Chamber and committees

In our draft Heat in Buildings Strategy we committed to developing and implementing a bespoke public engagement strategy for heat in buildings. This will have a focus on raising the profile of energy efficiency and zero emissions heating options so that people are aware of their benefits, as well as enabling people to actively participate in shaping the development of policy, incentives, and local level heat and energy efficiency planning; and promoting the support that is on offer to maximise take up.

The latest figures are from September 2015 and can be found in Zero Waste Scotland’s report: How Much Food Waste Is There in Scotland? , published in 2016, showing that over 1.5 million Scottish households had access to food waste collection.

The Scottish Government recognises the importance of the Doric Board and has provided funding to the organisation since its inception. The following table outlines these allocations;

The Scottish Government does not hold this data centrally.

The Gaelic Capital Fund is an important support mechanism for Gaelic projects across Scotland. The Scottish Government is currently considering a range of bids from across Scotland and a decision will be made on these shortly.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-02631 on 13 September 2021 September 2021. 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 .

Eligibility for Free Personal Care is identified by an assessment of need. The assessment is carried out by a member of staff of the local authority's social work department. Local authorities have a duty under the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 to assess the needs of people and decide, in the light of this assessment, whether they should arrange any services and, if so, which services.

A collaborative approach including stakeholder engagement was undertaken by Jacobs in taking forward the work to consider the roles and responsibilities of the bodies within Scotland as part of its review of transport governance structures. Transport Scotland published a report in July 2019: national-transport-strategy-transport-governance-working-group-report.pdf .

Stakeholders engaged in this process included: the National Transport Strategy (NTS2) Roles and Responsibilities Working Group; the Society of Chief Officers in Transportation in Scotland (SCOTS); Regional Transport Partnership (RTP) leads; Transport Scotland and Scottish Government modal policy leads; and public transport operators.

In July 2019, the Scottish Government launched a consultation on the draft National Transport Strategy for Scotland including two questions relating to transport governance regarding democracy, decision-making and delivery. Trade unions had the opportunity to provide a response to the consultation and one trade union, ASLEF, did so and 1, 221 responses to the consultation were received in total.

The Scottish Government has had no approach from either Sector regarding increasing the numbers of spoken language interpreters.

The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) is the national, strategic body that is responsible for funding teaching and learning provision, research and other activities in Scotland's colleges and universities. It’s budget provides investment in Scotland's colleges and universities to support the development of well-educated, highly-skilled people and to enable sustainable, inclusive economic growth through enhancing skills and securing world-class research and cutting-edge innovation.

Scottish universities are autonomous institutions therefore it is for the individual universities to decide how to distribute the places it receives between faculties, what courses to offer, and how many of the total funded places will be available on each course.

As I noted in my statement to Parliament on 24 June, a single NHS Board first discovered in December 2020 that a small number of women who had subtotal hysterectomies had been wrongly excluded from the cervical screening programme and subsequently developed cervical cancer. All affected individuals or their families were directly contacted on 15 April 2021 by their NHS Board.