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This year’s Scottish Budget is a budget of choices and we have chosen to back our national mission to tackle child poverty and strengthen support available for families during the cost of living crisis.

The Budget commits almost £200 million to double the Scottish Child Payment to £20 from April 2022, immediately benefiting 111,000 children under the age of 6.

We remain committed to delivering the Scottish Child Payment for children and young people aged 6-15 by the end of 2022, subject to receipt of the necessary data from DWP, at which point more than 400,000 children will be eligible.

In advance we are supporting as many school age children and young people as possible through our Bridging Payments, worth £520 in 2022. This innovative response, which makes use of the data local authorities have, is delivering immediate support to around 150,000 children.

The Scottish Child Payment remains the best way to provide the support low income families need now which is why we have acted to double the payment from April.

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.
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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.

The Scottish Government currently forecasts a balanced resource budget position by the end of 2021-22.

The £200 million of additional Covid support for Business’s and for Self Isolation Support Grants announced by the First Minister on 14 December 2021 has been reprioritised from existing budgets.

The 2022-23 Scottish Budget assumes £179 million of capital and financial transactions will be made available for carry-forward in 2021-22 through the Scotland Reserve.

The Scottish Government recognises the valuable contribution that positive, well supported transitions have on outcomes for care leavers and that the relationships care leavers build including with their foster carers are integral to these outcomes.

Since 1 April 2015, young people leaving care after their sixteenth birthday, and who have been looked after in foster, kinship or residential care have been eligible for Continuing Care and therefore able to continue in their care setting if that is in their best interests. The Scottish Government’s Continuing Care guidance stipulates that local authorities should carefully consider the financial implications for a carer offering a Continuing Care placement to ensure that a lack of financial support is not a barrier to the continuation of the placement.

The First Minister announced funding to support small and medium-sized businesses to improve their ventilation. The Business Ventilation Fund opened for applications on Tuesday 23rd November 2021.

The impact and effectiveness of the fund is being carried out in early January to consider take up and a full evaluation will be conducted on closure of the Fund in April. This will include reach by sectors and size of business.

A webpage is being set up for the Covid Ventilation Short Life Working Group, and the minutes will be available on there in due course.

The number of Nurses employed by NHS Ayrshire & Arran in the last five years can be found on the NHS Education for Scotland (NES) website on the following link: Nursing and Midwifery | Turas Data Intelligence (nhs.scot)

The number of GPs in each board is available at Table 2 of:

General Practice - GP Workforce and practice list sizes 2010 - 2020 - General Practice - GP workforce and practice list sizes - Publications - Public Health Scotland

The next update, including figures for 30 September 2021, is published on 14 December.

The number of Doctors other than GP's including Consultants, doctors in training and other trained doctors employed by NHS Ayrshire & Arran in the last five years can be found on the NES website on the following link:

Medical and Dental | Turas Data Intelligence (nhs.scot)

The Scottish Government considers the practice of cropping a dog's ears purely for cosmetic reasons in order to achieve a desired look a despicable and cruel practice. Should the Scottish Parliament agree that the measures set out in the Kept Animals Bill should apply to Scotland then that Bill, if delivered, will provide Scottish Ministers with regulation making powers to prohibit the importation of certain types or classes of animals, including dogs that have been mutilated for cosmetic reasons.

If and when these new powers are available to us, we will seek to bring forward new legislation to prohibit the importation into Scotland of dogs with cropped ears or other unacceptable mutilations. Meantime, we continue to work with the other GB administrations, APHA and animal welfare stakeholders to highlight the illegality and cruelty of such procedures.

The construction of the A92/A96 Haudagain Improvement project is well advanced.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures to combat the impact of the pandemic, it was confirmed in the publication of the Infrastructure Investment Plan in December 2020 that completion was anticipated in Winter 2021, noting that this date was subject to any unforeseen circumstances.

The latest information received from the Contractor now indicates an anticipated date for completion of works allowing roads to open to traffic by the end of March 2022. The Contractor has reported impacts to programme critical work within the previous month due to adverse weather from Storm Arwen and Storm Barra. Until these recent events the Contractor had been able to maintain an expected completion date within the Winter 2021 period, despite the challenges posed throughout 2021 by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and industry-wide supply chain issues. However, the risk of such events causing delay to the expected completion date has always been highlighted, to indicate that any estimated date must be understood to be subject to an element of uncertainty. Although this revised date remains subject to no further disruption occurring due to events such as adverse weather and the COVID-19 pandemic, Transport Scotland continues to engage with the Contractor as they work to mitigate any delays on site.

The following table presents the total number of fatal and serious accidents for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. However, the information on the total number of fatal and serious accidents for 2021 are only available up to the date stated in the table.

There are now over 150 chargers throughout the Electric A9 corridor, in a variety of locations including charging hubs and rural communities.

The number of chargers will continue to grow as the number of electric vehicles in Scotland does, providing electric vehicle charging provision for long distance journeys, alongside local charging for businesses and residents, and charging at destinations.

To date, the Electric A9 has been funded by Scottish Ministers and chargers are part of the ChargePlace Scotland, which provides the back office provision and network. ChargePlace Scotland don’t own or operate charge points, this is predominantly done by local authorities along the route. We anticipate that commercially funded chargers will also be installed along the route of the A9 increasing the total number of chargers available in future years.