Seòmar agus comataidhean

We are continuing to engage with Vestas around potential investment into Scotland. The former First Minister met with the CEO of Vestas on 3 April 2024. A further meeting between the First Minister and the CEO is due to take place in September 2024.

Officials from the Scottish Government and our agencies also meet with the company regularly.

Internal legal costs are not available because in line with usual practice, details of individual tasks carried out by civil servants, including the number of hours spent on them, are not routinely recorded because there is no business need to do this.

The legal costs in defending and settling the Judicial Review brought by Mr Salmond in 2018 are published on the Scottish Government website.

The costs of legal services regarding the former First Minister’s judicial review are published at: Costs of legal services regarding former First Minister's judicial review: FOI release - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).

The costs of the settlement in respect of the former First Minister’s legal fees in the Judicial Review are published at: Former First Minister Legal fees: FOI release - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).

As the action brought by Mr Salmond against the Scottish Government is live litigation, we are not able to publish the Scottish Government’s legal costs at this stage. We will publish this information in due course.

As this is an operational matter for Scottish Water, and the Scottish Government does not hold the information, I have asked them to respond. Their reply is as follows:

As this is an operational matter for Scottish Water, and the Scottish Government does not hold the information, I have asked them to respond. Their reply is as follows:

Scottish Government Committee witnesses to the Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints were not coached.

The Scotland Act 2012 introduced provisions for the UK Parliament to devolve further tax powers to the Scottish Parliament (now section 80B of the Scotland Act 1998, “Power to add new devolved taxes”).

This followed a recommendation from the Calman Commission, which stated that “we see no reason why the Scottish Parliament should not be able to legislate to create new taxes that affect the whole of Scotland uniformly and not just via local taxation, if it does so with the agreement of the whole UK Parliament”.

The specific legislative mechanism is an Order in Council which must be approved by both Houses of the UK Parliament and by the Scottish Parliament. Once approved, the Order in Council would add any new tax to the existing list of devolved taxes in the Scotland Act 1998.

Primary and secondary legislation would then be required in the Scottish Parliament for a new devolved tax to come into effect.

The ScotWind leasing round was carefully designed by Crown Estate Scotland with a focus on quality and deliverability of bids, and the long-term goal of securing supply chain investment. We welcome the commitment of developers to invest an average projection of £1.5bn in Scotland per project across the 20 ScotWind projects and we expect developers to honour these commitments.

We recognise that investment, both public and private, is key to unlocking these commitments. That is why we are investing up to £500m over five years to anchor the offshore wind supply chain in Scotland. Our commercial-first approach will stimulate and support private investment in the infrastructure and manufacturing facilities critical to the growth of our offshore wind sector.

The Scottish Government is determined to maximise the economic opportunity for the Scottish supply chain from our offshore wind potential.

We expect developers to honour their commitments set out in the Supply Chain Development Statements (SCDS) and a process has been carefully designed and is managed by Crown Estate Scotland (CES) to hold developers to account. Failure by developers to deliver on their commitments can trigger remedies ranging from financial penalties to an inability to progress to a seabed lease.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-29198 on 5 September 2024. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.

Please see the following table for details of annual spend on repairs landslide mitigation infrastructure on the trunk road network for the years 2021-2024 to date: