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The commitment to investing at least £500m over the life of this Parliament to create a Whole Family Wellbeing Fund is significant. This will enable transformational change through the building of universal, holistic support services available in communities across Scotland giving families access to help when and where they need it, and help Scotland keep the Promise.

We will work closely with The Promise Scotland and partners across local government, social justice, health, the third sector, and with children and families to design and deliver the Fund. Further details will be provided in due course.

The amount spent on the Edinburgh Tram Inquiry to date is just over £12 million.

Although not responsible for the site, the Scottish Government has agreed to fund the first phase of work at the Tarbolton landfill site, which will begin to reduce the environmental and amenity impact of the site. As part of this first phase, work to remove giant hogweed from the site was successfully completed in July.

SEPA is currently procuring the bulk of the first phase of work and I am grateful to SEPA for offering to undertake this procurement.

While the Scottish Government is not responsible for the site, we continue to work with our public partners to consider further actions for its longer-term restoration.

The Scottish Government recognises that children whose behaviour has caused harm will also often be the victims of abuse or neglect. The Bairns’ Hoose will be an environment in which this context can be understood and positive interventions can be made to prevent further harmful behaviour.

A key consideration in the development of Bairns’ Hooses which will be taken into account in the development of the policy will be balancing the rights of victims and those of children whose behaviour has caused harm. We recognise the potential tension between the rights of victims and those of children whose behaviour has caused harm and, as such, addressing issues that may arise due to competing interests will be a fundamental consideration as we develop our plans for a national Bairns’ Hoose model.

Our approach is rights-based in line with the United Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), The Promise and Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) in recognising that all children must receive the right help at the right time.

The Biodiversity Intactness Index is one of several indices devised to assess the current state of nature, with attribution to a range of drivers. The Biodiversity Intactness Index focuses on nature in the past, and the many pressures in the past over which we now have no control. The index is predicated on the history of land use in each country, with the UK having a long history of deforestation and agricultural intensification which resulted in a lower score relative to other countries.

We have committed to introduce a new Environment Bill which will include targets for nature restoration that cover land and sea based on an overarching goal of preventing any further extinctions of wildlife and halting declines by 2030, and making significant progress in restoring Scotland’s natural environment by 2045.

In December 2020, we published our Statement of Intent on biodiversity, which sets out our ambitions for biodiversity and announces our new biodiversity strategy, which will be published in autumn 2022. We will continue to consider the best mix of targets and indicators to measure success as we develop our strategy and response to the global post-2020 biodiversity framework.

Please refer to S6W-00255, answered on 23 August 2021 which provides information on the area of responsibility of the Special Advisers and pay scales.

Special Advisors are contracted to work a minimum of 37 hours per week. For the period 7 May 2021 to 16 September 2021 an average of £13.20 per week was claimed on expenses in total by Special Advisers.

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

The Scottish Government works closely with CyberScotland Partners including Police Scotland and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to help protect the public from cyber threats and supports the publishing of a regular CyberScotland Bulletin which references content from Police Scotland, NCSC, SCVO, Scottish Business Resilience Centre, GetSafeOnline, Take5, Trading Standards Scam Share and Neighbourhood Watch Scotland.

On 19 March 2021, we published Scotland’s Scams Prevention, Awareness & Enforcement Strategy, which will facilitate a more coordinated approach to tackling scams in Scotland. The strategy introduces a new framework for tackling scams, with an emphasis on: disrupting scams at source; building capacity, skills and resilience amongst individuals to avoid the risk that scams pose; streamlining the reporting and advice landscape so that people can access the right support at the right time to meet their needs; and improving coordination and intelligence sharing between frontline advice providers, enforcement bodies and wider advocacy organisations.

We encourage anyone who identifies a suspicious email to forward it to report@phishing.gov.uk and to report any suspicious scam websites using the NCSC Scam Website Reporting Service ( https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/section/about-this-website/report-scam-website ). Any victims of online scams or fraud should report to Police Scotland by calling 101

We recognise the massive role that SMEs and micro businesses play across public procurement in Scotland and regard their success as key to unlocking opportunities for all, through fostering apprenticeships, jobs and economic growth.

£13.3 billion worth of public procurement spend in 2019-20 has been analysed. We know the size of the supplier for £11.7 billion of spend and £5.4 billion (46.2%) of this went to SMEs.

The Small Business Survey Scotland 2019 Small Business Survey Scotland 2019 found that 24 per cent of SME employers in Scotland had actually done business for the public sector in the past 12 months compared to 22 per cent for the UK as a whole Small Business Survey UK 2019 . This survey found that, of those SME employers in Scotland that have worked for the public sector in the past 12 months, the greatest share (55 per cent) reported that local authorities were their main customer. This is higher than the UK as a whole at 44 per cent.

A copy of the table detailing the value of core Scottish Government procurement spend with small to medium sized enterprises for the period 2007-2008 to 2020-2021 within UK local authority areas, based on data contained in the Scottish Procurement Information Hub, has been placed in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 62701).

The Scottish Government continues to work with partners to safeguard vulnerable people through the implementation of the National Missing Persons Framework for Scotland. Over the past three years we have developed return discussion training for professionals across Scotland to build understanding about the reasons a person went missing and reduce the risk of future missing episodes.

We have worked with young people who have experience of being missing and invested £40,000 to develop an education resource for young people, hosted on the Runaway Scotland website, to build understanding of risks and where support can be accessed. We have also provided £242,000 of funding since 2016 to Missing People charity to raise awareness of their Runaway helpline service (call 116 000 or visit www.runawayhelpline.org.uk ) for people who are thinking about running away, have already run away or have been away and want to come back. Ninety-nine percent of people who go missing in Scotland are returned safely.

We remain committed to the delivery of East Linton station as early as practicable in Control Period 6 (2019–2024). Network Rail announced on 7 September that local authority planning approval had been received. They are awaiting a final construction programme and will announce an intended completion date as soon as possible.

We continue to work closely with train operators to develop a timetable which will meet the needs of passengers in East Lothian. We will communicate that information widely, including the frequency and stopping patterns, when it has been finalised.