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The Scottish Government currently provides a substantial, free advice and support offering to Scottish SMEs to understand how to become more energy and to take action to implement renewable heating measures, through its Energy Efficiency Business Support Service. Scottish SMEs benefit from a variety of support packages including online tools, onsite visits, bespoke energy audits, webinars, information events and advice on funding.

The Energy Efficiency Business Support (EEBS) service is responsible for signposting businesses to the SME loan and cashback scheme, administered by Energy Saving Trust on behalf of the Scottish Government, and for producing the bespoke assessment reports that are a prerequisite for an application to these schemes. The SME Loan and Cashback scheme provides interest free loans from £1,000 up to £100,000 to small and medium sized Scotland based businesses. Furthermore, SMEs can apply for a 75% cashback grant of up to £10,000 towards the costs of a renewables heating system and a further 30% cashback grant up to £10,000 for energy efficiency measures.

Scotland’s land and the natural capital it supports is one of our most valuable assets, vital to our national prosperity and to our wellbeing as individuals and communities. By addressing the twin climate and biodiversity crises while improving individuals public and community wellbeing, progressive land use and development brings many positive benefits to Scotland by combining sustainable land use/development and people’s requirements in a fair and accountable way. As such it is in line both with our long standing vision and objectives for sustainable land use in Scotland as set out in our Land Use Strategy and the overarching principles of our Just Transition.

The Roads (Scotland) Act 1984 places the statutory responsibility for local roads improvement, maintenance and repair with local road authorities.

As such, the local authority road network condition is assessed via the Scottish Road Maintenance Condition Survey, which is organised by the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland (SCOTS).

That information is not held centrally. Local authorities are responsible for the provision of local waste services and are, therefore, best placed to comment on contractual arrangements for waste services.

We have no plans to include future designation of any new national parks as a national development in the forthcoming National Planning Framework 4. A draft was laid in Parliament on 10 November 2021 and a public consultation is also running alongside parliamentary scrutiny.

On 3 November 2020 the Scottish Government published a rapid review of outbreaks to learn lessons for practices within care homes Coronavirus (COVID-19): care home outbreaks - root cause analysis - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

In doing so, the report collated and evaluated local level experiences and responses to COVID-19 outbreaks within care homes. It identified a number of recommendations to support working practices to prevent transmission of COVID. We continue to work to ensure the recommendations are implemented and have recently set up a working group to examine whether further work is required given where we now are in the pandemic.

Providing consistent high quality, safe and effective personalised care for people is our top priority for our health and care services. We continue to take a public health and a clinical evidence based response to the pandemic. In doing so, this continually ensures working practices are fit for purpose, for example Infection Prevention and Control, Personal Protective Equipment and Testing to Protect which continue to be of paramount importance as we come to deal with the impact of the pandemic and apply lessons learned.

In addition, to support the needs and wellbeing of the social care workforce and unpaid carers, we have put in place a combination of measures including working practices which were outlined in the Adult Social Care Winter Plan available at the following link: Adult social care - winter preparedness plan: 2021-22 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

As we look to the future and rebuild and remobilise our social care sector in Scotland, we have a significant opportunity to ensure that staff and users of social care people are placed at the centre of the recovery. We are proactively developing an Older People’s Strategy and a Healthcare Framework for adults and older people living in care homes. These principles will also be critical as we establish a National Care Service in Scotland.

The UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) has not yet made a recommendation on the use of self-sampling in the national cervical screening programme. However the UK NSC continues to gather and evaluate evidence on the matter. Scotland is playing an active part in evaluating the benefits of self-sampling, through a study in NHS Dumfries and Galloway. We are taking the necessary steps to ensure that we can roll it out as soon as possible once a recommendation is made. Patient safety is our top priority and we will not act until we are assured it is safe to do so.

SEPA maintains a robust programme structure to plan, track, and deliver the regulator function for Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme (DRS), including delivery of a producer registration system. SEPA is making good progress in establishing this system in time to meet the January 2023 milestone that the Scottish Government published in December 2021.

Marine Scotland – Licensing Operations Team (“MS-LOT”) has recently received the written report from Seagreen Wind Energy Limited in respect of unexploded ordnance clearance activities. MS-LOT is currently conducting a review of the report and will publish on its website (marine.gov.scot) once this review is complete.

We recognise that the Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on our NHS including diabetes services. We took the opportunity to reflect on these challenges as we determined the priorities for our Diabetes Improvement Plan refresh, which was published in February 2021.

On 25 August 2021 we launched our NHS Recovery Plan which is backed by more than £1bn of investment over the next five years. The plan takes forward our aim of increasing NHS capacity by at least 10% as quickly as possible in order to address the backlog of care and meet the ongoing healthcare needs for people across the country.