Chamber and committees

While the management of Scottish waters is an area of devolved competency, the Scottish Government continues to work with the UK Government and other devolved administrations through the delivery of the Marine Wildlife Bycatch Mitigation Initiative (BMI) which is a joint plan for tackling bycatch across the UK to minimise, and where possible eliminate, bycatch of sensitive marine species. This includes an objective to improve our understanding of bycatch through monitoring, which we continue to do through our observer programmes.

Sustainability, support for biodiversity, and consideration of the wider ecosystem is at the heart of how we manage Scotland’s fisheries and protect our marine environment. For this reason, actions contained within both Scotland Fisheries Management Strategy and in the Blue Economy Vision for Scotland, sets out our ambition for the sustainable management and shared stewardship of Scotland’s seas and coasts.

The Future Catching Policy will take concrete action to support fishers to avoid bycatch of fish and other sensitive marine species – the aim is to reduce waste and increase the sustainability of the Scottish fishing fleet. As a first priority, we will take firm measures to increase selectivity by introducing additional technical measures were required to reduce unwanted catch, working with stakeholders to explore and deliver solutions.

There is an estimated 908 MW of community and locally owned renewable energy capacity operational in Scotland, as of the most recent annual update in December 2022. This represents 45% of our target of 2 GW capacity of community and locally owned renewable energy by 2030.

In the Onshore Wind Sector Deal, the Scottish Government and onshore wind sector have jointly committed to develop approaches to support and encourage community shared ownership models, and will publish a framework on this by the end of 2024.

Nature Scot are in regular communication with project partners Palladium, Lombard Odier and Hampden & Co who all remain actively involved in and committed to the pilot.

The Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES) supports communities across Scotland to participate in, and benefit from, the energy transition to net zero emissions. Since its inception, CARES has offered funding of over £61 million to over 800 projects and helped support the installation of 58.6 MW of renewable energy.

CARES funding is allocated across financial years. The breakdown of funding offered to groups for financial years 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 by local authority area is set out in the following table.

CARES is a demand-led scheme, and so relies on organisations submitting successful applications for funding. This means that there is often a difference between the CARES budget and the funding offered to projects.

The figures provided below relate to the date when funding was offered, and so do not necessarily correlate to when the funding was drawn down or spent by communities.

Statistics relating to Adult Disability Payment are published quarterly – the latest releases covers the period to 31 st July 2023 and is available on the Social Security Scotland website:

Social Security Scotland - Adult Disability Payment: high level statistics to 31 July 2023

Table 1 of the publication provides statistics on the number of applicants there have been for Adult Disability Payment, and Table 8 provides statistics on processing times. We can't provide data on longest processing times as we are unable to report on individual cases.

We have made a commitment to increase pay for those delivering direct social care to children and adults to £12 per hour from April 2024. Pay and conditions are of central importance in the wellbeing and retention of the social care workforce. We will continue to work with partners, including those representing Personal Assistants who support children and families, to build a more sustainable workforce who feel valued.

We have set up a short-life working group to better understand the pressures facing the children’s services workforce and to create and access more regular, real-time data about the workforce and vacancies, to achieve better planning of resources, improve workforce development and assist with career planning and pathways. This will also assist with retention of staff and more successful recruitment in the sector. We are committed to attracting and retaining the right people, developing them in their roles and raising the status of social care as a profession.

Following the planned conclusion of two previous governance structures, the Perinatal and Infant Mental Health Programme Board and the Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Joint Delivery Board, the Scottish Government and COSLA have agreed to progress this work through a new combined strategic board. This new strategic board will retain a strong focus on perinatal and infant needs and ensure that there is good integration with provision for older children, young adults and families. Embedding an equity led approach is also a key part of this work. We are currently working with key partners to agree membership.

The first meeting of the new strategic board is planned for later this year. Further information will be available on the Scottish Government website in due course.

I refer the member to my letter of 6 November 2023 to the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. Subject to the necessary client data being provided by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on the dates and to the quality standards agreed, Social Security Scotland will begin processing Winter Heating Payments from mid-December. Payments will be made in batches and those clients receiving payment in the initial batches can expect to receive their Winter Heating Payment before the end of December. We anticipate that the vast majority of payments to the remaining clients will be made by the end of January 2024.

The information requested is not held by the Scottish Government.

We fully recognise that we have more to do, and all institutions have to work hard to ensure students from deprived areas receive opportunities to achieve their potential.

The Scottish Government is engaging with the sector to develop a consistent and robust set of measures to actively identify students who would benefit from our Widening Access policy.

We have established an Access Data Short-life Working Group to consider proposals and to investigate other widening access measures and data sources alongside existing SIMD measures. The group is due to report its findings to Ministers this autumn.