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Scotland’s land and the natural capital it supports is one of our most valuable assets, vital to our national prosperity and to our wellbeing as individuals and communities. By addressing the twin climate and biodiversity crises while improving individuals public and community wellbeing, progressive land use and development brings many positive benefits to Scotland by combining sustainable land use/development and people’s requirements in a fair and accountable way. As such it is in line both with our long standing vision and objectives for sustainable land use in Scotland as set out in our Land Use Strategy and the overarching principles of our Just Transition.

The Heat in Buildings Strategy sets out the Scottish Government’s proposed approach to introducing energy performance standards for all existing buildings. It confirms our intention to introduce regulations from 2025 for private housing to reach a minimum energy performance standard equivalent to EPC C at respective trigger points, where technically feasible and cost-effective to do so - with backstops of 2028 (for the private rented sector) and by 2033 (for owner occupiers).

For mixed-tenure and mixed-use buildings, including tenements, we intend to introduce regulations from 2025 onwards, with an expectation that all of these buildings should meet the standard of a good level of energy efficiency, equivalent to EPC C rating by 2040-45.

For non-domestic buildings, we intend to consult on the regulatory approach in 2022 and introduce regulations by 2025 to require owners to reduce demand for heat through energy efficiency improvements where feasible.

To support the introduction of these proposed regulations, we have set out proposals to reform the metrics underpinning Energy Performance Certificates. As set out in the Heat in Buildings Strategy, we plan to consult on our proposals for regulations during 2022.

We have no plans to include future designation of any new national parks as a national development in the forthcoming National Planning Framework 4. A draft was laid in Parliament on 10 November 2021 and a public consultation is also running alongside parliamentary scrutiny.

Scottish Government is open minded as to the size of the areas which are put forward as candidate areas for National Park status. Reference to ‘smaller in scale’ in the Bute House Agreement was to dispel any perception that areas nominated would need to be of the same scale as the two existing National Parks.

The Scottish Government considers a range of data to support policy development. Current data on how Scotland compares to the rest of the UK is considered in the weekly state of the epidemic paper, available on the Scottish Government website. This report ( Coronavirus (COVID-19): state of the epidemic - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) ) brings together the different sources of evidence and data about the COVID epidemic to summarise the current situation, and incorporates data from the UK COVID Dashboard on cases, hospital occupancy and deaths across the four nations. The Scottish Government also refers to the latest data for the four nations from the ONS Covid-19 Infection Survey, which includes estimates of positivity, estimates of the number of people testing positive for antibodies to COVID and long COVID, and has done since the first results were published for Scotland in October 2020.

The evidence and data which informs the Scottish Government is drawn from academic institutions based across the UK which inform SAGE (including via its sub-groups), the UK Health Security Agency and scientific literature from across the world. SAGE includes experts from within government and leading specialists from the fields of healthcare and academia. During the response to the COVID-19 pandemic the SAGE sub groups include:

• New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG)
• Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M)
• Independent Scientific Pandemic insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)
• COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK)
• Health Data Research UK (HDR UK)

The Heart Disease Action Plan 2021, sets out a strategic vision to address the impact of heart disease across Scotland. This means that the plan does not provide detailed information on specific conditions but instead identifies four priority areas. These are 1) tackling risk factors, 2) ensuring timely and equitable access to diagnosis, treatment and care, 3) addressing key issues within the cardiac workforce, and 4) ensuring effective use of data to support improvement.

The actions within these priority areas should impact across a number of cardiac conditions and therefore improve services for everyone with heart disease, including for people living with heart valve disease.

The Scottish Stroke Care Standards can be found here: ( https://www.strokeaudit.scot.nhs.uk/index.html ). The current standard relating to brain imaging already sets out that 90% of patients should receive this within 12 hours of arrival at first hospital, unless there is a documented contraindication.

The Scottish Stroke Care Standards are regularly reviewed in line with current evidence and updated guidelines. We monitor the implementation of these standards through the Scottish Stroke Care Audit to ensure that stroke patients in Scotland are receiving high quality care.

Further to the answer to question S6W-04701 I can confirm that the case review was undertaken by a small number of NHS Lothian clinicians who are all suitably qualified and experienced in their relevant fields. As none of the clinicians who undertook the review had previously looked after Mr Slorance there was no conflict of interest in undertaking the review.

The Scottish Cardiac Audit Programme, within Public Health Scotland, have been actively seeking data submissions from all sites across Scotland that previously contributed to the UK National Cardiac Audit Programme, managed by the National Institute for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research (NICOR). This includes sites which carry out TAVI procedures.

Security of electricity supply is a reserved matter and is delivered by National Grid ESO across the whole of Great Britain under regulation from Ofgem. NGESO is also responsible for sourcing generation to meet demand.

Scottish electricity supplies are currently considered secure with around 9GW’s of secure supply to meet peak demand of around 5GW’s. National Grid ESO has conducted a study of the effects of the earlier than expected closure of nuclear generation in Scotland which concludes that the system will remain secure with any potential operational issues and risks being identified and mitigations put in place.

Scotland is a net electricity exporter and in 2020 exported 20.4 TWh of electricity, equivalent to powering every household in Scotland for 26 months. It only imported a little over 1 TWh of electricity, meaning that net exports of electricity were 19.3 TWh in 2020, its highest year on record.