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Based on the draft budget, the resource accounting and budgeting charge is expected to be £175.6 million in 2016-17.

The Scottish Government has modelled increasing the repayment threshold from £17,000 to £21,000. This is expected to increase the resource accounting and budgeting charge by around four percentage points.

The non-cash DEL budget for 2016-17 is £175.6 million. The budget has been adjusted downwards to reflect estimated requirements.

The Scottish Government remains committed to ensuring that producers in the developing world achieve a fair price for their goods. Through our continued partnership with the Scottish Fair Trade Forum, who have been awarded more than £1.2 million from the Scottish Government between 2007 and 2017, we are reaching more people than ever before with the message that choosing to buy Fairtrade products really does make a difference to peoples lives.

Never is this more apparent than when we hear directly from the producers themselves – and this year, during Fairtrade Fortnight, we will once again welcome producers to Scotland from as far afield as Myanmar, Nicaragua and Mauritius. It is their stories of how Fairtrade has helped them overcome hardship and poverty which will help inspire people to choose one of the 4,000 Fairtrade products now readily available in high streets up and down the country.

A full programme of the events being held during Fairtrade Fortnight to promote and encourage support for Fairtrade will be published on the Scottish Fair Trade Forum's website in the next few weeks.

http://www.scottishfairtradeforum.org.uk/newsroom/events/

Scottish Government policy on allowances reflects the recent announcement to align kinship and foster care allowances following the legal challenge to local authorities in 2015 and the agreement to provide 10.1 million a year to support this. We have agreed with COSLA to now look at the overall system and will convene a group shortly. We will look closely at the desirability and feasibility of a national scheme through this work which will report as soon as possible. The group will take into account new welfare powers accruing to the Scottish Parliament and the timescales governing the UK Government welfare reform agenda.

Following our recent announcement to align kinship and foster care allowances we have agreed with COSLA to now look at the overall allowances system and will convene a group shortly. We will look closely at the desirability and feasibility of a national scheme through this work which will report as soon as possible. The group will take into account new welfare powers accruing to the Scottish Parliament and the timescales governing the UK Government welfare reform agenda.

At this stage, the Scottish Government considers it is too early to make an assessment of the likely impact of the merger of BT and EE on the mobile telecoms market in Scotland. The increasing convergence of fixed and mobile infrastructure and services will require Ofcom to keep regulation in this area under review to protect consumers, stimulate infrastructure investment and innovation, and encourage the growth of mobile markets. In our response to Ofcom’s Strategic Review of Digital Communications, we called on Ofcom to undertake more extensive regional market analysis, which would assess the likely impacts of such mergers in Scotland and therefore help determine which remedies, if appropriate, would be most effective.

The most recent statistics on the number and percentage of fuel poor households by local authority area were published on 29 January 2016. They relate to the period 2012-14. The next publication of fuel poverty statistics for Scotland is due in December 2016 and will include figures broken down by local authority for the period 2013-15.

The issues raised in the British Infrastructure Group’s report, including structural separation of BT, are currently being considered by Ofcom as part of the Strategic Review of Digital Communications.

The Scottish Government set out its position in response to Ofcom’s recent discussion paper. We believe that the regulatory environment governing BT must stimulate higher service quality and deliver greater transparency and levels of investment. It is our view that strengthened, and more rigorously enforced, functional separation arrangements could deliver those outcomes, without the associated disruption to the market. However, if this is not achievable, then structural separation of Openreach should be considered.

We believe that Ofcom is best placed to assess these options; and look forward to continued engagement with them throughout the strategic review process.

Scottish Government officials have had several discussions with their counterparts in the Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive on a range of waste topics including deposit return. I will shortly be writing to ministers in the Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive to invite them to discuss these issues further.