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The Scottish Budget for 2024-25 allocated £3.080m at Level 4 for Migration Strategy. Scotland’s Migration Service is one of the deliverables funded within this budget line. A total of £997,480.05 was spent on contracts with operational and digital suppliers to facilitate the design and delivery of Scotland’s Migration Service during 2024-25

The Scottish Budget for the 2025-26 financial year includes a Migration Strategy Level 4 budget allocation of £3.762m, from which funding for Scotland’s Migration Service is sourced, along with delivery of other public commitments around population and migration.

Scotland’s Migration Service publishes performance data on a quarterly basis. This can be found at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-migration-service-performance-data/

987 appointments with individuals took place between April 2024 and October 2025. This is broken down as follows:

The Scottish Government regularly publishes spend information over £25,000 on its website. This can be accessed at: https://www.gov.scot/policies/public-sector-procurement/procurement-transparency/

Contract values are also published on the Public Contracts Register, which can be accessed at: https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/Contracts/Contracts_Search.aspx

For Scotland’s Migration Service, during the 23-24 and 24-25 financial years, a total of £692,688.00 was paid to Seraphus. To date, during the 25/26 financial year, £314,752.74 has been paid to Seraphus.

This spend relates to the following activities:

• Development of online guidance on business immigration matters (see https://migrationservice.scotland.org)
• Provision of webinars on business immigration matters
• Provision of one-to-one legal advice appointments for Scotland-based employers and inward investors
• Delivery of marketing and stakeholder engagement activities to promote Scotland’s Migration Service
• Reporting and service user engagement activities to support monitoring and evaluation of Scotland’s Migration Service
• Project management, training, and other overheads

No civil servants are employed by Scotland’s Migration Service. Officials from the Population and Migration Unit oversee the delivery of Scotland’s Migration Service.

There is no business requirement for officials to record the time spent on specific tasks or their work more generally. These are completed as part of normal duties, along with other tasks appropriate to roles as civil servants.

A core team of six RPID officials from the Agricultural Development and Area Office teams were responsible for assessing applications to the Future Farming Investment Scheme. They were supported by a further six members of staff from across the RPID area office network, who provided additional capacity during the assessment and verification process.

As of 17 November 2025, there have been 45 outbreaks of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza amongst poultry and other captive birds in the UK in the current outbreak period (since 1 October 2025): 35 in England; six in Wales; three in Northern Ireland; and one case in Scotland. In the same period 253 wild birds in Great Britain have been identified as infected with the virus, only 12 of which have been located in Scotland.

As with England and Wales, Scotland has had an Avian Influenza Prevention Zone (AIPZ) in place since January this year, which has required all bird keepers in Scotland top apply strict biosecurity measures at their premises including measures to deter wild birds, prevent contamination and incursion into flocks and to apply best practice hygiene and husbandry process in order to protect flocks. Scotland has also worked with their operational partners, including the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) to act rapidly on the suspicion of disease and to apply disease controls to close down the spread of infection at the three premises at which outbreaks have occurred in 2025.

Officials have been meeting with Scottish poultry industry representatives to discuss the correct and proportionate response to the current risk levels and outbreaks in the UK. The housing of birds in Scotland is being considered, but this is being balanced against significant welfare of impact of confining millions of birds, potentially over a sustained period. CVO Scotland will, however, continue to act swiftly and effectively in response to the changing situation and characteristics of this virus.

Scottish Government continue to issue disease prevention communications urging all bird keepers to apply robust biosecurity best practices in order to protect their birds and to remain vigilant for clinical signs of the disease in their flocks. They are reminded that it is a legal requirement to report suspicion of the disease.

Priority status alone did not guarantee funding; investments also had to demonstrate strong alignment with scheme objectives and deliver measurable outcomes. Variation in the accuracy and completeness of applications was also a significant factor in the outcomes.

Many island based applicants applied for standard items of agricultural equipment, mainly for general livestock management, which, while not deemed ineligible, when assessed against other capital investments did not demonstrate strong delivery against the scheme’s objectives. Examples included cattle clippers, sheep shearing machines, footbaths, water troughs, creep feeders, self-locking feed barriers, and feed storage bins.

Although these items are useful for routine livestock management, they were assessed as providing limited measurable benefit in terms of improving environmental performance, resource efficiency, or climate outcomes. For smaller businesses, these capital investments can represent meaningful improvements, however within a competitive assessment framework they did not score as highly as proposals that delivered more substantial benefits in line with the schemes purpose and objectives. This does however provide us with useful information about the kind of capital items that small and island based businesses need support with, and this information will be used to help inform how we develop future schemes moving forward.

This government has a strong record of delivering a range of support schemes to our island based farming and crofting businesses. From 2015 to August 2025, over £33.1 m in Crofting Agricultural Grant Scheme funding has been committed, helping over 5,200 crofters with their businesses. Since January 2007, the Scottish Government has approved Croft House Grant payments of almost £26 million helping to build and improve over 1,160 croft homes. The Scottish Government also provides support through the Less Favoured Area Support Scheme and Basic Payment Scheme – demonstrating our commitment to continuing support and investment for the sector, all in stark contrast to support policy in other parts of the UK.

A summary of the scoring mechanism has already been published on the scheme guidance webpages. This explains how applications were assessed through a combination of eligibility checks, verification of information provided, and merit-based scoring against the scheme objectives.

Variation in the accuracy and completeness of applications was a significant factor in the outcomes. Applicants were expected to provide clear and verifiable information, however a number of submissions contained inconsistencies or responses that could not be supported at inspection. For example, some applicants selected “Yes” to using the grant for electronic identification technology when applying for items such as creep feeders, hoof-trimming equipment, water troughs, or fencing, where EID was not relevant. Had these applications been awarded funding, they would have been unable to evidence how the investment delivered and the grant would have had to be recovered.

These issues may not indicate intent to mislead but demonstrated misunderstanding of the scheme’s contractual requirements. In contrast, applications that provided specific, accurate, and verifiable information were able to be scored properly and offered greater assurance of compliance with the scheme rules. This explains why some applications that appeared similar received different outcomes, and why robust assessment and verification were essential to the scheme

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Gov.scot implemented new cookie banner settings as of the start of September 2024. Previously all users were opted-in to analytics tracking by default (and could opt out); now the default is that all users must choose if they want to opt in or not. This caused a drop in traffic available in the dashboard which has been calculated to be 39% of the total site usage. Each of the figures below are the opted-in analytics users only.

Data from 8 October 2025 up to 9 November 2025

Paper title: A Fresh Start with Independence

Main paper URL: https://www.gov.scot/publications/fresh-start-independence/

Main paper publish date: 8 October 2025

Main paper views: 12,233

Easy read URL: https://www.gov.scot/publications/fresh-start-independence-easy-read-version/
Easy read publish date: 8 October 2025

Easy read views or download link clicks: 483

Audio URL: https://soundcloud.com/scotgov/a-fresh-start-with-independence

Audio publish date: 17 October 2025

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Translation publish date: 8 October 2025

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BSL YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpP6-wYXyB0

Date BSL Version Published: 16 October 2025

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