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Since financial year 2021-22, the Scottish Government has awarded £1,860,000 to the Soil Association for the Food for Life Scotland programme.

A breakdown of funding for the last four financial years has been provided in the following table.

The Scottish Government’s funded Food for Life Scotland Programme currently operates within 15 local authorities with 19 ‘Food for Life Served Here’ awarded caterers across 1,336 sites in Scotland.

We continue to support the delivery of the Food for Life Programme which has had a primary focus on school meals with over 100,000 daily ‘Food for Life Served Here’ meals served in primaries, secondaries and additional support needs schools. Most recently over the past 12 months, 191 new local authority sites have achieved ‘Food for Life Served Here’.

Throughout financial year 2024-25, the Soil Association will continue to work with local authorities on maintaining accreditation as well as seeking to further embed Food for Life principles across the wider Scottish Public sector.

Officials last met with COSLA to discuss the free school meal expansion programme in July 2024.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-29121 on 2 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.

Cabinet minutes provide a full account of actions but are not a verbatim record. As such, it is not possible to determine with certainty when or how many times a particular topic has been discussed at Cabinet. The Cabinet discusses policies which relate to education and to child poverty on a regular basis.

As set out in the Flood Resilience Strategy Consultation, the Scottish Government is working in partnership with COSLA and Local Authorities to reform the current approach to funding flood resilience actions.

We have met regularly, having met 3 times already in 2024 with the next meeting on 5 September.

The Scottish Government has allocated (a) £42m in 2020-21 (b) £52m in 2021-22 (c) £63m in 2022-23 (d) £61m in 2023-24 and (e) £88m in 2024-25 to local authorities through the general capital grant to invest in flood protection and resilience measures.

However, the vast majority of funding available to councils is provided by means of a block grant from the Scottish Government. It is then the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them, including on flooding protection, on the basis of local needs and priorities, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

The funding has been distributed as follows:

The reasons for not approving the four most recent late applications are detailed in the decision notice for each. These can be found in the Register of Community Interest in Land (RCIL), which is held on the Registers of Scotland website. It is free to access. The four cases were:

Broomhill Community Trust Hub Limited (Ref:CB00263) – September 2023

Kinlochard (Cottages) Residents Association Ltd (Ref: CB00248) – January 2021

Kinlochard (Cottages) Residents Association Ltd (Ref: CB00247) – November 2020

Carty Port Community Company (Ref: CB00234) - April 2018

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-29121 on 2 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.

The Flood Resilience Strategy consultation document refers to there being an estimated 284,000 properties across Scotland exposed to flooding. This figure was derived from the most recent version of the National Flood Risk Assessment (NFRA), which was prepared by SEPA. The figures per local authority from the NFRA are as follows: