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This is a matter for SEPA. The information requested is not held centrally.

The Scottish Government has made £2,877,287.97 of funding available to local authorities to enable them to cancel school meal debts within their respective local areas. This sum represents the entire amounts bid for by each local authority.

29 local authorities made bids to the Scottish Government’s School Meal Debt Fund and we issued grant offer letters to them on 3 December 2024.

The amounts awarded to each local authority is set out within the following table:

This is an operational matter for South of Scotland Enterprise. I have passed your query to Jane Morrison-Ross, South of Scotland Enterprise Chief Executive and asked her to respond to you directly.

The Scottish Government remains committed to reducing health inequalities and supporting people to live longer and healthier lives. Tackling underlying drivers such as poverty and inequality remain the best way to improve population health outcomes and life expectancy. We are undertaking a range of actions to achieve this.

In 2024-25 we continued to allocate around £3 billion a year to policies which tackle poverty and protect people as far as possible during the ongoing cost of living crisis. This is in addition to initiatives to promote healthy lifestyles through tobacco control, preventing alcohol related harm, promoting healthy eating and physical activity.

These actions are coupled with national support to enable local approaches to address regional health disparities. Through the Place and Wellbeing Programme, the Scottish Government is tackling health inequalities by supporting health and social care bodies to operate as effective anchor institutions; empowering the community and voluntary sector to complement the public sector; and working to achieve fairer health and wellbeing outcomes through the coordinated efforts of Community Planning Partnerships.

Furthermore, the Scottish Government is working with its partners at a local, regional and national level to develop a Population Health Framework, to take a cross-government and cross-sector approach to improve the key building blocks of health including: good early years and education; good work and income; healthy places; and equitable health care. The Framework’s overarching ambition is to accelerate the recovery and improvement of population health in Scotland, focussing on a whole system approach to preventative action. Actions under the Framework will be targeted to areas and communities most in need to ensure an equitable approach to address regional disparities between Scotland’s communities.

A key way Scottish Government will develop its understanding of a whole system approach is through the recently announced collaboration between Public Health Scotland, University College London’s Institute of Health Equity and three of Scotland’s local authority areas. The Collaboration for Health Equity in Scotland (CHES) will work with Aberdeen City, North Ayrshire and South Lanarkshire to strengthen and accelerate action underway to improve health and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities. Insight and learning from the Collaboration will be shared through a national learning system to support work across the whole country.

In addition, there are targeted actions within the Scottish Government’s Women’s Health Plan aim to address women’s health inequalities through raising awareness across women’s health, improving access to healthcare for women across their lives and tackling inequalities in health outcomes for women and girls.

The management of the school estate is the statutory responsibility of local authorities. Decisions about the closure of schools are also a matter for local authorities.

There are additional provisions to protect schools from closure in place, particularly those in rural areas, via the Schools (Consultation) (Scotland) Act 2010. Local authorities must undertake a full statutory consultation on the permanent closure of schools. Ministers have powers to “call-in” any proposals to permanently close schools.

Through our Addressing Depopulation Action Plan, published in February, we acknowledge the important role that education provision plays in terms of local population attraction and retention. Through this Action Plan we have provided £90,000 in funding to Dumfries & Galloway Council in this financial year, which will be used to further explore locally-identified priorities around depopulation and design a campaign to encourage people to move to the area along with inward investment, among other measures to support the long-term sustainability of communities.

The Scottish Government will also provide over £15 billion in the 2025-26 Local Government Settlement. This represents an increase of £1 billion, a real terms increase of 4.7% compared to 2024-25.

In 2025-26 Dumfries and Galloway Council will receive £444.5 million of funding, which equates to an extra £62.9 million or an additional 16.5% compared to 2024-25. In addition, all councils will receive their fair share of the currently undistributed sum of £563 million.

Any move towards cleaner fuels must take place as part of a just transition, whilst ensuring that no one is left in fuel poverty.

The Scottish Government is currently gathering further evidence around the potential impacts of taking forward a ban on the sale of house coal on fuel supplies. We are also carefully considering the potential impacts on costs in rural and islands communities, where many still rely on coal for primary heating and/or secondary back up. We will announce next steps in the first part of 2025.

The Scottish Government has taken the decision to realign funding for scams prevention and awareness, with the requisite funding reallocated from its consumer policy and advice budget to Consumer Scotland’s budget. Consumer Scotland also now receives and manages grant funding for Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) for its advocacy and education programme which was previously allocated from the consumer policy and advice budget.

Realigning these funding streams has had the effect of reducing the consumer policy and advice budget, while the Consumer Scotland budget has correspondingly increased.

