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The Minister for Housing and Welfare met with Lord Freud, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Welfare Reform, on 6 March 2013. The discussion focused on the under-occupancy deductions to housing benefit for social sector tenants.

Disease-specific information is not recorded for registration purposes.

Although the NHS Pay Circular covering Agenda for Change staff in England has been issued, there are many staff there who will not receive their pay award until May or even June.

The NHS Scotland pay award is different from that in England. We are protecting family incomes for the lowest paid by providing an increase of £250 a year for those paid less than £21,000 and also continue our commitment to the Scottish Living Wage. This requires us to produce a Scotland specific pay circular and instructions.

We are working in partnership with trade unions and NHS boards to ensure that NHS Scotland staff receive their pay award as quickly as possible. The pay increase will be backdated to 1 April this year, so no staff will lose out.

It is not possible to identify the discrete cost of providing the chronic medication service. The chronic medication service is operationally integrated within the way in which community pharmacists deliver NHS pharmaceutical services.

Shelter and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations are members of the joint Scottish Government COSLA Housing Benefit Reform Stakeholder Advisory Group. The under occupancy penalty has been a focus of the work of the Group which has met 14 times since autumn 2010.

The Scottish Government is doing all it can, within the current constitutional settlement, to mitigate the worst impacts of the UK Government cuts and changes to the welfare system.

We are taking action and investing more to support people and organisations across Scotland. This includes: providing £7.9 million for advice and support services, of which £2.5 million is directly for social landlords to help those affected by the bedroom tax; an additional £9.2 million for the new Scottish Welfare Fund, giving a total Fund of £33 million, allowing us to award an extra 5,600 Community Care Grants and an additional 100,000 Crisis Grants; and we have also provided, with our partners in local government, a total of £40 million in 2013-14 to ensure that around 560,000 people in Scotland who previously received Council Tax Benefit are protected from the UK Government’s 10% cut in funding for successor arrangements.

The costs involved in rehousing homeless households are variable, depending on a range of individual and local circumstances. It is not possible for the Scottish Government to produce definitive national figures on such costs.

Ministers and officials have regular meetings with housing associations and their representative bodies to discuss a range of issues, including the integration of health and social care and the housing sector’s role and contribution to its objectives of supporting independent living.

We recognise the important role of housing in improving outcomes, particularly for people with long term conditions and complex needs and to support independent living in the community. Legislation will be introduced to Parliament before summer, that will place health boards and local authorities under a duty to work in collaboration with key stakeholders to plan and deliver nationally agreed outcomes, and we would expect these to include the housing sector.

National guidance on the development of strategic commissioning plans for health and social care includes a requirement for local partnerships to ensure that the housing sector is included in the planning process. The Housing Contribution Statement is a key part of the strategic commissioning plan. It provides a clear basis to strengthen links between housing and health and social care, and will also help local partnerships to make best use of housing services, such as adaptations.

The Chronic Medication Service (CMS) is offered in some 1,240 community pharmacies across the 14 territorial health boards in Scotland.

All qualified pharmacists in Scotland are trained to provide the key aspects of pharmaceutical care that underpin the CMS. Pharmacists are the experts in medicines and their undergraduate education prepares them to become healthcare professionals who have a strong grounding in the practice of pharmaceutical care which supports them in delivering pharmaceutical services such as the CMS.

CMS formalises the role of community pharmacists in supporting patients with long term conditions. It improves the patient’s care through a systematic approach to their pharmaceutical care, makes better use of the pharmacist’s skills and expertise to improve the patient’s understanding of their medicines, and helps maximise the clinical outcomes from their therapy. CMS also facilitates and supports the pharmacist’s role as defined by the professional body.