Chamber and committees

For the financial year 2021-22, Scottish Development International (SDI) and its partners recorded 3721 new jobs and 4059 safeguarded jobs. These job numbers only cover the projects or companies that were directly supported or assisted by SDI. While the Scottish Government are not able to collect data on all jobs created in Scotland as a result of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the recently published EY Attractiveness Survey 2022 estimates projected jobs created in Scotland from FDI to be around 10,000 in 2021.

In spite of the challenging economic climate of the past two years, Scotland has continued its strong performance in attracting Foreign Direct Investment. The EY recent results shows Scotland’s FDI projects (in calendar year 2021) outpaced Europe and the rest of the UK – Scottish projects were up by 14% from 2020, compared to 5.4% increase in Europe and 1.8% increase in UK. This resulted in a record number of FDI projects in Scotland, 122 projects in 2021, up from 107 projects in 2020. Scotland maintained its position as the top performing FDI region or nation of the UK, outside of London, for the 7th year running. The benefits of our approach are being felt right across the country with five of Scotland’s cities/towns in the top 20 UK locations for investment, and Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen in the top 10 UK cities.

These are fantastic results for Scotland and shows that our Inward Investment Plan is working. It also demonstrates the importance of FDI in supporting the ambitions set out in our National Strategy for Economic Transformation, by attracting high quality inward investment and technologies required in areas such as Energy Transition, Decarbonisation of Transport and Space.

We met the commitment to begin providing free bikes to schoolchildren within 100 days of the new Government by commencing the ongoing pilot programme. The pilot programme is, by its nature, focused in scope with 9 projects testing a range of delivery models. We aim to roll the programme out more widely in 2023.

The pilot period will conclude at the end of August 2022. The projected spend to the end of the pilot period is £2,601,356.22. This is £870,369.34 resource and £1,730,986.88 capital. The resource element of the budget is not used to procure bikes, but to fund activity such as training sessions and staffing to support the objectives of the pilot programme.

The total number of bikes issued to date is 2067. We expect to have issued 3000 bikes by the end of the pilot period. The bikes include adapted and non-standard bikes to cater for a range of needs.

In addition, fleet bikes delivered by Sustrans Scotland to participating schools, but not given to any individual child, have been used 2927 times.

We do not record data on bike numbers at local authority level. However, considering bikes issued and associated training and promotion sessions, free bikes activities have taken place in 20 of 32 local authority areas. The 9 pilots are running across a range of locations including in urban, rural and island communities.

Abellio ScotRail (at the time), Network Rail and Transport Scotland were all involved in the development work leading to the publication of the Decarbonisation Action Plan ( Rail Services Decarbonisation Action Plan | Transport Scotland ) in July 2020. Battery trains, supported by partial electrification of routes were set out as an option alongside other forms of rail traction.

Transport Scotland and (now) ScotRail Trains Limited are regularly engaged in discussions over planning for the procurement of new zero emission rolling stock.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-09714 on 29 July 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 .

At a national level, there are two methods for monitoring of flowering plants: changes in plant distribution and changes in plant abundance.

In relation to the first method, the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) periodically publishes a complete Atlas of plant distributions, based on 10km square records gathered by volunteers.

Giant hogweed increased its distribution significantly in Scotland between 1930–69 and 1987–99. The increase was greatest in the eastern arable area and less pronounced in the Highlands and south Scotland. BSBI is due to publish its next Atlas in 2023. This will include changes in the distribution of plants between 1987-99 and 2000–2019.

Between 2010 and 2020, giant hogweed was recorded in thirty 10km squares where it had not been previously recorded. Giant hogweed is being controlled in more than half of these locations; the remainder are in locations where there is currently no coordinated control programme in place, and there is already giant hogweed nearby.

In relation to the second method, giant hogweed is not sufficiently abundant in the countryside to be detected by the National Plant Monitoring Scheme. Information on abundance of invasive plants is collected as part of individual control projects and is not collated centrally.

