Seòmar agus comataidhean

Following a pause, due to capacity challenges related to the pandemic from March 2020 to March 2021, officials from the Scottish Government and the UK Government's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have resumed work to finalise a proposal for introducing split payments of Universal Credit in Scotland. This work has been progressing steadily and Scottish Government officials expect to have a policy proposal ready for the DWP to undertake impact assessments in 2022.

Offering the choice of split payments of Universal Credit has the potential to help address the inequality inherent in household payments that reduce access to independent incomes and can place power in the hands of abusers. Whilst offering split payments of Universal Credit in Scotland will not be sufficient to solve these complex problems, improving the accessibility of an independent income may help people in difficult situations and result in fairer and more empowering outcomes.

A list of the NatureScot Better Places Fund recipients can be found on its website using the link below. It includes both recipients of the first round of the Better Places Fund in 2020-21, a NatureScot initiative, and a second round of funding in 2021-22.

Better Places Green Recovery Fund - Closed for applications | NatureScot

This second round of funding was provided by the Scottish Government specifically to support communities, local authorities and public bodies as they prepared for the 2021 season.

In total the £3.2m fund has supported 125 projects including 75 ranger posts, 54 visitor operatives and infrastructure such as advisory signage, recycling litter bins, temporary toilets, over-flow parking areas, car park upgrades and other developments.

Projects have covered a variety of locations across the majority of the country.

When existing Disability Living Allowance for Children (DLA Child) clients have their awards transferred to Child Disability Payment (CDP) they will receive the same payment rate for CDP as they received for DLA Child at the point of transfer. They will continue to receive this amount until their CDP needs to be reviewed. The value of each component of CDP is the same as DLA Child so that we do not create a two-tier system with varying rules whilst Scottish disability benefit clients are transferred to Social Security Scotland.

The Scottish Fiscal Commission is responsible for forecasting spending on DLA Child and CDP. The Commission has not reported a breakdown of the proportion of the CDP clients in receipt of greater, the same, or lesser amount of financial assistance under CDP compared with what they receive from the Department for Work and Pensions.

In forecasting CDP, the Scottish Fiscal Commission assumed that when award reviews occur the proportion of clients that would have had their award increased, maintained, and decreased under DLA Child will be the same as under CDP. While they recognise that the less frequent award reviews for CDP may increase the proportion of awards staying at their existing level for longer, the Commission’s judgement is that the effect on the overall outcome of award reviews on award levels may be cancelled out by an increase in the average initial award length and light-touch award reviews.

The First Minister has not visited any care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic to listen to the views of residents, but has closely monitored the situation in care homes throughout, discussing developments frequently with officials and Ministers.

The Scottish Government have not made contact with the Australian Government for advice regarding an apology for historical adoption practices.

The Scottish Government recognises the importance of mobile and broadband connectivity for almost all aspects of everyday life which is why we work closely with Local Resilience Partnerships, telecoms providers and the UK Government - both in preparing for, and responding to severe weather events which may impact telecommunications in Scotland.

It is important to note that resilience of the Communications Sector, which includes telecommunications and internet, is reserved and therefore the responsibility of the UK Government.

Major outages are extremely rare, but most telecoms equipment is dependent on a power supply in order to function which can be disrupted by extreme weather.

During the Storm Arwen response effort, welfare centres offered Wi-Fi and mobile phone charging facilities where possible. Additionally, in the in the run-up to Storm Arwen, the Scottish Government’s Ready Scotland campaign was activated using local radio and digital channels and was geographically targeted on the areas affected by the Amber and Red Met Office warnings.

The ‘Ready Scotland’ website, at ready.scot , provides advice to the public on how to prepare for and respond to emergencies; including utilities loss and severe weather.

We will continue to press the UK Government and the regulator (Ofcom) for assurance that increasing resilience of the telecoms network in Scotland is a priority.

Scottish Government makes DNS changes to domains on a daily basis. Given the number of change requests that have been processed each day since renewals in 2016 and the way in which domains are managed it is not possible for us to provide an accurate breakdown of the “active” or “inactive” domains for any date or year other than the latest data we have for the current portfolio as it stands today. We can however provide a breakdown of annual costs for the renewal, management and enterprise DNS provision for the Scottish Government domains portfolio each year since 2016.

Date     Total domains   Total Ex Vat

2021-06-30   1039     £13,267.50

2020-06-30   1021   £12,530.00

2019-06-30   837   £10,455.00

2018-06-30   705   £8,493.00

2017-06-30   640   £7,612.00

2016-06-30 630   £7,186.00

We have defined “active” as a domain that has DNS configuration applied to it. Any domain that is currently parked with our Registrar Com Laude or has no DNS configuration has been defined as “inactive”.

We set out an initial £20 million allocation for the Fund in our draft Budget document on the 9th December. Building on our commitment to co-design, we will take forward a series of engagements in the new year with partners across the region to design the approach for the implementation of the Fund, including how investments can demonstrate alignment with the national outcomes we set out in our response to the Just Transition Commission in September 2021.

We are fully committed to ensuring this Fund benefits communities fairly across the North East and Moray region. Our engagement activity will cover the region as a whole, ensuring that communities and businesses in Moray, with others, are able to influence the approach taken for the Fund.

The Scottish Government has received the following amounts in (a) health and social care related Barnett consequentials; and (b) Covid-19 Barnett consequentials related to health and social care spend:-

Work to review the response to Storm Arwen is already well underway.

I requested that the Scottish Government’s Resilience Division begin work on the scope and terms of a review into the Storm Arwen response on 30 November 2021, and on 14 December 2021 I formally commissioned the Scottish Resilience Partnership to collate evidence from local resilience partnerships to inform the findings of the review.

The Scottish Government will also gather evidence from other relevant groups, for example the voluntary sector and utilities companies.
‎

I aim to publish a review paper with recommendations as early as possible in 2022, although I now expect that to be later than originally planned due to the need to enable resilience partners to prioritise the pandemic response.