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The commitment to deliver 40,000 additional operations and diagnostic tests was set out in the NHS Recovery Plan published in 2021. Progress reports have been published annually, the most recent being in December 2024: NHS Recovery Plan 2021-2026: annual progress update report 2024 - gov.scot.

In his speech on NHS reform and renewal in January this year, the First Minister announced that in 2025-26 the NHS will deliver of 150,000 extra appointments and procedures as part of the Operational Improvement Plan (OIP). This will be done through recruitment, extended working and regional and national working, including in the National Treatment Centres.

This additional activity will be backed by an additional investment of over £100 million this year. Activity will be targeted at long waits, ensuring that by March 2026 no one is waiting longer than a year for their new outpatient appointment or inpatient/day-case procedure.

As noted within the OIP, SG will report against progress publicly and to Parliament within 2025-26, using published statistics.

In April, the Chief Planner and I required planning authorities to report every six months on their local development plan timelines and actions they are taking to avoid delays and accelerate the process.

We have not yet received the initial formal six-monthly updates, which are to be sent to the Scottish Government by 30 September 2025. We will analyse and share details from the progress updates in due course.

In this year’s Programme for Government, we committed to providing local authorities with additional capacity and expertise, through the National Planning Hub. This includes prioritising action where evidence shows that authorities are having challenges in meeting timescales or where there are delays in producing local development plans. Planning authorities were advised of the support available to them in a letter from the Chief Planner issued in May. Since that letter, the Hub has been working with a number of local authorities to provide direct support at the earliest opportunity in response to their specific pressures and needs.

We are continuing to work with the National Planning Improvement Champion, the Improvement Service and Heads of Planning Scotland to raise the imperative of making timely progress with local development plans, to encourage proactive steps to accelerate timelines, and to provide support to authorities who have identified slippage as a concern.

I was informed of the publication of cancer waiting times, scheduled for 24 June 2025, and provided with pre-release access to the statistics on 19 June 2025.

The tool is currently live in six territorial boards, and work is continuing to implement the tool for the remaining territorial health boards and National Hospital Golden Jubilee. In line with the NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan (https://www.gov.scot/publications/nhs-scotland-operational-improvement-plan/pages/1/), all territorial health boards, and National Hospital Golden Jubilee, have been scheduled into the current theatre scheduling tool rollout plan, as at the end of June 2025.

Tax code matters such as allowances and reliefs are reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government has no plans currently to change the number of Income Tax bands

Projections for social security costs in the coming years are established in the recently published Medium-Term Financial Strategy. Our approach to taxation is established in the Tax Strategy, which has already set out that we will not introduce any new bands or increase the rates of Scottish Income Tax in this parliament.

The Scottish Government recently published the Tax Strategy for Scotland, which along with Scottish Budget 2025-26 and the Medium-Term Financial Strategy, sets out the next steps in our approach to tax, identifying priorities to support economic growth and Government objectives of eradicating child poverty, tackling the climate emergency and improving public services.

We are engaging a range of stakeholders and women and girls with lived experience in the development of Scotland’s first equality strategy for women and girls.

The strategy will be co-designed with the First Minister’s National Advisory Council for Women and Girls (NACWG) and the Empowering Women Panel (EWP). The NACWG was established in 2017 to give advice to government on what needs to happen to tackle gender inequality in Scotland. The EWP was started in 2023 and is a group of 20 diverse women and girls from all parts of the country and all backgrounds who don’t normally have the chance to influence policy.

We are engaging widely and the first phase is ongoing, this will include:

• Inviting over 50 organisations to engage with the women and girls they work with to share their views on the development of the strategy.
• Two roundtables hosted by the NACWG with gender equality stakeholders and wider equality stakeholders to seek their expertise on the strategy.
• A round table with members of the Senior Leaders Forum to understand how the strategy can support public leaders to work collaboratively to deliver further progress in equality for women and girls.
• Individual meetings with stakeholders with key roles in the delivery of the strategy such as COSLA.
• A workshop with groups that hold gender critical views to ensure that we hear a breadth of views.
• Peer led research from the EWP seeking the views of diverse women on the development of the strategy.

The views and expertise from these meetings will be considered by the Scottish Government, NACWG and EWP and used to develop the content for the first phase of the strategy. There will be further opportunities to influence the strategy in phase two of its development due to commence later this year.

Scotland should be a place where everyone can participate fully within society, access their rights and thrive within their communities. To realise this vision, we must make bold and sustained progress in tackling discrimination and advancing equality across Scotland.

To support BSL users to communicate by phone in their preferred language, the Scottish Government funds Contact Scotland BSL, a free national Video Relay Service that enables British Sign Language (BSL) users to make phone calls via qualified BSL interpreters, available 24/7. A new contract for this service is currently being tendered, and the Government has engaged with the Deaf and Deafblind communities and their representative organisations to understand their needs and priorities for the future service.

The Scottish Government expects all public bodies to fully comply with their legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010, including the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). This duty requires public authorities to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different groups. These responsibilities should be embedded in all aspects of decision-making, including the design and delivery of services.

While enforcement of the Equality Act, including the PSED, lies with the courts and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)—which operates independently of the Scottish Government—the Government supports compliance through guidance, engagement with public bodies, and monitoring how the PSED is implemented in practice.

There has been no discussion between the Scottish Government and Historic Environment Scotland regarding the future or sale of the South Sleat Estate.