This information is in the public domain and can be found on the Scottish Government’s website where the Scottish Budget sets out the Scottish Government’s proposed spending and tax plans for 2025-26 as presented to the Scottish Parliament. Please see the following link.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-budget-2025-2026/

Further details on the Scottish Budget, such as the split by HMT aggregate, outturn comparisons and Level 4 Budget tables, can be found in the following link.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-budget-2025-2026/documents/

The Scottish Government has instructed ScotRail to procure replacement trains for the current fleet, known as the High Speed Trains (HST) fleet, 25 of which operate on its InterCity routes between Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Inverness.

These routes are strategically important for Scotland: 35% of Scotland’s population are served by the rail corridor to Aberdeen. Inverness provides long distance connectivity to the rest of the UK for approximately 250,000 people: it is the gateway to the Highlands and Islands and the Far North.

Replacing the fleet aims to provide a high quality, more consistent, reliable, comfortable, accessible and family-friendly experience for passengers on the InterCity routes, helping to encourage more people to choose to travel by train on these routes rather than by car.

Replacement will ensure the reliability of InterCity routes for the long-term, reduce emissions from Intercity services and will be another step on our journey towards the full decarbonisation of ScotRail services. It will also reduce ScotRail’s operating costs by being more energy efficient.

The decision to replace the trains followed a process of appraisal. The appraisal took into consideration the available options to transition from diesel power to electric trains, the time necessary to deliver electrification infrastructure, the availability of funding and the affordability challenges.

ScotRail will run the procurement in a fair and transparent manner, enabling Scottish suppliers to provide their services to potential bidders. In the meantime, the HSTs remain safe to run until a replacement fleet is ready; they are needed for the capacity required by ScotRail to deliver an appropriate service level. As the replacement trains arrive, the HSTs will be withdrawn.

This decision will also contribute to the refresh of the Scottish Government’s Rail Services Decarbonisation Action Plan (the DAP), which will be informed by the response to this procurement. The first DAP, published in 2020, was stated to be dynamic and subject to continuous improvement, to be updated and refined as progress is delivered and the funding environment changes. Accordingly, it is being revised.

The original target date of 2035 for complete removal of diesel passenger trains from the Scottish network can no longer be met, due to constrained budgets and logistical requirements impacting adversely on the delivery programme.

The physical delivery of electrification works needs to be staged to reduce the impact on passengers as much as is practicable. Undertaking too much disruptive engineering work across the Network at the same time would have significant farebox revenue impacts and would significantly diminish the attractiveness of rail travel for the public.

Delivering electrification over a longer period of time reduces passenger disruption from engineering works. It also allows for other associated works, such as bridge replacements, to be undertaken in a more phased manner, reducing road traffic impacts.

The revised DAP will demonstrate phased full decarbonisation by 2045. The refreshed plan is now expected to be published in Spring 2025. The refreshed plan will show a staged approach to creating a decarbonised rail system by 2045 and increasing from the current 75% of rail journeys which are already decarbonised.

A contract notice will be published today on Public Contracts Scotland with a more detailed delivery timeline available at the point of contract award.

The Infected Blood Inquiry’s report of 20 May 2024 set out a range of important recommendations that seek to protect patient safety and ensure a similar tragedy can never happen again. As the First Minister made clear in his statement to the Scottish Parliament on 21 May, the Scottish Government is committed to learning lessons from what went wrong and the terrible impact it has had on so many infected blood victims in Scotland and their families. The Scottish Government has established an Oversight and Assurance Group involving patient representatives and from the NHS in Scotland, to ensure progress in taking forward the Inquiry’s recommendations.

A UK Government report (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-response-to-the-infected-blood-inquiry/government-response-to-the-infected-blood-inquiry-html) provides an update on progress so far in implementing the recommendations. This includes updates on the approach being taken in Scotland, along with information on progress being made on recommendations being taken forward at UK level, such as on the provision of compensation to infected blood victims. In line with the Inquiry’s recommendation 12, the Scottish Government expects to provide a further detailed response to each of the Inquiry’s recommendations next year, within one year of the publication of the Inquiry’s final report.

In Scotland, a number of steps are already being taken and further work is being done in the coming months to ensure further progress. In particular:

• The Scottish Government and the Scottish Infected Blood Support Scheme have ensured that additional interim compensation has been paid to infected hepatitis C and HIV victims in Scotland and that estates of many of those who sadly died are now able to claim interim payments of £100,000;
• The Chief Medical Officer has asked all NHS Boards and GP practices to offer hepatitis C testing to anyone who has had a blood transfusion prior to 1996 if they have not already been tested. This is to ensure any individuals who may have been infected but not yet diagnosed can be offered treatment and support as quickly as possible;
• The Scottish Government is working with campaigners and relevant local authorities to identify a suitable location for a memorial to infected blood victims.