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In November last year we published a plan setting out a suite of 20 actions being taken to improve GP recruitment and retention.

We have also reactivated the GP Sustainability loans scheme for GP premises and invested an additional £73.2 million in General Practice this financial year to provide a pay uplift for GPs and to support GP practices to retain and recruit key staff. The uplift includes £7.6 million to cover population growth.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information centrally. The member may find it useful to consult the Public Health Scotland ‘Cancer incidence in Scotland’ publication. This had its most recent release in November 2024 and is accessible at the following link: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/cancer-incidence-in-scotland/cancer-incidence-in-scotland-to-december-2022/

NHS Boards have reporting systems to capture data on violence and aggression - including sexual assault. I strongly encourage staff to report any and all instances of violent and aggressive behaviour.

Health Improvement Scotland are working with all NHS boards and partner organisations to standardise the reporting of adverse events, and have developed a national framework which was published in February.

This details the importance of national standards of reporting and the requirement for monitoring and publishing of data. This will facilitate the collation of accurate data nationally.

The courts have extensive powers to deal robustly with sexual offending. All instances of such behaviour should be reported and escalated to Police Scotland as quickly as possible for consideration of necessary action.

The Scottish Government does intend to bring forward new legislation to regulate canine fertility businesses. Draft regulations will be laid before the Scottish Parliament for its consideration in due course.

Decisions around how much is spent on mental health and child and adolescent mental health services is dependent on the financial decisions taken by NHS Boards and their partners, on the continued local investment needed to achieve the targets. It is important that Boards retain flexibility in their spending decisions to meet specific demands, including making progress towards the 1% and 10% targets

Boards should be commended for the increases in spend on mental health. While some have gone above the 10% and 1% targets.

Looking forward we expect spending on Mental Health between the Scottish Government and NHS Boards, to be around £1.5 billion in 2025-26 based on recent Health Service cost book data.

The use of contractors in SG is largely accounted for by resourcing requirements to strengthen key professional skills such as expanding our digital capabilities. Employing temporary and agency workers provides the flexibility required to meet immediate business and access specialist and other skills quickly.

Having grown the workforce to respond to the Covid-19 epidemic, the Scottish Government reviewed its workforce plans at the beginning of the 2022-23 financial year and the Resource Spending Review. Recruitment controls were introduced in 2022 and the Scottish Government has continued to prioritise reductions in contingent workers as an initial means of reducing the workforce size and cost. This approach has been in partnership with recognised Trade Unions. The number of contingent workers is now 39% lower than in March 2022.

One of the areas in which this was delivered was the Digital Directorate within DG Corporate. A number of roles were identified that would be needed on a long term basis which were currently occupied by contingent workers. An intentional cost saving strategy was implemented to replace some posts being held by contingent workers with directly employed staff. It is estimated that this process has saved Scottish Government £3.2m.

Social Security Scotland has the capacity to identify the number of distinct recipients removed from the client count for Adult Disability Payment in a given time frame. Social Security Scotland do not hold the breakdown of such data by cause of removal.

Social Security Scotland will continue to review and prioritise any new statistics produced and will take account of users’ needs when developing future publications, in line with Code of Practice for Statistics.

The latest Adult Disability Payment official statistics publication can be found at: Social Security Scotland - Statistics. The next release of Adult Disability Payment statistics, covering the period to the end of January 2025, is due to be published on 18 March 2025.

There is a requirement for Health Boards to maintain accurate and up to date information on PACS Tier Two requests. The Scottish Government does not hold validated data on the number of PACS applications that Health Boards have received from clinicians. This information would need to be requested from Health Boards directly.

Health Boards are required to capture and share data as retrospective “in confidence” summary reports with the Scottish Government on a quarterly basis. The data received by Scottish Government is retained for internal management purposes only and is not formally validated.

Notably, the majority of collated PACS Tier Two requests are for fewer than five medicines; and data for numbers fewer than five are deemed to be patient identifiable and cannot be published.

The Scottish Government does not hold all data in a way that can meet this request. The Scottish Government can provide you with a breakdown of its annual spend on contingent workers by Directorate, but is unable to provide this by Project and/or Contract name as it cannot be consistently categorised in this way.

The table containing the breakdown of expenditure by Directorate on contingent workers was too large to be incorporated into the PQ response. This has therefore been recorded as bib 65692 held in The Scottish Parliament Information Centre. To note, this data has been extracted from a different system to that which retains records on contingent worker numbers and cannot be viewed as inter-related, due to the dependency on different hierarchical structures and definitions of contingent worker. This data does not provide a comparable view of the costs attributable to the contingent workforce listed Scottish Government workforce information - gov.scot

The Scottish Government implemented an Oracle Cloud enterprise resource planning system in Autumn 2024, replacing our legacy HR and Finance systems. Though the data capture of contingent workers remains an area requiring some further development, the implementation of a combined HR and Finance system will improve the data we hold on workforce costs.

The Scottish Government has prioritised a reduction in the contingent workforce such as contractors and consultants, as it has reduced its workforce size. This approach has been in partnership with recognised Trade Unions. The number of contingent workers is now 39% lower than in March 2022.

The SPCB is open to discussions with organisations that may provide a practical improvement to the processes we already have in place.  Already, we have embarked on several ways to reduce single use products including disposable cups usage across the Scottish Parliament.  The cup levy has been in place since 2019 which has significantly reduced the use of disposables.  We actively monitor the usage of disposable cups with our service partner and are working to reduce this further through positive consumer behaviour.  We are in the process of installing a customer operated appliance that rinses and dries reusable cups efficiently and hygienically. This will support customers further with using reusables on a return basis assisting us with the goal of disposable reduction. We have also ordered a stock of reuseable cups to be available when personal cups are forgotten or not available.