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Perinatal and infant mental health is a key priority for the Scottish Government and the continued development and implementation of perinatal and infant mental health services across all sectors will continue to be supported. A Delivery/Implementation Group is currently being planned to build upon the successes of the Perinatal and Infant Mental Health Programme Board from April 2023.

The Third Sector play a key role in access to perinatal mental health support and has been pivotal in delivering the programme to date, including as members of the Programme Board. Third Sector organisations will continue to play a key role in the next iteration of the strategic oversight of perinatal and infant mental health across Scotland.

The Scottish Government are aware of the severe pressures which rising energy and other inflation-related costs are putting on the sector. The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care has established a Ministerial Advisory Group to ensure we collaborate effectively to meet these challenges.

Many of the policy and economic levers that would help reduce the pressures on care homes are reserved to Westminster and the Cabinet Secretary recently wrote to the UK Government (and the other UK nations) to again raise these matters.

Within its existing remit, in August the Scottish Government increased its support for SMEs by investing £300,000 to expand the capacity of the Business Energy Scotland advice service, and doubled the energy efficiency cashback element of the SME Loan Cashback scheme to £20,000.

The cap on claims for the Mother and Baby Unit Family Fund is currently being reviewed, in line with feedback received from the consultation analysis. Both Scottish Mother and Baby Units are aware of this and until the review is complete, the £500 cap can be waived on a case by case basis, subject to local judgement.

This information is not held centrally.

The Care Inspectorate and the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) have published related figures on the levels of staff vacancies in Scotland’s care services, in their recent 2021 Staff Vacancies in Care Services report:

The 2021 Staff vacancies in care services report | Scottish Social Services Workforce Data (sssc.uk.com)

n September 2021, the Scottish Government published the National Neurodevelopmental Specification for Children and Young People which sets out seven standards for service providers to ensure that children and young people, who have neurodevelopmental profiles with support needs, receive the support that they require. The Neurodevelopmental Specification is purposefully inclusive and includes support for those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as such there is no separate guidance for ASD and ADHD.

A neurodevelopmental diagnosis is not required in order for a child or young person to receive support that meets their needs. For many children and young people, such support is likely to be community or school based, and should be quickly and easily accessible.

To support implementation of the Neurodevelopmental Specification, we have provided funding to NHS Boards to build capacity to provide access to specialist neurodevelopmental professionals.

In March 2022, funding was also provided to allow five local areas to take forward Tests of Change on the implementation of the Neurodevelopmental Service Specification, specifically to test and implement aspects of the Standards and Principles of Care outlined in the Specification. Learning and evidence will be shared from these Tests once concluded to support other local partners to implement the Specification successfully.

The standards outlined within the National Neurodevelopmental Specification will continue to be reviewed on a regular basis in light of any new research and recommendations made to Scottish Government, particularly in relation to learning emerging from the Neurodevelopmental Tests of Change.

The Bathing Waters (Scotland) Regulations 2008 enable Scottish Ministers to designate a bathing season in a period where they expect a large number of people to bathe at a designated bathing water. The definition of bathers, in this instance, is exclusive to paddlers and swimmers and does not cover other water users.

For all 87 designated bathing waters in Scotland the bathing season runs from 1 June to 15 September each year, in accordance with the traditional period of peak usage. In comparison with the 3.5 month bathing season in Scotland across Europe the season length varies from 2 months in Sweden to 6 months in Cypress.

The aim of the Bathing Waters Regulations is to minimise the risks to human health to swimmers and paddlers from bacteriological impacts whilst bathing. It would be disproportionately costly to monitor bathing waters outwith the current bathing water season when they are not regularly used by large numbers of bathers. General health advice on wild swimming is available from the UK Health Security Agency at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/swim-healthy-leaflet/swim-healthy , which is also applicable to Scotland

The number of bathing waters in Scotland has increased since last year and now stands at 87, with 98% achieving the bathing water quality standards and more rated excellent than ever before.

The Scottish Government aims to answer all ministerial correspondence within 20 working days and regularly reviews and monitors its performance against this target.

Correspondence from MSPs; councillors; third sector organisations and other key stakeholders; or the wider public is not categorised separately, therefore, calculating the percentage of responses sent within 20 working days to MSPs specifically could only be obtained at a disproportionate cost. Between December 2021 and December 2022, the response rate for all ministerial correspondence was approximately 77% (of 43,091 items of ministerial correspondence, 33,173 were responded to within 20 working days).

On Scotland’s national forests and land, Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) constructs roads for use on a multi-purpose basis e.g. timber transport, tree planting, environmental improvement works, recreational access. FLS does not hold data that ascribes a particular use to sections of forest road, nor does it hold specific data as to what lengths of road have been constructed by windfarm developers. Over the past ten years, levels of forest road construction by FLS have been as follows:

2012: 46 Miles

2013: 52 Miles

2014: 43 Miles

2015: 34 Miles

2016: 37 Miles

2017: 37 Miles

2018: 44 Miles

2019: 32 Miles

2020: 27 Miles

2021: 24 Miles

2022: 22 Miles

National Records of Scotland (NRS) are unable to confirm when it will be possible to resume publishing the Migration Statistics Quarterly Summary for Scotland as the data required is not currently available.

The release is a summary of data sources from UK Government departments including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Home Office.

These departments have temporarily suspended most statistical releases for reasons such as data quality, other underlying data issues, and reviewing the way they produce statistics to make best use of available data.

More information can be found on the NRS, DWP, ONS and Home Office websites.

The consultation analysis report for the Mother and Baby Unit Capacity in Scotland consultation was published in August 2022. This report and other resources are being fed into an options appraisal which is setting out the next steps in improving specialist perinatal mental health care for women and their babies in Scotland. This will consider the geographical need and variation across Scotland. This options appraisal will be undertaken by NHS National Services Scotland and will commence in January 2023 with a view to being completed by the end of September 2023.