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The UK Internal Market Act was imposed on the rest of the UK by the UK Government, despite the refusal of consent from the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and poses a direct threat to Scotland’s ability to exercise devolved decision-making across a wide range of devolved policy areas including environmental policy.

We are currently analysing the text of the Act to understand how it could interact with Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme.

It will be for the Scottish Environment Protection Agency as regulator of Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) to assess Circularity Scotland’s performance of its obligations under the DRS Regulations.

We are currently considering our approach to wider monitoring and evaluation of the operation of DRS.

Professional dog walkers, like dog owners, are subject to a number of laws relating to dog welfare and control. The majority of dog walkers are likely to operate sensibly and responsibly; however, the profession itself is currently unregulated and the Scottish Government recognises that issues may arise. We will consider whether there may be a need to bring dog walkers under tighter regulation in any future plans for companion welfare legislation.

Under the National Concessionary Bus Travel Scheme for Older and Disabled People, a holder of a +1 National Entitlement Card is entitled to free bus travel for themselves and a companion travelling together with them for the same journey on local registered and long distance scheduled bus journeys throughout Scotland. Booking arrangements generally only apply to longer distance scheduled bus services and are the responsibility of the bus operator.

Under the National Concessionary Bus Travel Scheme for Older and Disabled People, a holder of a +1 National Entitlement Card is entitled to free bus travel for themselves and a companion travelling together with them for the same journey on local registered and long distance scheduled bus journeys throughout Scotland.

Local authorities have discretion to provide local non-bus travel concessions for their residents. Public Transport operators may also provide travel concessions on their services for certain groups of people as part of their own commercial operations. The extent and level of any concessions offered are for individual local authorities and public transport operators to determine.

As of June 2021, there are 114,738 registered companion (+1) cardholders eligible to access the Scotland-Wide Free Bus Travel Scheme for Older and Disabled People (the Scheme).

The Scheme is administered by Transport Scotland on behalf on the Scottish Government. In 2019-20 the cost of the Scheme was around £215 million. We have used figures for 2019-20 as this is the most recent pre-covid financial year where typical journey numbers have been undertaken.

The following table shows the number of properties receiving a non-domestic rates relief or exemption from rates for unoccupied properties since 2011, except for 2014 and 2017 as no data is available for those years. The figures are as at the snapshot date and may therefore underestimate final numbers of recipients in a given year, and include entire local authority areas as data by parliamentary region is not held.

Data for 2021 is expected to become available in late 2021.

The information requested can be found here: Housing statistics: Empty properties and second homes - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) . Please note the figures provided for each local authority area do not differentiate between the different types of empty property.

The Scottish Government does not hold a breakdown of the requested figures by local authority area. The annual figures are shown in the following table:

I have asked SQA to respond. The charges per local authority are: