Seòmar agus comataidhean

For details of consultant costs for 2021-22 in relation to the Abellio ScotRail Franchise I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-08601 on 6 June 2022. 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

Following the move in April 2022 to bring ScotRail services into public ownership, any ScotRail costs for consultants in financial year 2022-23 are costs incurred by ScotRail Trains Ltd and as such the full details of this will provided by ScotRail Trains Ltd as soon as practicable after the end of the financial year in March 2023.

NatureScot has advised that there is no evidence of spread of avian influenza from poultry or gamebirds to wild birds within the UK. There is no evidence to support further disease control measures on game bird operation activities beyond those already in place, which includes a ban on releasing game birds in all disease control zones. We are closely monitoring the situation and will review disease control measures as appropriate.

The Scottish Government’s leadership in support for rail freight is outlined in our rail freight strategy and put into practice with significant investment and a first of a kind regulatory growth target. Our £25 million ring-fenced fund for rail freight for the period 2019-24 is unique to Scotland and we continue to offer Freight Facilities Grants unlike some other parts of the UK. These funding opportunities are generating private investment in rail freight facilities and unlocking opportunities for rail freight across the country.

Our rolling programme of efficient electrification, detailed in the Rail Decarbonisation Action Plan, will also encourage and facilitate modal shift to rail freight as it brings significant environmental benefits, improves connectivity and creates additional capacity supporting the key role rail freight has to play in helping us achieve our transport emission targets.

Education authorities have duties under the Education (Additional Support for Learning) Act (2004) to identify, provide for and review the additional support needs of their pupils. This includes needs arising from the disruption caused by the mobility and deployment of a parent or carer in the Armed Forces and would include mental health and/or pastoral supports as appropriate.

We continue to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing through the provision of counselling through schools. This is now in place across secondary schools in Scotland. We have also introduced new guidance to support whole school approaches to mental health and wellbeing, complementing the work that education authorities and schools already do to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing.

Children of service personnel in Scotland will have their needs met by the supports outlined above and as such there are no plans to introduce a Service Pupil Premium.

Evacuation alert systems were introduced to all new high rise domestic buildings over 18m to assist the Fire and Rescue Service in the unlikely event of a partial or full evacuation of the building following the outbreak of fire.

The guidance in the technical handbooks is not retrospective and applied to new buildings or conversions from 1 October 2019. Local authority building standards services hold building warrant records, which should show which buildings have evacuation alert systems installed.

Savings in carbon emissions from replacement of Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU) rolling stock are calculated using emission rates from the DfT’s TAG Databook A3.3 (November 2021). This is undertaken when each individual project or line of route reaches the Outline Business Case stage of development.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-10083 on16 August 2022. 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.

Many refugees resettled in Scotland have skills and experience developed through their trade or occupation in their home country, including in the construction industry, and may want to resume their profession here.

In Scotland, everyone working on a building site must first pass a health and safety test and be certified through the UK wide Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS).

The Building Skills for Construction Certification Project has developed supporting ESOL materials, to help ESOL learners to prepare for the computer CSCS test. Pilot courses are being delivered to test the resources. The project started on 1 September 2021 and will run until 30 November 2022. Pilot courses are running in Fife, Clackmannanshire and Dundee, as well as a national online pilot for candidates across Scotland to enable those who cannot access such training in person to benefit, particularly those in remote and rural communities where a pilot course would not be viable due to numbers.

There are seven Arabic speakers enrolled in this course across Dundee, Fife and Clackmannanshire. Throughout the rest of Scotland there are an additional thirteen learners on these courses, eleven of whom are Arabic speakers.

The CSCS ESOL course resources will be a lasting legacy of the project. At the end of the project, these resources will be freely available for any learning provider or training organisation to use, allowing courses to be run across Scotland to prepare refugees for work in the construction industry. There will also be a webinar at the end of the project which will cover how these resources should be used in practice.

This project has been funded through the New Scots Refugee Integration Delivery Project which is part funded through the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund.

The Scottish Government is committed to continuing to invest in NHS dentistry in rural areas, which is why we have updated the Recruitment and Retention Allowance to reflect the particular challenges in attracting dentists to work in more remote areas.

Dentists, who meet all the requirements and are providing GDS in a Classification 1 area, will receive:

• £25,000 paid over two years, at £12,500 per annum, for dentists in sub-part A of the first part of a dental list;
• £12,500 paid over one year for dentists undertaking VT.

Dentists, who meet all the requirements and are providing GDS in a Classification 2 area, will receive:

• £15,000 paid over two years, at £7,500 per annum, for dentists in sub-part A of the first part of a dental list;
• £7,500 paid over one year for dentists undertaking VT.

The Scottish Government is modifying homelessness legislation in September 2022 to suspend the power of Scottish local authorities to refer a person who is homeless or threatened with homelessness to another local authority in Scotland on the grounds of their local connection. This will not affect processes in place related to social housing. This change was recommended by the independent Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group in 2018 and will give people in housing crisis more choice about where they live and access to the support they need.

Homelessness stakeholders support the principle of the suspension of local connection referrals. Some concerns have been raised by those local authorities with the highest volume of homelessness presentations. As the timing of the change was the primary concern, the Scottish Government delayed amending the legislation on three occasions, most recently in March 2022 due to the potential impact on homelessness services of the Ukrainian resettlement scheme.

The Scottish Government has put in place a robust monitoring and evaluation framework to measure any impact on local authorities’ homelessness and support services. The Ministerial Statement on Local Connection, published in March 2021, allows for appropriate action to be taken should the capacity of a local authority to meet its homelessness and housing duties be adversely affected by the legislative change.

The Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers and Scottish Women’s Aid have raised concerns about people who have restrictions on their movement, for example, people subject to multi-agency public protection agency (MAPPA) arrangements and convicted perpetrators of domestic abuse. The change to local connection legislation will not override existing protocols to manage these matters.

Any other concerns will be addressed as they arise through regular engagement with stakeholders. Appropriate mitigations and support will be put in place where there is evidence that this is needed.