Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is a member of the Trading Standards Policy and Coordination Group. This Group is coordinated by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) as the representative organisation for local government in Scotland. The Group seek to provide:

• strategic leadership of the trading standards function across Scotland;
• and effective co-ordination of trading standards priorities between local and national government and recruitment and retention of trading standards staff.

Since April 2021, Scottish Opera has undertaken the following number of productions in Scotland and in the Highlands and Islands region:

The Scottish Government is committed to enhancing safety across Scotland’s road network.

The Road Safety Framework to 2030 sets out a vision for Scotland to have the best road safety performance in the world by 2030. This contains mode and user specific targets focussed on our priority areas, including pedestrians and cyclists.

The Scottish Government has allocated a record £36m for road safety investment in the 2024/25 financial year. This includes £10m for the Road Safety Improvement Fund to support local authorities reduce casualty and risk on the local road network, and over £4m to support the delivery of projects aimed at reducing pedestrian and cyclist casualties.

To further protect vulnerable road users, a national behaviour change campaign will launch in March 2025, encouraging all road users to recognise the road is a shared space. Additionally, a dedicated stakeholder group has been established to monitor risks, identify emerging trends, and develop measures to address specific safety concerns for pedestrians and cyclists.

These measures reflect the Scottish Government’s ongoing commitment to making Scotland’s roads safer for everyone.

All overseas development assistance provided by the Scottish Government is guided by a rigorous process to ensure complete transparency and accountability focused on areas of need where Scotland’s aid can make an impact.

Following a review in 2021, and in consultation with our African partner country governments and civil society, the Scottish Government developed new thematic areas of focus directly aligned to the priorities of our partner country governments as set out in their respective development strategies. With a focus in particular on mitigating the impact on women and girls of the COVID-19 pandemic and reducing attainment gaps. As a part of this process, independent analysis and evidence papers were commissioned and published which underpin our two key larger areas of international development investment, namely the new health and inclusive education programming in Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia. A key consideration has been how best to focus international development investment on sectors in which Scotland can provide added value through existing expertise in relevant subject areas.

As new projects have launched, the participatory design phase has enabled delivery partners to engage with a range of stakeholders to continue to understand their needs and to work with them to create effective programmes that deliver for communities and align with national sector plans. A key example of this is our new Women and Girls Fund, under our Equalities Programme, where women and girl led groups in our partner countries have designed the scope of the Fund, towards advancing gender equality in Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia.

Since 2021, all new international development investment has been guided by the Scottish Government’s International Development Principles. This includes provisions for ensuring that the Scottish Government and our delivery partners are transparent and accountable to local communities and the general public in our partner countries and in Scotland; and that all of our work has appropriate safeguarding policies and practices in place. Ongoing strong monitoring and evaluation is a key consideration throughout programme management processes.

No, we have not assessed the impact of closing some international offices on Scotland’s ability to promote exports and attract investment.

As per Creative Scotland’s (CS) Regular Funding Organisation (RFO) handbook, CS works with organisations to ensure that expectations such as contribution to the development of the sector, best practice governance, management and leadership, and resilient financial health are met.

RFOs provide data and reports to CS on an annual basis and further detail on the monitoring data and information that CS gather can be found here: Project Monitoring | Creative Scotland

CS’ other funding activity to organisations is based on their Strategic Priorities and Funding Criteria, which is available on the following link: Strategic Framework and Funding Criteria | Creative Scotland

Since 2021-22, Creative Scotland distributed £251k to organisations registered in the EU (plus Norway). Full breakdown as follows:

Enforcement of traffic offences, including the illegal use of e-scooters and electric bikes, is an operational matter for Police Scotland, with oversight provided by the Scottish Police Authority which operates independently of Scottish Ministers.

The Scottish Government fully supports Police Scotland and its partners in dealing with the misuse of such vehicles. Local policing teams are ideally placed to identify where the misuse of such vehicles is causing distress to the public and ensure that those areas can be prioritised to prevent future incidents.

Police Scotland issued communications before Christmas, reminding people to consider the legal implications when purchasing an electric scooter or e-scooters. It urged people to be cautious when buying electric bikes or e-scooters reminding the public that some models may not be permitted for use on public roads and that anyone found riding a non-compliant e-bike or e-scooter on a public road will likely have it seized by officers, with a significant cost to the owner. It highlighted that further information on the use of electric bikes is available at: https://www.gov.uk/electric-bike-rules.

It is not possible to separately identify prosecutions under the Road Traffic Act 1988 that specifically relate to the illegal use of e-bikes. While the Act does not explicitly mention e-bikes, their illegal use may be prosecuted under a variety of offences. However, the Criminal Proceedings dataset does not hold this level of detail.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information. I have asked Police Scotland to write to you on this matter.