Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has committed to developing a new hate crime strategy, for publication later this year, to help guide how we successfully tackle hatred and prejudice in Scotland.

On 28 April 2022, I chaired the inaugural meeting of the Hate Crime Strategic Partnership Group (SPG), comprising a range of third sector organisations and public bodies. The representatives on the SPG each possess specific expertise in tackling hate crime and building community cohesion, and will provide a multi-agency approach to development of a new hate crime strategy for Scotland.

At the meeting, the SPG discussed draft Terms of Reference and I invited members to share their key priorities for tackling hate crime, to help shape development of the new strategy.

In the coming period we will publish relevant information relating to the SPG, including membership and an agreed Terms of Reference.

The Scottish Government has contacted all Scottish hosts to check that people are happy to undergo statutory safeguarding checks and to gather more information about their offer. This information will then be passed onto local authorities so they can undertake the relevant checks.

The Scottish Government funded a £1 million Creative Digital Initiative to deliver a range of activity and support to upskill creative businesses in their digital capabilities and capacity through a public sector partnership.

Creative Scotland were allocated over £290,000 to deliver multiple projects, including a digital commissioning programme via The Space to help creative businesses grow the skills, knowledge and confidence required in key areas of their digital activity. Creative Scotland also delivered a Digital Pivot mentoring and peer support programme, and the Next Level Up programme to transform those who were already digitally engaged into digital leaders and support creative industries and to cultural sector participants to take the digital opportunity to the next level.

£40,000 of funding was allocated to the delivery of an XpoNorth web portal and nearly £30,000 was allocated to South of Scotland Enterprise to deliver digital skills webinars and short courses to support the understanding of the potential of digital.

Skills Development Scotland were allocated £60,000 to deliver a Creative Game Changers programme, providing specialist mentoring, coaching and 1-2-1 support, engaging with up to 20 creative businesses, freelancers or sole traders. Skills Development Scotland are also leading on an evaluation of the project to consider next steps for upskilling the digital capability of creatives.

£525,000 was provided to Scottish Enterprise to provide large enterprise grant support.

The CDI Steering Group will consider how best to allocate any remaining funds, using the CDI project evaluation to consider sector needs.

In November last year, Police Scotland had established a Gold command on the issue of spiking. Led by an Assistant Chief Constable, this comprised of a network of health partners, victim support organisations, colleges and universities and night time economy sector to achieve the right balance of targeted and universal intervention to ensure the safety of the public.

The Scottish Government is committed to working with partners to strengthen our response to spiking, and ensure that people are supported to report, if something does happen.

This includes ongoing work with health partners to explore clinical and reporting pathways and to ensure clear and consistent messaging for anyone accessing health services where a drink is believed to have been spiked.

The Scottish Government is committed to working across society to deliver lasting action that secures a just transition to climate resilience and net zero for Scotland. Our Just Transition Plans, representing a large degree of our policy, will identify concrete steps to manage the economic and social impacts of the transition fairly. We have committed to co-designing our Just Transition Plans to ensure they are underpinned by diversity and inclusion and support wider objectives on furthering equality and human rights across all protected characteristics. We will be publishing details on our approach to co-design, including the involvement of deaf and disabled people, shortly.

Beavers have the potential to bring significant biodiversity benefits to Scotland. They may also have adverse impacts on some land uses. Our main policy focus at this point is to prevent and mitigate negative impacts of beavers before damage can occur.

NatureScot can issue protected species licences to control beavers for the purpose of preventing serious damage to agriculture.

NatureScot also support land and fisheries managers experiencing negative impacts through the Scottish Beaver Mitigation Scheme. The Scheme offers land managers advice and practical assistance with mitigating the impacts of beavers including taking pro-active measures to prevent impacts where appropriate. NatureScot will continue to work with stakeholders on the mitigation scheme looking to develop new and innovative approaches.

Increased use of translocation of beavers will also help prevent negative impacts and as set out in the answer to question S6W-04596 on 24 November 2021, we will also provide both financial and practical support to facilitate this translocation of beavers.

