Seòmar agus comataidhean

The Scottish Government are progressing a range of actions to support a sustainable reduction in the prison population, including:

• The passage of the Prisoners (Early Release) (Scotland) Act 2025, which changes the point of release for most prisoners serving short-term sentences of under four years from following 50% of their sentence, to following 40% of their sentence.
• Increasing community justice funding by £14m this year to a total of £148m to further strengthen alternatives to custody.
• Introducing regulations that enable GPS technology to be used to monitor individuals being released on Home Detention Curfew (HDC).
• SPS continue to optimise the appropriate use of HDC which allows certain prisoners who have met the requirements of a risk assessment to spend up to 180 days in the community.
• We intend to bring forward secondary legislation to amend the use of HDC with the intention of increasing the period of time individuals can spend on release under licence conditions.
• We have increased the use of electronically monitored bail which is now available in every local authority and its use is at record levels.
• The establishment of an independent review of sentencing and penal policy which will focus on reducing reoffending and ensuring custody is used at the right time, for the right individuals.

I have asked Teresa Medhurst, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), to respond. Her response is as follows:

SPS will publish information on the early release under the changes to sentencing for short-term prisoners on our website, and we have previously published information on releases under the emergency release legislation again on their website.

SPS seek to be as open and transparent as possible, whilst continuing to meet our statutory obligation to ensure that those in our care have their personal information protected; as such we cannot publish a breakdown of establishments as some of the data could relate to a small group of individuals, which may lead to their inadvertent identification.

The Scottish Government has received regular updates from the Scottish Prison Service on HMP Glasgow in line with updates to the Infrastructure Investment Plan since 2014:

• In March 2014 the Scottish Government was updated that there was an on-going site search and completion dates for the project remained uncertain.
• In March 2016 the Scottish Government was updated that estimated operational date was 2022.
• In September 2016 the Scottish Government was updated that estimated operational date was 2023.
• In April 2019 the Scottish Government was updated that estimated operational date was 2024.
• In November 2020 the Scottish Government was updated that estimated operational date was 2026.
• In May 2023 the Scottish Government was updated that the project time-line was uncertain.
• In July 2023 the Scottish Government was updated that the most likely time-scale for construction completion was 2027 but there were risks associated with this.
• In May 2024 the Scottish Government was updated that the most likely time-scale for construction completion was 2028.

The Scottish Government is investing up to £500 million over five years to anchor our offshore wind supply chain in Scotland. This investment will support market certainty, and help create a highly productive, competitive offshore wind economy that supports thousands of new jobs, including in north east Scotland.

The Scottish Government has also invested millions of pounds via the Just Transition Fund for the North East and Moray, including the development and rollout of a digital energy skills passport (£3.7m), investment in a skills hub within the ETZ Skills Campus (£4.5m), support for the National Energy Skills Accelerator (NESA) (£1m), and funding for Net Zero Bottlenecks in Moray (£210k).

We have also convened a ‘Team Scotland’ short-life working group (SLWG) to develop an offshore wind skills action plan at pace which will identify and address gaps in training provision. The SLWG is jointly chaired by the Director of Offshore Wind in the Scottish Government and the CEO of Scottish Renewables, ensuring collaboration between the public sector and industry.

The consulting process provided for under sections 36 and 37 of the Electricity Act 1989 and the Electricity Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Scotland) Regulations 2017 ensures that public bodies, communities and members of the public are consulted on proposals for electricity infrastructure. The decision whether to grant consent is taken only after careful and fair consideration of environmental information, consultee responses and public representations. The Scottish Government is committed to strengthening the pre-application consultation process by working with the UK Government on their proposed reforms to electricity infrastructure consenting in Scotland.

The Scottish Government will be responding to Environmental Standard Scotland’s (ESS) report by 4 March 2025, as requested by ESS. Scottish Water and SEPA have also been asked to respond to the report by the same deadline.

The average class size of primary pupils by local authority and stage is published in Table 6.6a of the pupil census supplementary statistics.

Pupil census supplementary statistics - gov.scot

These statistics are available from 2007-2023, data prior to 2007 is not available.

Primary class size statistics for 2024 will be published on 25 March, 2025.

NatureScot has released correspondence relating to the meetings and discussions through an FOI request.

This information is not held by Scottish Government.

Individual Scottish Government strategies and policies are periodically reviewed, taking account of progress towards objectives. Strategies and policies with environmental goals can be found on the Scottish Government’s website at https://www.gov.scot/environment-and-climate-change/.There are many sources of monitoring data on environmental outcomes in Scotland, an overview can be found at https://data.gov.scot/environment/.Environmental Standards Scotland is an independent body that promotes the effectiveness of environmental law through its work, and information on its investigations and monitoring can found on its website https://environmentalstandards.scot/our-work/.