Seòmar agus comataidhean

The Scottish Government is continuing to take action to reduce inappropriate out-of-area placements and delayed discharges experienced by people with learning disabilities and complex care needs through our Coming Home programme.

New Dynamic Support Registers (DSR) were introduced in May 2023 to help with local planning, building on our £1 million investment into Health and Social Care Partnerships through the Community Living Change Fund. It was encouraging to see an 18% reduction in numbers of people reported as being on the DSRs in the most recent quarter, but more needs to be done.

Our ongoing work combines a national focus with strong local leadership. A Peer Support Network has been established and has met a number of times. The Scottish Government and CoSLA co-chaired a Coming Home stocktake event on 12 May 2025, which was attended by system leaders from across health and social care. We are working with CoSLA, including via the co-chaired Collaborative Response and Assurance Group (CRAG), to collectively agree actions from this event and progress the Coming Home vision.

We have also consulted on how the proposed Learning Disability, Autism and Neurodivergence Bill can strengthen our work on the Coming Home programme, in particular the recommendation to establish a National Support Panel and whether there are opportunities to strengthen Dynamic Support Registers in the future.

The Dynamic Support Register (DSR) provides a mechanism for national data collection relating to people with learning disabilities and complex care needs. However, the DSR does not include data broken down by specific conditions or diagnoses, including autism.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) collect and publish the DSR data quarterly, with the most recent collection for the quarter ending 26 December 2024, published in March 2025. This publication reported that forty people with learning disabilities and complex care needs in Scotland had been in hospital for ten years or more. The DSR full March PHS report is available here: Insights into learning disabilities and complex needs: statistics for Scotland - 18 March 2025 - Insights into learning disabilities and complex needs: statistics for Scotland - Publications - Public Health Scotland. The next DSR data collection will be published by PHS in June 2025.

In 2024, we asked the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland (the Commission) to review the care and treatment of people with learning disabilities and complex care needs who had been in hospital for over ten years. The Mental Welfare Commission Report is available here: Hospital is not home

We are continuing to engage with the Commission and system leaders to address these delays and ensure that people’s human rights are upheld.

Decisions on offshore oil and gas licensing, as well as on consenting and the associated fiscal regime, are matters currently reserved to the UK Government.

The Scottish Government is clear in its own support for a just transition for Scotland’s valued offshore oil and gas sector, which recognises the maturity of the North Sea basin and is in line with our climate change commitments and energy security.

I refer the member to our recently published Climate Change Plan Update Monitoring Report for 2025, which shows our progress against the individual policies in the agriculture and land use sectors.

The most recent Scottish Greenhouse Gas Statistics from 2022 show that, compared to the 1990 baseline, emissions in land use are down 96.3% and agriculture is down 11.9%. The Climate Change Committee’s recent carbon budget advice to the Scottish Government projects that agriculture will form a part of our residual emissions to 2045, to be offset by land use sinks and engineered removals.

Transport Scotland is responsible for Blue Badge legislation. However, local authorities are wholly responsible for the scheme from application, administration through to enforcement.

While Transport Scotland does not explicitly define the way in which local authorities must publicise these services, Transport Scotland continues to work closely with local Blue Badge teams and reiterates the need for paper application forms, and for local authorities to raise the awareness of help offered locally to those who may need additional support during the application process.

We are making good progress towards the levels of peatland restoration implied by the CCC recommendations and to celebrate World Peatlands Day on 2 June, SG announced record levels of peatland restoration during 2024-25.

Through our Peatland ACTION partnership we have restored around 90,000 hectares of degraded Scottish peatlands to date with strong recent annual increases in rates enabled by associated increases in annual budgets.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on the number of vacancies in local authority planning services. The resourcing and staffing of planning services is a matter for individual local authorities.

Recognising the financial and capacity pressures on the planning system, the National Planning Hub is offering support to authorities including capacity and access to expertise to help them determine applications for renewable energy and housing projects.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-37886 on 4 June 2025. 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 has not issued guidance to Health Boards on the provision of blood testing facilities for people who may be self-medicating hormones for the purpose of seeking to address gender dysphoria.

The provision of specific healthcare facilities rests with individual Health Boards.

Yes, the Scottish Government does agree with this view and we continue to call upon UK Ministers to intervene at Grangemouth as it has done in other parts of the UK.