Seòmar agus comataidhean

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-06524 on 25 February 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
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The Scottish Government keeps all its policies and programmes under review to support delivery of the outcomes in the National Performance Framework.

The Self-Isolation Support Grant is focussed on supporting those low income workers who are most likely to face hardship. Since it was launched, it has been extended to better reach those it is intended to support. This includes parents or carers of children who are required to self-isolate and people with caring responsibilities for someone over 16 who needs to isolate.

Most people qualify for the Grant because they earn less than 25% above the Universal Credit assessment or earn less than the Real Living Wage. We have protected those on lower incomes by continuing to include the £20 Universal Credit uplift within the calculation of low income despite the payments being removed by the UK Government.

Those workers who are not eligible for the Self-Isolation Support Grant may be eligible for an emergency grant from their local authority. Scottish Welfare Fund Crisis Grants are available to all people regardless of their current benefit eligibility. They are specifically designed to provide a safety net when an emergency situation occurs and there is no other way to cover costs.

In addition, support can be provided via the Local Self-Isolation Support Service which is a proactive outbound call service operated by local authorities. The service calls people who are self-isolating, and who are happy to pass on their details. This service helps with support to access food, medication, and other essentials, whilst also signposting to further advice services. Help can be provided by contacting The National Assistance Helpline on 0800 111 4000 which anyone can contact, and operates between 09.00 to 17.00 every weekday.

Applications for development and capital funding are open. More information can be found on the Local Energy Scotland website here www.localenergyscot.org . Loan and grant capital funding is currently available to communities developing renewable energy, heat decarbonisation, and local energy system projects through the Scottish Government’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES).

Funding is dependent on project needs and type. The CARES team work with projects from inception to completion and continue to offer a flexible package of support to a wide range of renewable energy projects and will also soon offer support through a framework of specialised technical consultants to make it quicker and easier for communities to explore options. More information on this will be published shortly on the Local Energy Scotland website.

From April 2022 CARES will also give greater focus to the decarbonisation of heat in buildings in line with the ambitions set out in our Heat in Buildings Strategy.

We estimate that 4,100 businesses will qualify as producers for the purposes of Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme (DRS).

We have extensively consulted the drinks producer sector during the development and implementation of our DRS. Our Implementation Advisory Group included a range of representatives of the sector, and drinks producers, like any stakeholder, were consulted through the two consultations on DRS that ran from June-September 2018 and September-December 2019.

In addition to taking forward a National Conversation on rail, we will be consulting specifically on women’s safety when using public transport.

The specific means by which we carry out this engagement are yet to be determined and will be informed by initial discussions with groups representing women and Transport Scotland Officials. A range of options will be presented for how this engagement takes place. It is envisaged that these will include options for engagement that is open to all, focussed on specific groups or combines elements of both.

We welcomed the opportunity to participate in the first Less Survivable Cancers Awareness Day and joined the Less Survivable Cancers Taskforce in raising the profile of less survivable cancers, including neurological cancers, through our video of support on twitter.

We know that the earlier cancer is detected the greater the chance of survival, this is particularly important across rapidly-advancing diseases like the less survivable cancers, which include brain tumours. Our Detect Cancer Early (DCE) Programme adopts a whole-systems approach to diagnosing and treating cancer as early as possible. This £44m programme received an additional £20m in August 2021 and is being developed and supported by a new Early Cancer Diagnosis Programme Board.

Scotland’s first three Early Cancer Diagnostic Centres (ECDC) are now live in NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Dumfries and Galloway and NHS Fife. These Centres provide primary care with a new referral route for patients with non-specific symptoms suspicious of cancer (including weight loss, fatigue and nausea), which do not meet Scottish Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer for specific cancer types, including brain tumours.

Local Authorities have been provided with New Burdens funding to support new processes for gathering supporting information on behalf of clients applying for disability assistance. These new processes introduced a new requirement for Local Authorities to receive, triage, manage and respond to these requests for information from Social Security Scotland for Child Disability Payment.

The funding provided for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 years is detailed below:

The funding allocation is made on the basis of the anticipated level of need to support these processes in each Local Authority. Scottish Government Communities Analysis division have provided forecast estimates for the number of requests for supporting information that each Local Authority may receive.

The estimates for supporting information requests have been created by using actual volumes of applications in Scotland for the DWP equivalent benefit, Disability Living Allowance for Children (DLAC) over the past 5 years as the basis. This data was combined with statistics from the Department for Communities (DfC) which provided a percentage breakdown of cases where additional supporting information was required. This percentage was applied to the Scottish application projections and ratified by Health and Social Care practitioners in Social Security Scotland.

Working with COSLA and the Local Authorities who supported the Child Disability Payment Pilot, the Social Security Programme agreed an appropriate level of funding to support Perth and Kinross Council as a medium sized authority with a mixed urban/rural demographic to act as a median. The funding allocated to all other Local Authorities was based proportionately upon the volume of Supporting Information requests they are expected to receive against the base level of funding agreed for Perth and Kinross Council.

Using this methodology Island Authorities were thought to be unfairly disadvantaged due to the small number of requests they are likely to receive. As such an Island Uprating was agreed to ensure that all organisations received at least £29,000 per annum to adequately resource this new burden. The methodology for funding allocation was approved through the Settlement and Distribution Group and the COSLA Leaders meeting in Autumn 2021.

The following table shows the number of domestic abuse incidents recorded by police in Scotland, where the victim is male, from 1999-00 to 2020-21.

This information is sourced from the Official Statistics on domestic abuse incidents recorded by the police in Scotland. These note that the creation of Police Scotland altered the way in which domestic abuse data was collected, with the introduction of a new national database to capture this information for all of Scotland from 2014-15 onwards. Therefore some caution should be exercised when interpreting these statistics over years that span this change.

Table: Number of domestic abuse incidents recorded by police in Scotland, with a male victim, 1999-00 to 2020-21