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The Scottish Public Service Ombudsman (SPSO) has a statutory function in relation to complaints handling for most public bodies. If children and/or their representatives are not content with the way a public service within SPSO’s jurisdiction has dealt with their complaint they can escalate it to SPSO. When required to investigate complaints, SPSO highlight mistakes and failures in the complaints handling process and make recommendations to remedy those. SPSO also have legal powers to make a declaration of non-compliance if the public authority has failed to ensure their procedures are consistent with a model complaints handling process.

With extra funding from the Scottish Government, SPSO have created child friendly complaints handling principles and child friendly complaints handling process guidance to help public bodies under their jurisdiction to implement a model complaints handling procedure in a way that upholds children’s rights under the UNCRC.

The Scottish Government is also working with external stakeholders to co-develop data collection to help understand children and young people’s experiences of raising an individual rights issue to identify if and where children and young people encounter barriers and gaps in support, information, and services that they need to claim their rights.

The Scottish Government does not collect data on the total number of appeal decisions made by kinship carers regarding financial assistance.

Decisions made by the UK Government since the financial crash in 2008, and their overall austerity policy position since 2010, continue to have a profound and negative impact on the finances available to the Scottish Government, the economy, and to the college sector. In recent years this challenging scenario has been exacerbated by increased national insurance costs, high energy costs and high inflation.

Rising national insurance contributions have added over £11 million of extra cost on to our colleges. The Scottish Government is seeking to mitigate the impact of these costs by providing an additional £5.5 million in this current financial year, but the added costs to our public sector from increased national insurance contributions are not helping us to realise our potential for economic growth.

We recognise the pressures facing the college sector, which have been set out clearly by both Audit Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), and I will continue to work collaboratively with the college sector on those challenges.

The 2025-26 direct mental health programme budget remains as originally published at £270.5 million. There is no reduction to that budget. In keeping with normal practice, some of this budget is transferred to other portfolios for mental health projects and, for example, to NHS Boards to support improvement activity and local mental health provision. However, the reference to a £120 million internal transfer to Local Government is a transfer from another budget which supports a wide range of social care activity and bears no relation to the mental health services direct programme budget.

Under Class 33 of the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (Scotland) Order 1992, local authorities have permitted development rights (PDR) to carry out works for the erection of dwellings, provided that such works conform with the adopted local development plan. Use of the PDR is a matter for individual local authorities. There are no PDR specifically for registered social landlords.

The Scottish Government is exploring whether PDR can play a greater role in helping to address the housing emergency. The recent public consultation on Permitted development rights to support provision of new homes sought views on simplifying planning processes to encourage the provision of new homes in rural areas and town and city centres. The consultation closed on 27 October and feedback from respondents will help inform the formation and refinement of any proposals for new or amended PDR.

FLS does not have a policy of exclusive use of paid contractors for deer management.

FLS currently achieves its annual deer cull via:-

• FLS Wildlife Rangers (x 50), delivering 24% of cull.
• Professional Culling Contractors (x 115), delivering 74% of cull.
• Recreational Stalkers (x 50), delivering 2% of cull.

This model was developed over several years and has helped FLS facilitate a 35% increase in its cull from 30,700 deer in 2015/16, to 41,500 deer in 2024/25.

Higher culls result in reductions in deer numbers and associated deer damage impacts.

Across SNFL there are currently 23 recreational deer leases and permissions covering 24,700 hectares.

The Scottish Government remains committed to the aims of the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024 which includes introducing a licensing scheme and associated training requirements for muirburn so that it can be undertaken in an environmentally sustainable manner.

We are hopeful that the delay to the implementation of the licensing scheme until Autumn 2026 will provide us with the time and opportunity to carefully consider the upcoming changes to muirburn practices and how these changes can be brought forward in a way which does not adversely affect our ability to prevent and respond to wildfires.

The Scottish Government commissioned the James Hutton Institute 2024 report, Rapid Evidence Review: Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in Scotland. The report notes that evidence of urban and peri-urban agriculture in Scotland is more focused on the social, community and environmental benefits of community growing (eg. allotments and community gardens) and that most community gardening in Scotland is currently not commercially viable.

The Scottish Government continue to fund on-going research as part of the 2022-27 ENRA Strategic Research Programme which explores the means, barriers and drivers for increasing the production and use of Scotland’s fruit and vegetables (Incentivising resilient and innovative food supply chains and sustainable consumer choices | SEFARI). Part of the focus of this research is to identify interventions for supporting the sustainable expansion of small-scale, agro-ecological producers as a contributor to Scotland’s food system’s resilience. Final research outputs are not yet available. Priorities for future research in the ENRA portfolio were consulted upon earlier this year in the research strategy (Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture (ENRA) research strategy 2027-2032: consultation - gov.scot)

Research outputs from the rapid evidence review and future outputs of research in this area provide a valuable resource in contributing to on-going policy making.

Wildfire, as we saw this summer, is very damaging to our precious peatland carbon stores and the Scottish Government is incredibly grateful to the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, gamekeepers, land managers, volunteers, partners, landowners, the extended local community, the wider land management sector and indeed to everyone who played a part in getting these under control.

Scottish Ministers held a wildfires summit on 14 October to consider how we can together to improve our preparedness for wildfires in the future. The increased wildfire risk in Scotland cannot be ignored and muirburn is a tool we cannot afford to lose.

Delaying the muirburn licensing scheme is a difficult but necessary decision to ensure there are no unintended consequences in regards to muirburns role in wildfire mitigation.

The Scottish Government has not had any recent discussions with UK Ministers regarding whale and dolphin hunts in the Faroe Islands, although officials do have engagement on this and other matters.

International negotiations and membership of organisations such as IWC are a reserved matter for the UK Government. However we fully support the UK Government and International Whaling Commission (IWC) in seeking to secure a permanent worldwide ban, and in continuing to call on all countries who practice any form of whaling, to cease these operations and enforce the worldwide ban.