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Supporting health and social care organisations to develop as digital organisations takes the form of many different resources and initiatives. This includes, for example, development of guides such as the Digital Telecare Playbook that supports organisations manage the transition to digital telecare. It also includes the skills of staff, and investment in basic infrastructure such as web cameras to enable use of Near Me. These costs are built into budgets for national programmes, and into local organisations budgets for the delivery of digital developments. It is therefore not possible to breakdown funding. This year, in 2022-23 as part of the overall health portfolio investment, we are investing £99.6 million in digital health and care. This covers a huge amount of work ‘behind the scenes’ that is needed to modernise our health and care systems.

Advances in technology and the growth in its use, means we need a constant focus on what is coming next. Our annual delivery plan for digital health and care (Care in a Digital Age: Delivery Plan 2022 to 2023 - Care in the Digital Age: delivery plan 2022 to 2023 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) ) sets out our ambitions for technology and infrastructure delivery.

Many items in our delivery plan cover embedding software packages across health and care. Examples include embedding clinical software to support effective and safe patient care including GP IT, Picture and Archiving Communications System, Emergency Care Summary.

The use of software packages is driven by clinical need and staff need. The Scottish Government are in ongoing engagement with stakeholders to seek views as required.

Software is not the only component to be embedded in the health and care system. Successful delivery of digital health and care requires many factors including services design, skills, workflows, and adoption. More information on this is available in the delivery plan.

The Delivery Plan will be reviewed and revised on an ongoing basis and the 2023-24 Delivery Plan that is due to publish later this year will include a further update.

The Scottish Government continues to support NHS Boards to implement single sign on solutions and technologies to have safe and streamlined access to systems. In addition, the Scottish Government is supporting the federation of the Microsoft 365 platforms to further integrate access to systems and data across the health and care sector.

The Building Digital Skills and Leadership Programme enables the delivery of Priority 4 of the refreshed Digital Health and Care strategy where ‘Digital skills are seen as core skills for the workforce across the health and care sector’. The associated programme priorities are found within the Care in the Digital Age: delivery plan 2022 to 2023.

We are in the preliminary stages of development of our Commercial and Procurement Strategy and have started early engagement with stakeholders.

An update will be provided later this year with the delivery priorities for 2023-24 in the next version of our Delivery Plan.

The SPCB is continuing to review the requirements under the Deposit and Return Scheme for Scotland Regulations 2020 and how they apply to the Garden Level Restaurant/Garden Coffee Bar and shop at the Holyrood site.

The other outlets would not fall under the customer deposit element of the scheme (i.e., the public café, Holyrood Room, QBH Lounge) as they don’t offer any takeaway options.

The Scottish Government consultation on restricting alcohol advertising and promotion is open until 9 March 2023. The Scottish Parliament shop sells Scottish Parliament branded whisky. With regards to the sale, promotion and advertising of alcohol, the SPCB ensures it complies with all current regulations, and will comply with any future regulations agreed by the Parliament.

At present no resources have been utilised in the preparation for the introduction of the scheme, other than a small amount of management time to consider the proposals.  Consideration is being given to how the regulations will be met and one option under consideration is leasing or hiring of a Reverse Vending Machine.

The SPCB is continuing to review the logistics associated with the roll out of the scheme and awaits information on the requirements from the Scottish Government's contractor, which the SPCB will then implement.

The Scottish Government and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency publish detailed data on industrial carbon dioxide emissions. There are three different, but complementary, sources of such data with each defining industries in different terms.

The first source of data relate to a commissioned study in 2020 which defined industries using the Standard Industrial Classification (2007), a classification scheme used in economic data. The ten largest emitting industrial groups in Scotland during the calendar year 2018 are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 - Largest CO2 emitters by industry group, excluding residential emissions, Scotland, 2018.