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Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for MSPs to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

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Question reference: S6W-37699

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 16 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Jenni Minto on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the potential impact of utilising home dialysis for patients with chronic kidney disease on (a) alleviating pressure on the NHS, (b) improving economic productivity and (c) delivering better patient outcomes.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that all people living in Scotland with long term conditions including Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) are able to access the best possible care and support, and benefit from healthcare services that are safe, effective and put people at the centre of their care.

The Cabinet Secretary set out in the NHS Scotland operational improvement plan published on 31 March of this year that we will work to ensure people receive the right care in the right place. There are many benefits that home dialysis can offer to both NHS Boards and patients as to whether home dialysis is appropriate for the patient. However it is a matter for NHS Boards to determine the situations when home dialysis is the best option.

Question reference: S6W-37704

Asked by: Mark Ruskell, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Green Party
Date lodged: Friday, 16 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Gillian Martin on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S6W-31971 by Gillian Martin on 12 December 2024, and the publication of its Programme for Government 2025-26, for what reason it no longer plans to introduce new primary legislation on drinking water and wastewater in the current parliamentary session.

Question reference: S6W-36983

Asked by: Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 16 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Angus Robertson on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government which ministers were involved in taking the decision to disband its constitutional futures division.

Question reference: S6W-38202

Asked by: Karen Adam, MSP for Banffshire and Buchan Coast, Scottish National Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 29 May 2025
Current Status: Initiated by the Scottish Government. Answered by Fiona Hyslop on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its £30 million Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Fund.

I can advise Parliament that the Scottish Government’s £30 million Electric Vehicle (EV) Infrastructure Fund has now been fully allocated to local authorities to enable them to work in partnership with the private sector to attract matched investment and deliver approximately 6,000 additional public charge points across Scotland by 2030.

Scotland currently has over 6,800 public charge points and is on track to meet its commitment of enabling approximately 24,000 additional public EV charge points by 2030, the majority of which will be funded and delivered by the private sector.

This fund prioritises the delivery of new public EV charging infrastructure in those parts of Scotland less likely to benefit from stand-alone private sector investment in public charging infrastructure.

I can further advise that through the fund, the Scottish Government has provided the North of Scotland partnership, consisting of Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Highland and Moray councils, with over £7 million to transform charging infrastructure across the North of Scotland.

Our investment has enabled this partnership to leverage over £4.9 million of additional matched private sector investment over the next three years to ensure that drivers of electric vehicles in the North of Scotland experience the availability, accessibility and reliability of public EV charging they need and deserve.

Question reference: S6W-37924

Asked by: Jamie Greene, MSP for West Scotland, Scottish Liberal Democrats
Date lodged: Wednesday, 28 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Kate Forbes on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the sale of Prestwick Airport to a new owner or the timescales around its potential return to the private sector.

I wrote to the Economy and Fair Work Committee on 25 June 2024 to confirm that a market testing exercise for Glasgow Prestwick Airport was underway. Scottish Ministers’ longstanding position is that the airport should be returned to the private sector at the appropriate time and opportunity. This must be to an organisation with the commitment and capability to operate businesses directly relevant to GPA.

Any decision to sell GPA must represent value for money for taxpayers and be informed by what is right for the long-term success of the business and its contribution to the local and Scottish economy.

This process is continuing and I will update Parliament when a significant development has been made.

Question reference: S6W-37787

Asked by: Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Paul McLennan on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S6W-36742 by Paul MacLennan on 25 April 2025, for what reason it does not require Registered Social Landlords to consider immigration status when allocating social housing.

Local authorities are public bodies and can only place certain people on their allocation schemes or waiting lists for housing, this is set out in legislation, and immigration status is a consideration. There is however no legislation requiring Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) to consider immigration status when allocating social housing. RSLs are independent organisations regulated by the Scottish Housing Regulator who must make their decisions to allocate housing within the law and according to their own policies. However a RSL would discuss rent, affordability, income and benefit entitlement with any prospective tenant, before making an offer.

Question reference: S6W-37020

Asked by: Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 16 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Shona Robison on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government how many public sector body board members currently hold appointments with more than one public sector body and, for each such board member, what the total amount is that they receive annually as a combined remuneration.

