent and 10% in our rural and island communities.

Question reference: S6W-37124

Asked by: Mercedes Villalba, MSP for North East Scotland, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 23 April 2025
Current Status: Answered by Shona Robison on 7 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what the total amount generated from ScotWind leasing revenue is.

Question reference: S6W-37127

Asked by: Mercedes Villalba, MSP for North East Scotland, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 23 April 2025
Current Status: Answered by Shona Robison on 7 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what proportion of ScotWind leasing revenue is designated for (a) manufacturing, (b) assembly and (c) ports infrastructure in the offshore wind supply chain.

Question reference: S6W-37163

Asked by: Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 23 April 2025
Current Status: Answered by Natalie Don-Innes on 7 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reported concerns that rural nursery closures will force families to travel long distances or give up work due to a lack of childcare.

The Scottish Government recognises that high quality, accessible and affordable early learning and childcare is vital in rural and island areas to support children’s outcomes and to enable parents or carers to train, work, or study.

At a national level, several work programmes are underway to support childcare access in these communities. This includes funding a new national childminder recruitment and retention programme, making grants available to local authorities via the Addressing Depopulation Fund (two of which contain a focus on addressing childcare issues) and investing £16 million over two years into our six early adopter communities, including those in rural and island locations.

Decisions relating to the school estate, including whether to temporarily close council schools and nurseries, are for local authorities to make in consultation with the local community. Local authorities have a statutory responsibility to make Early Learning and Childcare services available to all eligible children within their area and are responsible for local service delivery planning, this includes a duty to consult and inform parents every two years regarding local demand. We are currently reviewing guidance on mothballing to provide greater clarity on when it is an appropriate action to take. That will ensure that local decisions are based on effective engagement with the community, better reflect the needs of rural families and help to maintain access to early learning in those communities.

I would therefore encourage any families affected by planned service closures to engage with their local council about how the Early Learning and Childcare needs of their children will continue to be met.

Question reference: S6W-37140

Asked by: Elena Whitham, MSP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, Scottish National Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 23 April 2025
Current Status: Answered by Jenni Minto on 7 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the availability of Scottish Medicines Consortium-approved therapies for patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease.

The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) assesses the clinical and cost effectiveness of newly licensed medicines, including medicines for advanced Parkinson’s disease, on a once for Scotland basis and publishes advice for Health Boards to consider. It is expected that Health Board Area & Drug and Therapeutics Committees (ADTCs) will consider making a SMC recommended medicine, or an equivalent, available on their local or regional formulary for routine prescribing within 90 days of SMC advice being published.

In March 2024, the SMC accepted for restricted use foslevodopa-foscarbidopa (Produodopa®) within the NHS in Scotland for treatment of advanced levodopa-responsive Parkinson’s disease with severe motor fluctuations and hyperkinesia or dyskinesia when available combinations of Parkinson medicinal products have not given satisfactory results. The SMC restriction was for use in patients not eligible for deep brain stimulation (DBS).

Question reference: S6W-37097

Asked by: Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 23 April 2025
Current Status: Answered by Ivan McKee on 7 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government how much it has spent on Amazon Web Services in each of the last three years.

The Scottish Government spend with Amazon Web Services in each of the last 3 financial years is detailed in the following table:-

Financial Year	Total spend
April 22-March 23	£534,815.88
April 23-March 24	£1,698,666.07
April 24-March 25	£1,659,999.71

New services hosted on Cloud Platform Services (CPS) are built on AWS – ScotPayments, Digital Identity & Digital Connectivity – these have all gone live over the past 3 years, increasing AWS spend as the services scale to meet their customer demand.

Currently there are 45 workloads on the CPS, 27 of which are on the AWS element of the platform. Through using the services contract with public cloud companies, SG services have to date saved £409,414 – these savings are against open market AWS costs.

Savings are being made through migration of applications to CPS from the SG data centre, which is due to close in December 2026. The closure of the data centre is expected to save an estimated £3.6M, between data centre upgrade requirements and increases in energy running costs.