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Annual waste data will be submitted to SEPA who will also undertake verification inspections. It is our intention to ensure that DRS packaging data is identified in our waste data reporting.

a) In financial year 2021-2022, £1 million was allocated to organisations working to tackle social isolation and loneliness. This funding has supported work including helplines, befriending, and practical support.

Many of the 48 organisations funded through the Equality and Human Rights Fund also work on tackling social isolation. The Equality and Human Rights Fund will distribute up to £7 million annually for the three years from October 2021 to September 2024.

The Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund for adults launched in October 2021 and has invested £21 million in supporting grass roots community groups in building resilience and tackling social isolation, loneliness and mental health inequalities made worse by the pandemic and, more recently, the cost crisis.

The Connecting Scotland digital inclusion programme delivered a Winter Support Package and two Fast Track schemes with a focus on social isolation in 2021-22. £6.8 million was spent on devices, connectivity and skills support across 32 local authorities in Scotland.

b) In 2022-23, over £1 million was provided to organisations working to tackle social isolation and loneliness and mitigate the impact of the cost crisis.

The Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund, for which social isolation and loneliness is one of the priority areas, was funded with a further £15 million in 2022-23.

In the first two years of the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund, approximately 3300 grants were made to local organisations across Scotland to a wide range of grassroots community projects including those based around peer support, physical activity, arts and crafts activities, social interaction and befriending, with a strong emphasis on the key themes of prevention and early intervention, suicide prevention and addressing social isolation.

Information on the number of lone parents receiving Scottish Government funded employability support in each year since 1999 is not held centrally.

Official statistics for Fair Start Scotland (launched April 2018), and experimental statistics for No One Left Behind, our strategic approach to employability delivery (launched April 2019), are published quarterly by the Scottish Government and include data on lone parents. The publication relates only to Scottish Government funded activity data and not the entirety of employability related activity in each local authority area.

The most recent publication was on 22 February 2023 (Scotland's Devolved Employment Services: statistical summary February 2023 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)). Statistics available for lone parents supported are shown below.

Table 1: Number of lone parents joining Fair Start Scotland from year 1 (April 2018 to March 2019) to year 5 so far (April 2022 to December 2022)

Provisional data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that the Business Enterprise Research and Development (BERD) expenditure estimate for Scotland in 2021 was £3.12bn. Note that the ONS has recently changed their measurement of BERD. The BERD statistics methodology has been improved to better capture data from smaller businesses, which has led to significant uplift revisions to BERD expenditure estimates. More work is required to further quality assure the new methodology and we will continue to work with the ONS on that. The Scottish Government and its agencies invested an additional £45m to support the increase of BERD between 2018 and 2021.

Previous Governance models for Scottish Government chronic pain policy have involved people with lived experience in a variety of methods – including individual representation, a wider reference group of lived experience, elected representatives and members of chronic pain or associated other condition advocacy groups. Views from these groups had therefore already been solicited to help inform the development of the Framework.

Our Equality and Impact Assessment for the Framework identified the need to amplify the voices of groups of people who may be impacted by chronic pain but typically overlooked when it comes to engagement as they are not members of organised groups associated with a condition. Therefore there was a specific requirement for participants to be recruited independently of existing groups and structures to broaden the reach of engagement and ensure diversity of experience was included.

Official statistics covering processing times for Child Disability Payment are published as a part of the regularly scheduled quarterly publication. The latest Child Disability Payment statistical publication was published on Tuesday 16 May 2023. Information on the average processing time by month is included in table 9. This publication is available from https://www.gov.scot/collections/social-security-scotland-stats-publications/#benefitsforcarersanddisabilityassistance .

Processing time is the number of working days from part 2 of the application being received to a decision being made or the application being withdrawn. It does not include time to make payments. We would normally advise to allow up to 5 days to reach a bank account once a payment is authorised.

I refer the member to the question S6W-17628 on 25 May 2023. 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 recognises the findings that have been highlighted within the Disability Price Tag 2023 report, that disabled people have been disproportionately impacted by the current cost-of-living crisis.

One of the First Minister’s first acts upon taking office was to increase the budget for our Fuel Insecurity Fund to £30 million for 2023-24 to ensure support is available to households who would otherwise be at risk of self-rationing their energy use, or self-disconnecting entirely. Assistance is provided on the basis of a holistic assessment of individuals’ circumstances, which can include increased energy usage arising from the need to run essential medical devices.

The Scottish Government provide a range of disability benefits to help disabled people and those with long-term conditions. These benefits provide financial support to disabled people to mitigate the additional costs of living with a disability or health condition. In recognition of the cost crisis, all Scottish Government social security benefits were increased by 10.1% in April, except for Scottish Child Payment, which was uprated early, with an investment of around £430 million. This uprating is in line with inflation as measured by the Consumer Prices Index.

The Scottish Government did not make a decision on the re-instatement of shared cabins. This decision was taken by the ferry operator following their own internal review.

The Scottish Government maintains an open dialogue with Liberty Steel and meets with them regularly.

The question of whether or not to install additional equipment at the Dalzell or Clydebridge facilities is an operational matter for Liberty Steel. From recent discussions I understand that there are currently no plans to install an Electric Arc Furnace at either Dalzell or Clydebridge.