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The act of spiking is utterly abhorrent and we remain absolutely committed to working with partners to tackle all forms of violence against women.

The Scottish Government has taken a proactive approach to understand the prevalence and address concerns about the incidence of reported spiking in Scotland.

Since November 2021, several roundtable meetings have taken place to bring together partners from across the justice system including policing, victims organisations and prosecution in addition to representatives from colleges and universities, community safety and night-time economy sector. These meetings have been designed to discuss the range of initiatives and information available on spiking. Information is available on the safer.scot website, to inform and support the public around the subject of spiking. This is being updated on a quarterly basis.

Analysis of spiking incidents by Police Scotland is undertaken on a weekly basis to ensure national oversight is maintained and understanding evolves. The Scottish Government is kept informed about any changes in the prevalence of spiking. The number of reported incidents related to spiking are published annually within the National Statistics bulletin on crimes and offences recorded by the police in Scotland.

Spiking can be prosecuted under the common law offence of drugging, which is a broad offence covering all types of drink spiking. Another common law offence which may be relevant depending on the individual facts and circumstances of each case is assault. There is also a more specific statutory offence contained in section 11 of the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009 called administering a substance for sexual purposes. This provides it is an offence for a person to intentionally administer a substance, or cause a substance to be taken by another person, without the other person knowing, and without any reasonable belief that the other person knows, for a sexual purpose. A sexual purpose is for the purpose of stupefying or overpowering someone, so as to enable any person to engage in a sexual activity which involves the person who administered the substance.

We have no plans at this time to create a specific criminal offence of spiking however we keep all laws under review.

The Scottish Government supports, and participates in, The Life Sciences Scotland Industry Leadership Group - Life Sciences Scotland . This includes a specific sub-group focusing on Digital and Data, chaired by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (the DHI). The DHI are funded by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council to act as the interface between academia, industry and our health & care services around digital health and care and run several innovation clusters on our behalf. See Innovation Clusters | Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (dhi-scotland.com) for information.

Non-Executive Board members are required to undertake mandatory training at local level as a part of their local induction process. This is set out in the Director Letter DL(2019)21 - Induction process for Non-Executive Board Members . In addition, NHS Education for Scotland has a range of learning material available to Board Members. Current eLearning modules include: “Finance”; “Audit and Risk”; and, “Equality and the Role of Board Members in Meeting the Public Sector Duty”. These modules, whilst not mandatory, are recommended.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information. This is a matter for NHS Education for Scotland (NES).

The Scottish Government remains committed to introducing a high quality and clinically safe thrombectomy service in Scotland. The thrombectomy service at NHS Lothian continues to complete cases, with 55 thrombectomies completed there as of 1 January 2023.

Work is ongoing to establish the most effective means of further expanding the national thrombectomy service and the appropriate timescales to achieve this, including at NHS Lothian. This includes seeking input from National Services Scotland, to ensure that regional plans are cohesive and maximise access to thrombectomy procedures nationwide.

The Scottish Government conducts audits of Health Boards considered to be operators of essential services to obtain compliance assurance. From October 2021 – December 2022 we have spent £220,498. The Scottish Government has entered a new agreement for the delivery of audits, with up to £900,000 reserved for a third party to conduct audits over the next six years.

In addition, the Scottish Government has established the Cyber Centre of Excellence to enhance its response to security threats. For 2021-2022 the total spend was £420,000.

The Scottish Government Cyber Resilience Unit hosts regular Public Sector Cyber Resilience Network webinars bringing together more than 150 information/cyber security experts from across the sector to raise awareness of the latest threats, share good practice and ensure that lessons are learned from incidents and exercises.

Specifically for the health sector, the Cyber Centre of Excellence (CCoE) has been established. The CCoE will empower continuous improvements by focusing on key enablement pillars including Centralised Security, 24/7 Monitoring, Threat Hunting, Incident Response and Training & Awareness. It is complimented by the Scottish Cyber Coordination Centre (SC3) which will be a key partner to the CCoE, enhancing our national incident response capacity and capabilities.

In 2019, Scotland undertook its first digital maturity assessment across health and social care which helped to identify key priorities. A second national digital maturity exercise will be undertaken in 2023 and will provide current picture of digital maturity. This will support us to develop our “What good looks like” model, identify resources required to support organisational development, and conduct further reviews and prioritisation.

One of the key areas identified for improvement through the previous Digital Maturity exercise was to improve access to digital channels for members of the public. Key scale up programmes such as Near Me and Digital for Mental Health have further supported this, whilst other national programmes are now underway such as the Digital Front Door which will build on this further.

This work is ongoing and is set within the context of the wider financial settlement.

The Scottish Government held several roundtable meetings to bring together partners to discuss the prevalence of spiking and a range of initiatives and information available on spiking.

Representatives from COSLA and SOLAR (Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland) Licensing Committee were invited to the roundtable discussions.

We have also separately engaged with the SOLAR working group membership and the National Licensing Standard Officers (LSO) Forum to better understand the scale of spiking in Scotland within venues and consider whether any further actions are required. Previous discussions have not suggested any moves to introduce mandatory reporting conditions, however, under existing licensing laws it is possible for Licensing Standards Officers to submit reports, objections or representations on various matters to Licensing Boards. Where appropriate, LSOs may also be required to submit applications for a review of premises licences. More generally, we would expect independent Licensing Boards to co-operate and liaise with Police Scotland where required to ensure that consistency with the licensing objectives is upheld in the operation of the licensed premises at all times.