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No One Left Behind is the Scottish Government’s approach to transforming employment support in Scotland. This strategy is tailored and responsive to the needs of people of all ages and backgrounds who want help and support on their journey towards and into work - particularly people with health conditions, people with disabilities and others who are disadvantaged in the labour market, including those with lived and living experience of alcohol and drug use.

In January of this year, the Scottish Government published our Cross-Government response to the Drug Deaths Taskforce, ‘Changing Lives’ final report. This response set out our commitment to progress Cross Government work to provide employment support through the No One Left Behind strategy.

Scottish Government’s forthcoming Drugs and Alcohol Workforce Action Plan will provide further information on work underway to support people with lived and living experience of drugs and alcohol use towards, and into work, including roles within the drugs and alcohol sector.

The launch of our National Mission on Drugs in January 2021 has meant that some of the commitments set out in the Rights, Respect, Recovery Strategy and the action plan for it, refreshed in December 2020, are being delivered in a different way. Many of the milestones are being delivered through the National Mission and others are being picked up as part of more recent Government commitments.

Assertive outreach is being delivered though the guidance for Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) standard 3. The aim of MAT standard 3 is to proactively identify people, including through assertive outreach, who are at high risk, and to prevent harms by rapidly providing that individual with appropriate support.

In practice, implementation of MAT standard 3 extends to all substance misuse problems. A significant proportion of support offered to people identified through outreach is for problem alcohol use. Alcohol-specific outreach guidance will feature in wider standards for alcohol and drug treatment following the publication of UK-wide alcohol treatment guidelines.

The launch of our National Mission on Drugs in January 2021 has meant that some of the commitments set out in the Rights, Respect, Recovery Strategy and the action plan for it, refreshed in December 2020, are being delivered in a different way. Many of the milestones are being delivered through the National Mission and others are being picked up as part of more recent Government commitments.

As part of the National Mission, Public Health Scotland established the Rapid Action Drug Alerts and Response (RADAR) system. The first published report was issued on 11 October 2022 and that has been followed by quarterly publications. It reports on drug-related indicators in order to inform action to prevent drug harms and deaths.

The launch of our National Mission on Drugs in January 2021 has meant that some of the commitments set out in the Rights, Respect, Recovery Strategy and the action plan for it, refreshed in December 2020, are being delivered in a different way. Many of the milestones are being delivered through the National Mission and others are being picked up as part of more recent Government commitments.

Quality improvement methodology is being embedded across Scotland through the implementation of the Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) standards.

The MAT Standards Implementation Support Team (MIST), based within Public Health Scotland, was set up to support local areas to build improvement-based capacity and capability so that they will be able to implement and sustain the MAT standards locally.

MIST helps local areas with quality improvement work which has focused on establishing that local areas have written procedures in place, have numerical information and data available and have a means in place to gather experiential data. All of which are required to help drive improvement.

Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) is also supporting local areas and works closely with MIST in providing practical quality improvement assistance and advice to local areas.

HIS will shortly begin delivery of its full quality improvement assistance to local areas to build on the first phase of quality improvement work MIST has undertaken. HIS also provides close links between its other relevant workstreams on residential rehabilitation, prison healthcare and mental health and addictions services.

Alcohol remains a priority for Scottish Government and we are treating our policies to reduce alcohol and drug deaths as twin public health emergencies in Scotland.

This is why we established a National Mission to improve and save lives, at the core of which is ensuring that every individual has access to, and choice in the type of recovery and treatment they need.

We are working to ensure people with alcohol use disorder receive the care and support in the same way that people can access for problematic use of drugs. The forthcoming Alcohol Treatment Guidelines will help ensure support for alcohol treatment, in a similar way to how the Medication-Assisted Treatment Standards ensure this for people impacted by opiates.

Following publication of the UK-wide guidelines it is our intention to draft a paper on specific alcohol treatment standards for Scotland.

Through our National Mission we are investing in residential rehabilitation that will benefit people experiencing alcohol and/or drug addiction.

The launch of our National Mission on Drugs in January 2021 has meant that some of the commitments set out in the Rights, Respect, Recovery Strategy and the action plan for it, refreshed in December 2020, are being delivered in a different way. Many of the milestones are being delivered through the National Mission and others are being picked up as part of more recent Government commitments.

The Prison to Rehab pathway was established in the summer of 2020 to support individuals into residential rehabilitation services during the unprecedented time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We conducted an internal review of the pathway in 2021-2022 which was complimented by an evaluation from one of our commissioned third sector organisations, the Scottish Recovery Consortium. The published evaluation can be viewed here . The review and the evaluation informed a new version of the Prison to Rehab protocol to ensure it continued to be fit for purpose. This was published in March 2023 and can be viewed here here .

In 2021, the Scottish Government formed a working group to develop Action 4 from the Rights, Respect and Recovery Action Plan. The aim of the working group is to ensure that good quality early intervention support services are available across Scotland for young people with emerging problematic drug and alcohol use.

The first phase of this work involved the working group gathering data from a range of sources to understand the size of the problem of younger people using drugs and alcohol as well as risk factors.

In 2022, we commissioned We Are With You to engage with young people in order to learn from their experiences of drug and alcohol use. This engagement has helped the working group to understand young people’s preferences for seeking help and the perceived barriers they face and this insight will aid the development of support for young people at risk from drugs/alcohol harms.

In Spring 2023, the working group began engaging with young people, using a co-design approach, to gather their views of good support. These findings, along with existing international evidence of good practice will be used by the working group to develop standards of support for children and young people.

The working group will outline the minimum principles of support that is required to meet the needs of children and young people and provide early intervention support in a way they want.

Yes, on 8 November 2021 the Scottish Government published A Review of the Existing Literature and Evidence on Young People Experiencing Harms from Alcohol and Drugs in Scotland.

The review can be found here: A Review of the Existing Literature and Evidence on Young People Experiencing Harms from Alcohol and Drugs in Scotland (www.gov.scot)

The Scottish Government’s ability to respond to the current financial context is limited due to overall UK Government cuts and by the financial restrictions of devolution, requiring extremely hard funding decisions to be made across the budget. The Scottish Government values our culture sector and the contribution of the grassroots music industry to the cultural and economic offer in Scotland. We will continue to work with the sector to identify barriers to recovery, and do everything within our powers and resources to help it overcome these.

I met with the UK Government’s Minister of State for Media, Tourism and Creative Industries on 13 June 2023, to discuss the imminent publication of the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Creative Industries Sector Vision.

The UK Government have not confirmed if there will be any Barnett consequentials as a consequence of their announcement.