In 2017, ten Fisheries Trusts supplied information to the Rivers and Fisheries Trusts of Scotland (RAFTS) for an evaluation of effectiveness and lessons learned from catchment-scale invasive plant projects. Giant hogweed was the least prevalent and abundant of the invasive plants surveyed. Three Trusts reported it absent and a fourth discovered only one small instance of the plant. In all the other areas infestations averaged greater than 4,000 square metres. In Ayrshire giant hogweed had invaded 188,000 square metres. Giant hogweed is being controlled in all of these river catchments.

Responsibility for invasive non-native plants rests with landowners and occupiers. Under common law, there is an expectation that land owners should take reasonable steps to prevent invasive non-native plants growing on their land from causing a nuisance or injury to others. However, it is not a criminal offence for an owner or occupier to have invasive non-native plants growing on their land.

NatureScot can make species control agreements and orders to require control of invasive non-native species. This discretionary power is aimed primarily at preventing high impact invasive non-native species becoming established in and spreading within Scotland. For species that are already widespread, such as giant hogweed, NatureScot can offer species control agreements to support coordinated control programmes, where inaction on a particular land holding is jeopardising the success of the programme.

In the last ten years NatureScot has written to twenty-two land owners asking them to control giant hogweed, and to date there have not been any cases where a landowner has ignored such a letter or refused to cooperate with a coordinated control programme. In the majority of cases the landowner has allowed access for a third party to control giant hogweed on their land, or has carried out the control work themselves. In some cases NatureScot has allowed landowners more time to secure funds to control extensive areas of giant hogweed.

For example, NatureScot has entered into one species control agreement to control giant hogweed along the railway line north of Dunblane to prevent the plants from seeding onto the banks of the River Allan. This enabled Network Rail to prioritise plant control along this section of line within its annual maintenance programme. Network Rail’s control programme has been successful in reducing the extent of giant hogweed on the site but a small number of plants remained in 2021. The agreement comes to an end in 2022 and NatureScot will consider whether to extend the agreement or make a species control order.

Large-scale control across river catchments is an effective way to reduce the biodiversity impacts of invasive plants like giant hogweed. However, it is challenging to eradicate completely and control must be maintained for many years to prevent reinvasion of the catchment.

Eleven of the thirteen Fisheries Trust areas where giant hogweed is widespread have initiated coordinated control programmes. In some areas, such as the River Tweed, invasive plant populations have already been reduced to very low levels. In others, control is at an early stage and concentrated on the upper parts of the catchment.

In 2017, the Rivers and Fisheries Trusts of Scotland (RAFTS), carried out an evaluation of effectiveness and lessons learnt from giant hogweed control programmes within seven Trust areas (Horril et al, 2019). All of the projects reported decreases of between 53% and 75% in the area covered by giant hogweed, while the plant was completely cleared from 16% of the infested sites within four years.

The paper highlights that the main barrier to successful control of invasive plants has been the short-term nature of project funding (1-4 years duration). To address this, the Scottish Invasive Species Initiative aims to quantify the level of support and coordination necessary to maintain invasive plant control programmes in the longer term.

There are no plans to combine these systems which operate under distinct legislative requirements.

Both systems, however, seek to achieve shared strategic objectives, including achieving net zero emissions. Our work on planning reform is ongoing, including taking forward the provisions of the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 through policy, regulations and guidance. Building regulations address a wide range of building functions or performance standards, and complement broader provisions of the planning system. Improved energy standards will apply from December this year and changes will be made in 2023 to introduce provision for electric charge points in new developments.

Work is also ongoing to improve the consistency, transparency and accessibility of information in both the planning and building standards systems as part of our five year digital planning transformation programme.

The Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill was introduced to the UK Parliament in June. The stated purpose of the Bill is to “ make provision prohibiting the import of hunting trophies into Great Britain.”

The Scottish Government is strongly committed to the highest standards of animal welfare, and as set out in the Programme for Government, we promised to “work alongside UK administrations on legislation to control the import and sale of products that raise ethical concern”.

Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme is an industry-led scheme, based on the polluter pays principle. Circularity Scotland, who were established by the industry to deliver the scheme, will therefore lead on communication with businesses and the public. We intend to mark this milestone through media communications and the Scottish Government's net zero social media channels.