Chamber and committees

The questions asked and the answers provided, during each of the Building Scotland (Amendment) Regulations 2022 - Online Q&A Sessions, were recorded and have now been collated and organised according to topic within a summary document.

This document is currently being finalised and will be published at: www.gov.scot/publications/building-standards-technical-handbooks-2022/ before the end of September.

The Scottish Government are currently co-designing the Disability Equality strategy with Disabled People’s Organisations. The co-design meetings will continue until February 2023. The strategy will be published in Spring 2023 once fully accessible versions are created.

Responsibility for the routine maintenance, upkeep and management of burial grounds in Scotland rests with the relevant burial authority. A burial authority may be a local authority or a private owner. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (as amended), owners must ensure any premises they are responsible for are maintained to a safe standard for both employees and visitors. The Burial ground memorial safety: local authority guidance was produced to assist local authorities meet their obligations to inspect and make safe memorials and headstones.

At this time the Scottish Government has no plans to provide financial support to local authorities for the maintenance of burial grounds.

It is not possible to estimate how much households have spent in total on installing these alarms during the six months before the statutory deadline in February 2022 as the number of households installing alarms during that period is not known.

Estimates of the number of households with legislation-compliant alarms will only be available when the results of the 2022 Scottish House Condition Survey are published. This is expected to be in late 2023 / early 2024.

Bikeability Scotland is a national cycle training programme for school children which supports the next generation of confident and responsible people travelling by bike. More than 41,000 children benefited from cycle training across all levels of the programme in 2020-21, and 37% of all primary schools delivered essential life skills through Level 2 on-road training.

The child poverty delivery plan 2018-2022 recognises transport as a key lever of poverty and child poverty through its impact on household income access to employment, education, goods and services. We have a commitment to provide free bikes to children who cannot afford one, and to date over 2,000 young people in Scotland have benefited from this commitment through our nine pilot projects.

Ensuring that every child leaves school with the ability to cycle safely, is not only about training. It’s also about providing a safe environment through the development of active travel infrastructure. We are committed to supporting many more people to walk, wheel or cycle for everyday journeys and are allocating record funding for that purpose.

The Active Travel budget for 2022-23 increased to a record £150 million; of which £137.7 million is capital investment. This includes the Cycling Walking Safer Routes grant of £35 million that goes directly to local authorities on a pro rata basis. We are investing in ambitious on and off-road segregated walking and cycling routes, safer junctions and improved design of place.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information centrally. Information on the reason for NHS dental treatment is held with the individual dentist. However, the overall number of courses of treatment which included the provision of a crown can be found on Public Health Scotland at: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/dental-statistics-fees-and-treatments/dental-statistics-fees-and-treatments-statistics-as-at-march-2021/ .

The Scottish Government has committed to investing £10 million in Changing Places Toilets (CPTs) over this parliamentary term. This investment will increase the number of these facilities across Scotland and support mobile CPTs, to allow disabled people easier access to public spaces, events and venues around the country.

The funding will be delivered in phases over the course of the parliamentary term. Plans for the CPT fund are currently being developed and further information will be available in due course.

The recent targeted review of the Capital Spending Review does not include a new funding stream dedicated to supporting new theatre spaces. The Scottish Government currently considers any request for capital funding of cultural venues on a case by case basis, dependent on a robust Business Case. We have provided £5.5 million towards the Citizens Theatre refurbishment, including a recent £1.5 million of additional support through Regeneration Capital Grant Fund, and will provide £6.5 million to support the King’s Theatre Edinburgh redevelopment.

Data on developer led remediated buildings is not held by the Scottish Government.

The Scottish Government and senior officials engage regularly with business leaders, representative organisations and industry bodies. During those conversations business have called for measures relating to the cost crisis including: energy price cap for business, VAT reduction, improvements to the occupation shortage list to tackle staff shortages and support in handling business debt.

As the powers to act on these requests fall within reserved responsibilities, I wrote to the UK Government on 8 August to urge it to act in response to these business concerns. I also called for the introduction of an energy price cap for SMEs and support for businesses to prevent closures, as well as investment in economic stimulus to minimise the scale of the projected recession.

The First Minister also wrote to the new Prime Minister in similar terms.

Business organisations have also suggested ways in which Scottish Government can help, including an easing of regulatory burdens; affordability of commercial rent; encouraging continuation of prompt payment; incentivising investment in renewable technologies coupled with improvements to the planning process to accelerate that investment; a freeze on non-domestic rates; capital investment for those businesses who are able to invest for the future; and a resilience fund to support the most extreme cases of hardship and where the business has a viable future.

We will set out the outcome of our Emergency Budget Review to Parliament in due course