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I welcome the recent refurbishment of Glasgow Royal Concert Hall earlier this year. The refurbishment upgraded the Main Auditorium seats and the stage lifts and allowed for important accessibility improvements.

There have been no discussions between the Scottish Government and Glasgow City Council and Glasgow Life regarding the future of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

In April 2022 increased planning fees came into effect, providing much needed additional resource to Planning Authorities. Whilst the use of this additional resource is a matter for individual authorities, some authorities have reported that the fee increase has allowed them to retain or recruit new members of staff.

Improving the resourcing and performance of the planning system are important priorities and we continue to work with Heads of Planning Scotland, the Royal Town Planning Institute and other stakeholders to implement the recommendations of the Future Planners Project Report which focuses on supporting the growth of entrants into the planning profession.

Through the work of the Building Standards Futures Board, work is being undertaken to support the Local Authority Building Standards Workforce through the development and implementation of a three year workforce strategy. In addition, the Board is overseeing a number of recommendations that aim to strengthen the building standards system. These will require investment in the system and workforce and a public consultation on building warrant fees will be undertaken over the summer.

The Scottish Government remains committed to the ambition. We are working with partners to explore how we can enable the transformational change required to ensure that by 2030 at least 5% of all community-based health and social care spend across Scotland is invested in preventative whole family support measures.

This includes providing £32m of Whole Family Wellbeing Funding on an annual basis to Children's Services Planning Partnerships to shift investment towards timely and sustainable early intervention and prevention activities that are flexible, responsive and proportionate to ensure families can access the support they need, when they need it and where they need it, before they reach crisis point.

Annual waste data will be submitted to SEPA who will also undertake verification inspections. It is our intention to ensure that DRS packaging data is identified in our waste data reporting.

The Scottish Government recognises the findings that have been highlighted within the Disability Price Tag 2023 report, that disabled people have been disproportionately impacted by the current cost-of-living crisis.

One of the First Minister’s first acts upon taking office was to increase the budget for our Fuel Insecurity Fund to £30 million for 2023-24 to ensure support is available to households who would otherwise be at risk of self-rationing their energy use, or self-disconnecting entirely. Assistance is provided on the basis of a holistic assessment of individuals’ circumstances, which can include increased energy usage arising from the need to run essential medical devices.

The Scottish Government provide a range of disability benefits to help disabled people and those with long-term conditions. These benefits provide financial support to disabled people to mitigate the additional costs of living with a disability or health condition. In recognition of the cost crisis, all Scottish Government social security benefits were increased by 10.1% in April, except for Scottish Child Payment, which was uprated early, with an investment of around £430 million. This uprating is in line with inflation as measured by the Consumer Prices Index.

The Scottish Government did not make a decision on the re-instatement of shared cabins. This decision was taken by the ferry operator following their own internal review.

Official statistics covering processing times for Child Disability Payment are published as a part of the regularly scheduled quarterly publication. The latest Child Disability Payment statistical publication was published on Tuesday 16 May 2023. Information on the average processing time by month is included in table 9. This publication is available from https://www.gov.scot/collections/social-security-scotland-stats-publications/#benefitsforcarersanddisabilityassistance .

Processing time is the number of working days from part 2 of the application being received to a decision being made or the application being withdrawn. It does not include time to make payments. We would normally advise to allow up to 5 days to reach a bank account once a payment is authorised.

I refer the member to the question S6W-17628 on 25 May 2023. 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 .

Information on the number of lone parents receiving Scottish Government funded employability support in each year since 1999 is not held centrally.

Official statistics for Fair Start Scotland (launched April 2018), and experimental statistics for No One Left Behind, our strategic approach to employability delivery (launched April 2019), are published quarterly by the Scottish Government and include data on lone parents. The publication relates only to Scottish Government funded activity data and not the entirety of employability related activity in each local authority area.

The most recent publication was on 22 February 2023 (Scotland's Devolved Employment Services: statistical summary February 2023 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)). Statistics available for lone parents supported are shown below.

Table 1: Number of lone parents joining Fair Start Scotland from year 1 (April 2018 to March 2019) to year 5 so far (April 2022 to December 2022)

Ministers are content to provide any updates on progress which parliamentary committees would find helpful as part of their normal ongoing engagement on progress within their portfolios.