The list of public appointments by public body, which was published on 25 March 2025, is an exhaustive list of Ministerial regulated public appointments only. Ministerial regulated public appointments are those governed by the Ethical Standards Commissioner and the Code of Practice for Public Appointments (2022). The Code requires publication.

The list is intended to be published to always reflect recently made appointments. It was last published in October 2024, January 2025 and February 2025. It was corrected on 25 March 2025 following the identification of errors.

Officials commenced a process of methodically checking the full list for accuracy on 25 March 2025. Once complete, the list will be re-published.

Question reference: S6W-36982

Asked by: Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 16 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Angus Robertson on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government how the decision was reached to disband its constitutional futures division.

The Constitutional Futures Division (CFD) was established to take forward the government’s commitment to providing the people of Scotland with information about independence through the development of the Building a New Scotland (BANS) series of papers. Within the Scottish Government a division is part of a directorate, and CFD was part of the Constitution Directorate. Following the successful delivery of a suite of papers in the BANS series, and with the series due to conclude with the publication of a final overview paper, CFD ceased to be a standalone division in January 2025 and its ongoing work was merged into that of the wider Constitution Directorate.

Question reference: S6W-37797

Asked by: Pam Duncan-Glancy, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Neil Gray on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide a breakdown of the £100 million of funding allocated to tackle waiting times by (a) NHS board and (b) specialty.

The funding committed to date in respect of the circa £100 million extra investment to address long waits is shown in Table 1 broken down by health board and in Table 2 broken down by specialty; this is over and above other funding to improve waiting times.

Table 1.

Health Board	Total Cost 25-26
NHS Ayrshire & Arran	5,708,768
NHS Borders	2,550,705
NHS Dumfries & Galloway	772,963
NHS Fife	9,938,616
NHS Forth Valley	3,656,435
NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde	24,515,664
NHS Golden Jubilee	2,183,118
NHS Grampian	6,987,204
NHS Highland	10,288,772
NHS Lanarkshire	6,606,479
NHS Lothian	22,379,275
NHS Orkney	165,664
NHS Shetland	422,127
NHS Tayside	9,921,322
NHS Western Isles	71,000
Grand Total	106,168,112

Table 2.

Speciality	Total Cost 25-26
Cancer	14,247,846
ENT	9,461,666
General Surgery	5,059,208
Gynaecology	8,879,121
Imaging	21,657,167
Imaging Reports	122,030
Ophthalmology	12,141,912
Trauma & Orthopaedics	25,252,177
Peri-Operative Management (Various Specialities)	60,000
Plastics	3,246,147
Urology	6,040,838
Totals	106,168,112

Question reference: S6W-37736

Asked by: Jamie Halcro Johnston, MSP for Highlands and Islands, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Monday, 19 May 2025
Current Status: Answered by Maree Todd on 30 May 2025

To ask the Scottish Government what the average time has been between receiving a social care assessment and delivery of a social care package in each year since 2018, also broken down by NHS board.

The Scottish Government does not hold data which would answer this question.

However, data up to 2022-23 on Social Care eligibility and waiting times is publicly available at Local Authority level via the following weblink:

Social care: eligibility criteria and waiting times Scotland 2022-2023 - gov.scot

Data showing the time waited between completion of a community care assessment and delivery of a new personal care service in the final quarter of each financial year can be found in the ‘Waiting times new personal care clients’ worksheet of the Excel workbook accompanying the publication.

However there are a number of caveats with these data:

The data return template sent to LAs is aggregate, and only grouped time periods are collected. Therefore it is not possible to calculate an average waiting time – only a distribution of time periods is possible.
Many local authorities have reported difficulty in providing the information asked for in this data collection and therefore not all data is available for every year.
Due to the gaps in the Local Authority level data, we cannot effectively aggregate to Health Board. Completeness levels for each LA can be found within the ‘Data completeness’ tab of the Excel workbook accompanying the publication.

Due to the issues faced in collecting this data from LAs and due to the lack of completeness, this data collection has been paused while we explore alternative methods of obtaining higher quality information on eligibility criteria and the length of time people wait for services. Therefore the most recent data available is for
2022-23.