Seòmar agus comataidhean

The Scottish Government wants to encourage more women into crofting, ensuring they are empowered to develop skills and access opportunities, creating equality of opportunity and prosperity, as well as supporting business innovation. That is why we are increasing the support provided to women in agriculture to £600,000 per year, during this Parliament, to deliver practical solutions to improve the lives of women living or working in Scottish agriculture.

The recent Economic Condition of Crofting Report states that the number of female crofters has more than doubled from 13% in 2014 to 30% in 2022 and since 2020, just under half of the new entrants recorded by the Crofting Commission were female.

The Scottish Government’s Directorate for International Trade and Investment directly manages the Trade and Investment Envoy Network.

We also work closely with the GlobalScot Network managed by the Scottish Enterprise to advance our trade and investment ambitions. Through GlobalScots, we engage with individual Scottish University alumni overseas to maintain good relations with Scotland and also offer a route for appropriate alumni to join the network, thereby adding to its diversity and reach.

The Directorate of International Trade and Investment has also worked with Scottish Government colleagues to develop the Scottish Government connections strategy, which is focused on developing stronger links with diaspora groups.

The Connecting Scotland programme aims to ensure that people in Scotland have access to digital services by providing them with opportunities to access and utilise devices, connectivity, skills, and support effectively. To date, the Scottish Government has committed over £48m to Connecting Scotland, through the Programme for Government and Winter Package for Social Support.

Responsibility for the management of the police estate sits with the Scottish Police Authority and the Chief Constable.

Police Scotland has advised that while they have no plans to build any new police stations in 2023, a new police station will be opened in spring 2023 at Newton House in Ayr, which is owned by South Ayrshire Council. This will provide a new, modern replacement for the existing Ayr police station.

This is a matter for the Scottish Social Services Council. The information requested is not held centrally.

This is a matter for the Scottish Social Services Council. The information requested is not held centrally.

The Scottish Government reviewed the Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS), Health Protection (HP) and Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Workforce in 2022, as part of the work formulating evidence towards the recently published ‘Infection Prevention Workforce: Strategic Plan 2022-2024’. The plan is about building capacity and capability of AMS, HP (with relevance to IPC) and IPC workforce in all health and care settings, to enable recovery and development. It reflects on the need for planning post pandemic across all health and care, and as part of the wider system infection management needs. Following a situational analysis, recommendations in the plan include:

• identifying the current specialist workforce across health and care to assess and address demands (current and future) and potential service gaps, to allow for succession planning and sustainability.
• reviewing and addressing current IPC capability within the AMS and HP Workforce.
• reviewing current educational and career pathways and identify key priorities in order to meet future and evolving needs to support service delivery.
• progressing the work for a national surveillance eSystem for IPC within secondary care, with the support of local and national stakeholders.
• identifying the requirements for new/emerging local/national specialist roles, which will support phased implementation of a sustainable workforce.
• that each Board should consider whether services should be led by a clinical leader with a focus on AMR, HAI and IPC and with accountability to the executive team within a board, or partnership, to ensure safe and effective clinical service delivery.

For this response families have been interpreted as households with children.

There have been 447 households with children included in the homelessness application that have spent three years or more in temporary accommodation. This is based on available temporary accommodation placement data, where placements closed on or before 31 March 2022. Source: HL1 and HL3 data collections up to 31 March 2022, data as published on 18 August 2022.

Notes on data

The total duration of stay in temporary accommodation for households with children has been derived by linking records between the homelessness application (HL1) and temporary accommodation placement (HL3) data collections. The HL1 collects information on the composition of households making homelessness applications (available from 2002-03). The HL3 gathers information about temporary accommodation placements associated with homelessness applications (only available for all local authorities from 2017-18, however, it includes placements which commenced prior, and includes data prior to this for some local authorities).

The total duration is based on the sum of the durations of all temporary accommodation placements associated with the same household. It may be underestimated where households have placements that started and ended before the HL3 data collection began.

The figure includes households who may have turned down multiple offers of settled accommodation by the local authority but have chosen to wait for an offer that fully meets their needs.

It is important to note that households may sometimes make alternative arrangements for children when entering temporary accommodation and therefore children included in the HL1 return are not always present in associated placements. It can also be that children are present for only part of the stay in temporary accommodation, e.g. as part of shared custody arrangements.

Since its inception in 2014, the annual budget for the Commissioner’s office has been £250,000. This is funded by the Scottish Government and covers the Commissioner’s remuneration, support staff, office and IT requirements and general running costs. The draft budget published on 15 December proposed increasing this to £280,000 in Financial Year 2023-24.

The UK Government has since funded the appointments of the UK Independent Veterans Advisor and the Wales and Northern Ireland Veterans Commissioners for which the Scottish Government do not receive any Barnett Consequentials.

The comment quoted relates to the scale of Scotland’s electricity generation ambition, and uses the comparison to current energy demand to illustrate that scale.

As set out in the draft ESJTP, in 2030, Scottish energy demand that is not met from domestic renewable electricity generation could be met by other sources including by energy storage, fossil fuels, or hydrogen. This will represent a reduction in the use of fossil fuels and an increase in renewables from 2020 levels, when 26.7% of total Scottish energy consumption came from renewable sources.