Seòmar agus comataidhean

We expect all investment to adhere to the Interim Principles for Responsible Investment in Natural Capital as a minimum. The ethical framework that is being developed by NatureScot and its partners to guide investments under the Memorandum of Understanding will support this.

The matters referred to cannot be determined until the ethical framework has been agreed and approved and the project design phase, which includes developing investment cases with land managers, has been completed.

The Climate Change Committee, an independent statutory body, published their report on Voluntary Carbon Markets and Offsetting in October 2022, concluding that high-integrity carbon credits purchased by businesses can play a small but important role in supporting the transition to net zero.

Establishing a values-led, high-integrity market for responsible private investment in natural capital is a commitment of the National Strategy for Economic Transformation, and the Scottish Government is working to ensure that this is one of a number of measures used to achieve a just transition. In support of this, our Interim Principles for Responsible Investment in Natural Capital make clear that investments should create benefits that are shared between public, private and community interests.

The Scottish Government takes all crime, including that committed in rural areas, extremely seriously. One of the key Aims of our Vision for Justice, published in 2022, is to ensure that we have a society in which people feel, and are, safer in their communities. In January this year, we revised our Strategic Police Priorities, which underpin the statutory policing principles that the main purpose of policing is to improve the safety and wellbeing of persons, localities and communities in Scotland.

The Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime (SPARC), is chaired by Police Scotland and draws together key stakeholders from across the justice and rural sectors, including Scottish Government, to provide a robust, multi-agency approach to rural crime and support activity at local level.

SPARC published an updated Strategy last year which set out 7 key priority areas and detailed the Rural Watch Scotland initiative focused on preventative activity undertaken and delivered by Neighbourhood Watch Scotland working through SPARC.

The Median waiting time for patients residing in NHS Highland, NHS Orkney, NHS Shetland, and NHS Western Isles that have attended a new outpatient appointment or received treatment as an inpatient or day case in other NHS Boards, in each of the last 10 years can be found in the Scottish Parliament Information under Bib. No. 64141.

Please note that PHS are unable to provide data at procedure level, and so data are provided at specialty level only. NHS Board of residence is derived from a patient’s postcode at the point when they were added to the waiting list. Please also note that PHS are unable to provide data prior to October 2012, so annual data are provided from January 2013 onwards.

For each NHS Board/specialty combination, the number of new outpatient attendances and inpatient/day case admissions has been provided along with the median and 90th percentile length of wait. The median is provided rather than the mean because an average can be skewed incorrectly by a small number of very long waits that are recorded in error in the national data. The 90th percentile statistic indicates that 9 out of 10 patients waited less than or equal to the number of days shown and provides a more accurate representation of the length of wait experienced by patients.

It is not possible to provide exact numbers on either current deer populations or future sustainable populations. For the purposes of protecting natural regeneration, tree-planting and peatland, in order restore and enhance natural systems that will deliver carbon and biodiversity benefits we need to focus on deer densities and impacts. We have already indicated in our response to the Deer Working Group report, that we support an overall density of no more than 10 deer per square kilometre. However we know that in many places we will need to achieve densities significantly lower than this in order to allow nature restoration projects to succeed.

We will aim to achieve the necessary reductions in deer populations through a combination of regulation and incentives. We are working to develop policies in this area, building on existing legislation and grant schemes.

At present our operational priority is to assess and identify priority areas where there is evidence of, or a high risk of deer damage, to ensure deer management efforts are focused and coordinated where there is the greatest need.

The Fuel Insecurity Fund was first established by The Scottish Government in the winter of 2020, as part of the wider Winter Support Fund, to help households struggling with their energy costs who were at risk of severely rationing their energy use, or self-disconnecting entirely.

The following table gives an overview of the Fuel Insecurity Fund’s budget and distribution since its inception:

The increase in funding to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in 2023/24 reflects re-profiled spending plans for the Edinburgh Biomes project.

The Scottish Government has not allocated any funding directly towards advertising Scotland Loves Local gift cards.

The Scottish Government provides funding to Scotland’s Towns Partnership (STP) to provide town centre advice and support, which since 2020 includes promoting the Scotland Loves Local Programme.

In 2020-2021, we provided funding totalling £235,000 to STP to deliver a Scotland Loves Local marketing campaign to support businesses in recovering from the impact of the pandemic in their local areas.

In 2021-22, we provided £2.1m that delivered a £1.5m Scotland Loves Local fund, as well as support for local authorities delivering the Scotland Loves Local gift card and additional phase of the marketing campaign.

In 2022-23, we provided £250,000 funding to enable digitisation of the Scotland Loves Local gift card scheme and to encourage additional business to join the scheme.

The most recent statistics report Poverty and Income Inequality in Scotland 2019-22 includes data tables showing a time series of poverty rates for children by whether the mother is under or over the age of 25. This report is available at Poverty and Income Inequality in Scotland 2019-22 (data.gov.scot) . However, it has not been possible to publish poverty rates for children where the mother was under 25 from 2016 onward due to small sub-sample sizes. The next report will be in March 2024.

The £20 billion finance gap figure for nature-related outcomes in Scotland was reported in research by the Green Finance Institute in 2021. The finance gap is defined as the difference between required spending and committed/planned spending to deliver desired nature-related outcomes, for 10 years from 2022. Given the complexity in determining this figure and the volume of related evidence, £20 billion is a central estimate within a range of models. Optimistic assessments of the gap suggest the figure could be £15 billion while more pessimistic models suggest it could be £27 billion. The main component costs for the central estimate include climate mitigation through bio-carbon (£9 billion) and protecting and restoring biodiversity (£8 billion). The report makes clear the assumptions made in reaching these estimates. This work and the report were steered by an independent project board comprising public, private and third sector organisations from across the UK. Scottish public sector representation was provided by NatureScot and Scottish Forestry.

The Scottish Government and relevant agencies will continue to monitor and refine estimates as natural capital markets mature and our work in this area develops.