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The Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010 gave the Scottish Legal Aid Board the function of monitoring the availability and accessibility of legal services in Scotland, and it has arrangements in place to monitor legal services. However, any assessment of registered solicitor numbers does not offer an accurate measure of the provision or supply of legal aid. This is because there is a large number of registered solicitors who are inactive, so the reduction in the number of registered solicitors, doesn’t necessarily equate to the same size of reduction in active solicitors. Therefore, registered solicitor numbers should not be viewed in the same context as active solicitors. The relevant measure of supply is active solicitors.

However, fluctuations in the numbers of Children’s solicitors occur for various reasons, these are:

Children’s legal assistance volumes are directly related to the numbers of children’s hearings taking place. The volume of hearings is in turn related to the number of Compulsory Supervision Orders (CSOs) being made or reviewed.

There are fewer Compulsory Supervision Orders and therefore less business for solicitors in this field.

At 31 March 2024, 6,490 children were subject to Compulsory Supervision Orders. In 2019-20, the number was 8,875 – a reduction of 27%.

The number of children subject to Compulsory Supervision Orders has decreased for a fourteenth consecutive year.

The Scottish Government recognises that reform is needed to the legal aid system, which is why we are currently developing a legal aid action plan for reform which will be published in early 2025.

The Lord Advocate’s instructions for non-prosecution of victims of human trafficking | COPFS were first published in May 2016 and the manual collation of data commenced at that stage.

As of 6 January 2025, proceedings involving 188 individuals, who were reported to the National Lead Prosecutor for Human Trafficking in accordance with the instructions, were not raised or were discontinued on the basis that the two-part test in the Lord Advocate’s instructions was satisfied.

The information is provided under the caveats that:

?A decision to discontinue proceedings can be taken at any time during a proceeding. Therefore, although the National Lead Prosecutor has not discontinued proceedings against an accused person, that may not be the final decision. Should further information become available, such as a positive Conclusive Grounds Decision, the National Lead Prosecutor may decide to discontinue proceedings on receipt of that information.

• The data is manually collated and so whilst the data is as accurate as it can be, full accuracy cannot be guaranteed.
• The data changes constantly depending on when new information is received.

The following table shows the number of criminal cases reported to COPFS with a first substantive marking for court proceedings.

The following table shows the percentage of criminal cases reported to COPFS by Police Scotland.

Scotland’s Fisheries Management Strategy is a ten year strategy and most of the actions relate to the ongoing delivery of our management functions. The progress being made with these will help ensure a stable context for fishing businesses to operate within. We intend to publish an updated Future Fisheries Management Delivery Plan in the coming months, which will provide information on the progress made for each of the 12 actions.

Tackling religious or race-based intolerance, including Islamophobia, is a priority for the Scottish Government. The Cross-Party Group’s report, Scotland’s Islamophobia - Update 2023, attributes three recommendations to the Scottish Government:

1. Integrate an understanding of Islamophobia into compulsory components of the Scottish education curricula and all teacher training education.

Curriculum for Excellence purposefully does not mandate curriculum content. However, this recommendation and the wider report will be considered in the context of the Curriculum Improvement Cycle. The Cycle commenced in early 2024 and involves the review and update of each curricular area within Scotland’s curriculum.

In terms of teacher training, teachers in Scotland are required to meet the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s Standard for Full Registration, found at: Document > The Standard for Full Registration- a commitment to the professional values of social justice, trust and respect and integrity is at the heart of this. The Standard recognises that our increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world faces many social challenges, and an effective, responsive and inclusive education system is vital if we are to address these. The Standard also explicitly states that social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities now and in the future.

2. The Scottish Government should ensure that the Public Sector Equality Duty is enforced in schools and provide additional training so that this can be better implemented and enforced.

Enforcement of the Public Sector Equality Duty is the responsibility of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), not the Scottish Government. The EHRC rightly operates independently. The Scottish Government does however encourage all organisations to appropriately implement the Public Sector Equality Duty. The guiding principles of our Learning Estate Strategy, which was co-produced with COSLA and other partners, also makes clear that learning environments should support the wellbeing of all learners.

3. The Scottish Government should fund and support organisations and initiatives that support social cohesion and integration, particularly for Muslim women.

The Scottish Government is committed to building resilient communities within which divisive narratives will not resonate. We work cooperatively with a wide range of organisations throughout the country to support social cohesion and integration, tackle hatred and promote inclusion. Turning specifically to Muslim women, the Scottish Government has provided over £150,000 in the current financial year to Amina, The Muslim Women’s Resource Centre to deliver a range of ambitions which address a number of issues including: violence against women and girls; children, young people and families’ intervention; adult learning and empowering communities.

The Scottish Government launched a consultation on 20th December 2024, to seek views on how best to further regulate non-surgical cosmetics procedures.

The consultation has been informed by extensive work with a range of stakeholders, including beauty industry representatives, among others, but it is important we receive further feedback before the Scottish Government commits to any proposals.

In taking forward work on any potential new regulations, we will continue to seek views from, and consider the impact on, existing businesses.

Our proposals aim to be both robust and proportionate, protecting the public and supporting reputable business to operate safely.

The draft Scottish budget indicates a £52.6m grant in aid allocation to SEPA for 2025-26 and SEPA may determine how to allocate those resources, setting this out in an Annual Operating Plan each year.

Information is not held centrally on the most common way to consume illicit drugs.

In 2023, 14% of all adults had used any of the drugs listed in the Scottish Health Survey in the previous 12 months. The drug most commonly used in the 12 months prior to being interviewed was cannabis (9%) (The Scottish Health Survey 2023 - volume 1: main report - gov.scot). Cannabis is typically smoked.

The Drug and Alcohol Information System (DAISy) captures information on people seeking specialist drug treatment. Public Health Scotland publish statistics annually presenting an overview of initial assessments for specialist drug and alcohol treatment (Drug and alcohol information system (DAISy) overview of initial assessments for specialist drug and alcohol treatment 2023/24 - Drug and alcohol information system (DAISy) - Publications - Public Health Scotland). This includes an analysis of the route of both cocaine and heroin use.

Public Health Scotland also publish information on the provision of injecting equipment (Injecting equipment provision in Scotland - 2022 to 2023 - Injecting equipment provision in Scotland - Publications - Public Health Scotland) along with information from their Needle Exchange Surveillance Initiative (NESI) which aims to measure the uptake of harm reduction services among people who inject drugs in Scotland (Needle Exchange Surveillance Initiative (NESI) 13 August 2024 - Needle Exchange Surveillance Initiative (NESI) - Publications - Public Health Scotland).

The National Flood Resilience Strategy demonstrates our commitment to improving flood resilience through the use of data. It sets out that we will work with partners to review how we can improve the presentation and use of data to drive flood resilient activity. We will also look how to best use data to raise community awareness of current and future flood exposure to inform decision making and support communities on their climate adaptation journeys and explore how developing new datasets may help improve decision making.