Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government published the Funeral Support Payment evaluation in July 2022, which found that the payment reduced the need for people to borrow money to arrange a funeral.

Social Security Scotland’s annual client survey monitors the impact of benefit payments. Respondents to the most recent survey in 2022-23 rated Funeral Support Payment an average of 8.7 out of 10 when asked to rate how much benefit payments had helped make a difference to their lives.

We are committed to continually improving Scottish benefits. As a result of evaluation findings and learnings since Funeral Support Payment was launched in 2019, we have recently introduced regulations into Parliament to make improvements to the payment, further supporting bereaved people.

We recognise the key role that private deer managers play in managing deer across Scotland. We expect to continue to work in collaboration with private deer managers in our objectives to modernise deer management across Scotland and want to work collaboratively with them.

As stated in the answer to S6W-30037 on 1 October 2024, we have consulted on a range of potential reforms to deer management. Alongside our public consultation we will also continue to speak with stakeholders to help inform any new legislation.

In addition to this we will be undertaking a number of impact assessments in relation to any provisions included in the Natural Environment Bill, including a Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment (BRIA).

BRIAs are used to assess the costs, benefits and risks of any proposed or policy changes that may have an impact on the public, private, third sector or regulators. These impact assessments will be an integral and necessary part of evidenced-based policy development in relation to deer management.

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.

Social Security Scotland routinely releases information on Funeral Support Payment including applications received, application outcomes and payments.

The following table shows total applications processed and the application outcomes by financial year since 2021-22.

The report from the Scottish Veterans Commissioner recognised the progress made in bringing forward the homelessness prevention provisions within the Housing (Scotland) Bill, which builds on the existing strong rights for people who are homeless, including veterans.

The number of homeless veterans in Scotland remains low and homeless veterans are a relatively small proportion (2%) of homeless households. However, we recognise that when veterans do become homeless they may have particular needs and we will continue to work with partners, including Veterans Scotland, both to prevent homelessness and improve housing outcomes for veterans.

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.

Officials meet NHS Boards regularly to discuss local issues, potential solutions and manage risk, which the Director of Dentistry attends. This includes Scottish Dental Access Initiative (SDAI) provision in the Tayside area.

The Chief Dental Officer wrote to Health Boards on 2 September 2024, confirming our intention to introduce a more targeted and evidence-based approach to SDAI provision, ensuring those areas with clear unmet need are supported.

I have asked Teresa Medhurst, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), to respond. Her response is as follows:

A Cell Sharing Risk Assessment (CSRA) must be completed before any individual is allocated to share a cell. SPS has no recorded instances of individuals sharing a cell that conflicts with a CSRA.

The CSRA will be used to make an informed decision on the individual's suitability to share a cell and if required alternative options are explored with the safety, security, health and wellbeing at the forefront of any decision made.

The CSRA process is used as the assessment process in accordance with Rule 28 (Accommodation of Prisoners) of the Prison Rules (Scotland) 2011.

The Scottish Government does not intend to publish details of any case studies in relation to regulatory powers under sections 7 and 8 of the Deer (Scotland) Act 1996.

However any legislation brought forward under the Natural Environment Bill will be justified and accompanied by published policy notes and impact assessments.

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.