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 has embraced the Community Wealth Building (CWB) approach to economic development as it is geared to helping local businesses and communities own a greater stake in how their local economy functions. The CWB model involves local authorities and their community planning partners ensuring that collective investment decisions focus on how local economies can be helped to grow and flourish. Practical benefits can include more local, good quality jobs; improved access to public contracts for local businesses; more land being placed in community ownership or developed for the benefit of the community; and support being offered to new businesses exploring employee ownership or other innovative models.

We are working with local authorities to help them frame strategic CWB action plans and have committed to introducing CWB legislation during this session of the Scottish Parliament. Our objective is to embed the CWB approach as a strategic economic development policy. Many actions taken across the policy spectrum will contribute to CWB and creation of a national economy striving for prosperity and societal wellbeing in equal measure. Community access to allotments can play a part in this collective effort.

Allotments and their provision are the responsibility of local authorities. That is set out in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. However, since 2012, the Scottish Government has allocated more than £1.4 million to directly support and increase the land that is available for community growing.

The Scottish Government ambition is that everyone who wishes to is able to access fair and sustainable employment, which is why we have committed to at least halving the employment gap between disabled people and the rest of the working age population by 2038.

Employability has a pivotal role to play in supporting these commitments, ensuring those further from the labour market, including people who have a learning disability, have access to the right support at the right time to move towards, into and to sustain work. In partnership with Local Government, we have made clear our joint aim of delivering person-centred services that are inclusive and accessible.

The Fraser of Allander Institute report highlights the importance of monitoring and evaluation, which we agree with. We currently have a longstanding programme of evaluation on Fair Start Scotland, and have recently commenced a formal, independent and robust evaluation of No One Left Behind and the Young Person’s Guarantee, which we anticipate will cover a multi-year period.

In addition to this, we routinely collect data across our services about people with disabilities and their outcomes, including follow-up after 12 months to measure sustainment. As we move forward with our No One Left Behind approach, we are also taking into account learning from what has worked well in other areas, and where we can make improvements.

The report’s findings mention the visibility of people with learning disabilities in the data reporting under Fair Start Scotland. We have mainstreamed this through our recently published Employability Shared Measurement Framework, which covers activity under the No One Left Behind approach. This will allow us to better measure the reach of our services for people with learning disabilities, and the opportunities and outcomes we are supporting them to access.

Furthermore, in line with our commitment to person-centred services, the experience of users is a critical measure of success, which is why it has such a prominent role in our Shared Measurement Framework. As part of this programme of evaluation work outlined above we will consider opportunities to evaluate the experiences and outcomes of those with learning disabilities, where possible.

In addition to the socio-economic findings, we recognise from ‘Invisible No More’ that more must be done to understand the gaps in the existing data sources. To address this we are undertaking an exercise to assess the data collected across Scotland relevant to people with learning disabilities and autistic people. This will inform the development of a data action plan that Scottish Government and its partners will take forward to improve the data across a number of topics, including employment.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-07181 on 24 March 2022. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers .

This data is not centrally available; whilst Public Health Scotland publish the total number of patients waiting for specialist mental health services, detail of the individual types of assessment or diagnosis is not held. The publications for both CAMHS and Psychological Therapies waiting times for the quarter ending December 2021 can be found at Publications - Public Health Scotland .

The Scottish Government is committed to implementing the National Neurodevelopmental Specification: Principles and Standards of Care for Children and Young People, published in September 2021, which specifies service standards that all children’s services should follow, to ensure access to support is effective and consistent across Scotland. Scottish Government have also commissioned Directors of eHealth, working with others including Public Health Scotland, to work to improve digital infrastructure, applications and data to report on all standards within the National Neurodevelopmental Specification.

The Scottish Government have also established the National Autism Implementation Team , in partnership with Queen Margaret University, to support Health and Social Care Partnerships to consider best practice and support improvement through the redesign of autism diagnostic services.

The National Implementation Team is supporting NHS Boards to examine diagnostic pathways for autism and establish regional experts to assist with improving tiered autism specialisms across health boards.