Chamber and committees

In 2021-2022, the Scottish Government invested over £12 million to support free income maximisation, welfare and debt advice services and has allocated the same amount in 2022-2023. This overall figure includes frontline and second tier advice and debt services.

We also invest in a range of other services that provide advice and information to people on specific issues including Housing, Consumer, Additional Support for Learning, Kinship Care, NHS Patient Support and Fuel costs. In 2021-2022, we invested over £17.5 million in these services and have allocated over £20 million in 2022-2023.

Information on the number of children receiving free school meals, broken down by parliamentary constituency, is not available. The Pupil Census of 2021 reported there were 274,938 children in primaries 1 to 5 at all schools across Scotland, and 17,482 of those were registered with schools managed by South Lanarkshire Council.

Free school lunches are available to all children in primaries 1 to 5 during school term-time, therefore all children within this age group are automatically registered to receive them if they wish. We estimate that providing free school meals will save families around £400 per child, per year on average.

Section 11 of the Homelessness etc. (Scotland) Act 2003 requires a landlord to notify the local authority when proceedings for possession are raised providing information prescribed in Schedule 1 of The Notice to Local Authorities (Scotland) Regulations 2008. Landlords are not legally obliged to provide any further information.

The consultation was developed jointly with DEFRA and the devolved administrations. This is a UK-wide consultation aimed at the pig industry, therefore the Scottish Government will not be responding to it.

The process of gathering cull returns is ongoing and NatureScot continues to gather returns for the last three years. The most up to date figures are captured in the table below and will be available on the NatureScot website later this month. These figures will be regularly updated as additional information is received.

At present returns from approximately 950 properties for the 21/22 are still to be received.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-10057 on 18 August 2022. 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

The Scottish Government is focused on identifying key areas where deer management efforts will be concentrated to ensure biodiversity and climate change targets can be met.

The operational delivery workstream of the Scottish Government’s new deer project board is responsible for identifying priority areas where a focused and coordinated approach to deer management is required. This work is being carried out alongside the work of the regulation, incentives and legislative workstreams, and overseen by the project board.

The shared policy programme in the 2021 Bute House Agreement committed to establish a 10-year £500 million Just Transition Fund for the North East and Moray, with £20 million allocated to year one of the Fund.

The published criteria for projects seeking to access the first year of Fund allocations included a location based stipulation that “the bidding organisation must be headquartered, or demonstrate a strong connection to at least one of Aberdeenshire, Aberdeen City or Moray. The majority of project activity and benefits realised must also be within these regions. If bidding jointly, at least one partner must be based or have majority of operations in one of the regions.”

Spectating at sporting events is important to the people of Scotland and brings benefits in terms of enjoyment, stress reduction, socialisation and camaraderie with community, friends and family. Public transport has a role to play in enabling fans to get to and from sporting events, especially families and young people. The extension of free bus travel to all children and young people under 22 makes public transport more affordable, helping to improve access to such events while enabling them to travel sustainably early in their lives.

In Scotland we take a modal corridor approach to strategic transport issues for the last two decades. The Scottish Strategic Transport Projects Review 2 (STPR2) makes recommendations on the strategic corridors and TS continues to work hard with local and national partners to provide such connectivity; and local authorities have a key role to play too.

Transport Scotland engages with transport operators on decision making for meeting spectator requirements. With the introduction of Scotrail’s Fit for the Future timetable from 20 July 2022, reliability of rail service to sporting events has improved as driver availability has improved. Transport Scotland will monitor public transport offerings for sporting events.

The Scottish House Condition Survey is the source of National Statistics on fuel poverty in Scotland. The key findings from the 2019 Scottish House Condition Survey were published in December 2020 and estimated that 613,000 households were in fuel poverty in 2019. Furthermore, it was estimated that 619,000 and 583,000 households were in fuel poverty in 2018 and 2017, respectively.

Due to Covid-19, the fieldwork for the 2020 Scottish House Condition Survey was suspended in March 2020 and did not resume. The 2021 Scottish House Condition Survey was undertaken using a non-contact external plus approach and the results, including key statistics on fuel poverty, energy efficiency and external repairs, are expected to be published in February 2023. Therefore, at present there are no National Statistics estimating the number of households in fuel poverty in 2020 and 2021.