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We are engaging a range of stakeholders and women and girls with lived experience in the development of Scotland’s first equality strategy for women and girls.

The strategy will be co-designed with the First Minister’s National Advisory Council for Women and Girls (NACWG) and the Empowering Women Panel (EWP). The NACWG was established in 2017 to give advice to government on what needs to happen to tackle gender inequality in Scotland. The EWP was started in 2023 and is a group of 20 diverse women and girls from all parts of the country and all backgrounds who don’t normally have the chance to influence policy.

We are engaging widely and the first phase is ongoing, this will include:

• Inviting over 50 organisations to engage with the women and girls they work with to share their views on the development of the strategy.
• Two roundtables hosted by the NACWG with gender equality stakeholders and wider equality stakeholders to seek their expertise on the strategy.
• A round table with members of the Senior Leaders Forum to understand how the strategy can support public leaders to work collaboratively to deliver further progress in equality for women and girls.
• Individual meetings with stakeholders with key roles in the delivery of the strategy such as COSLA.
• A workshop with groups that hold gender critical views to ensure that we hear a breadth of views.
• Peer led research from the EWP seeking the views of diverse women on the development of the strategy.

The views and expertise from these meetings will be considered by the Scottish Government, NACWG and EWP and used to develop the content for the first phase of the strategy. There will be further opportunities to influence the strategy in phase two of its development due to commence later this year.

I was informed of the publication of cancer waiting times, scheduled for 24 June 2025, and provided with pre-release access to the statistics on 19 June 2025.

Scotland should be a place where everyone can participate fully within society, access their rights and thrive within their communities. To realise this vision, we must make bold and sustained progress in tackling discrimination and advancing equality across Scotland.

To support BSL users to communicate by phone in their preferred language, the Scottish Government funds Contact Scotland BSL, a free national Video Relay Service that enables British Sign Language (BSL) users to make phone calls via qualified BSL interpreters, available 24/7. A new contract for this service is currently being tendered, and the Government has engaged with the Deaf and Deafblind communities and their representative organisations to understand their needs and priorities for the future service.

The Scottish Government expects all public bodies to fully comply with their legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010, including the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). This duty requires public authorities to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different groups. These responsibilities should be embedded in all aspects of decision-making, including the design and delivery of services.

While enforcement of the Equality Act, including the PSED, lies with the courts and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)—which operates independently of the Scottish Government—the Government supports compliance through guidance, engagement with public bodies, and monitoring how the PSED is implemented in practice.

The commitment to deliver 40,000 additional operations and diagnostic tests was set out in the NHS Recovery Plan published in 2021. Progress reports have been published annually, the most recent being in December 2024: NHS Recovery Plan 2021-2026: annual progress update report 2024 - gov.scot.

In his speech on NHS reform and renewal in January this year, the First Minister announced that in 2025-26 the NHS will deliver of 150,000 extra appointments and procedures as part of the Operational Improvement Plan (OIP). This will be done through recruitment, extended working and regional and national working, including in the National Treatment Centres.

This additional activity will be backed by an additional investment of over £100 million this year. Activity will be targeted at long waits, ensuring that by March 2026 no one is waiting longer than a year for their new outpatient appointment or inpatient/day-case procedure.

As noted within the OIP, SG will report against progress publicly and to Parliament within 2025-26, using published statistics.

Tax code matters such as allowances and reliefs are reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government has no plans currently to change the number of Income Tax bands

Projections for social security costs in the coming years are established in the recently published Medium-Term Financial Strategy. Our approach to taxation is established in the Tax Strategy, which has already set out that we will not introduce any new bands or increase the rates of Scottish Income Tax in this parliament.

The Scottish Parliament elections in May 2021 resulted in 72 of the 129 MSPs elected on manifestos which commit them to a referendum on Scottish independence during this Parliament.

A range of publicly available polling evidence is available showing support for Scotland’s right to choose its own future, and the right of the people of Scotland to choose their future was the belief of all three main Westminster party leaders at Scottish level, who signed a pledge in 2014 saying: “Power lies with the Scottish people and we believe it is for the Scottish people to decide how Scotland is governed.”

Following the independence referendum, the cross-party Smith Commission, containing representatives of all parties in the Scottish Parliament, agreed that:

“nothing in this report prevents Scotland becoming an independent country in the future should the people of Scotland so choose.”

Scottish Enterprise continues to work at pace to triage enquiries and identify a route forward for viable proposals at Grangemouth, with a focus on how the public sector might be able to support the deployment of near term propositions. Ministers are receiving regular updates on the most viable proposals that have emerged from the triaging process, and ways in which they could be deployed, via the Grangemouth Investor Taskforce.

The decision to approve the donation of the surplus NHS Scotland medical supplies to Ukraine was made jointly by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care and myself. The submission, dated 18 September 2024, was released under FOI/202500451642. The transport of the medical equipment was provided as Official Development Assistance which, according to The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD, cannot be spent on military aid and this is a rule that the UK as a whole, including Scotland, adheres to.

The Scottish Government is aiming to publish the palliative care strategy - Palliative Care Matters for All – and its associated delivery plan, later this summer. This timing reflects the time taken to analyse the 169 responses to the consultation on the draft strategy which closed earlier this year, and to undertake further work based on this feedback to inform the strategy’s finalisation.