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The SPCB provides a school engagement programme through its public engagement services office. We offer schools free sessions and tours at the Parliament. Understandably, Covid changed things for schools and our service. We now have a digital schools service, as well as having restarted our team that visits schools across Scotland. Those services are popular and are especially appreciated by those who do not want to travel to Edinburgh or who, for a number of reasons, find coming to Edinburgh to be too challenging.

Across our services, we have reached schools in 69 out of 73 constituencies, and we are continuing to improve ways of maximising our engagement with schools. Children and young people also visit the Parliament to take part in committee meetings, meet their MSPs and take part in our engaging events programme.

I declare an interest as a member of the Scottish SPCA and convener of the cross-party group on animal welfare.

To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government’s response is to reports that Scotland’s leading animal welfare charity, the Scottish SPCA, is in financial crisis. (S6F-02243)

I thank the First Minister for his answer. Companion animals in particular play a huge role in helping people’s mental wellbeing, but inflation, which the First Minister referenced, has put huge pressures on the cost of providing them and caused heartbreak for those who find that they simply do not have the resources to keep them. That puts more pressure on the Scottish SPCA and other animal welfare charities. At the same time, those charities have to cope with inflation themselves. For example, it costs £56,000 a day to run the Scottish SPCA, which is 14 per cent up on last year.

Will the First Minister, following the discussions that his officials are having with the charities, report back and let us see where those discussions have gone?

We are continuing to review how best to deliver our education services in the most effective and inclusive way post-Covid. It is important to the SPCB that we can ensure equity and meet the aims of our public engagement strategy to break down barriers for those who are least likely to engage with us and that we take into account other commitments, such as reaching net zero and ensuring the most effective use of our resources.

There are many factors around distance travelled and deprivation that we would want to consider. From our evaluation forms, we know that 25 per cent of schools say that cost is a factor. To date, the SPCB’s approach for those who cannot travel to Edinburgh to visit us has been to provide targeted services in schools. Our outreach and digital services are popular and remove other significant barriers, such as time away from the classroom.

The SPCB is happy to explore whether, as part of that review, offering some sort of subsidy is within its power and helpful to meeting our engagement goal of inclusivity. It is important that we consider the feasibility of any subsidy within the context of reviewing our education service as a whole in the context of our wider corporate commitments, including public engagement and sustainability. We will ask officials to engage with schools from across Scotland, and we will look to other legislatures to ensure that any decision takes account of the needs of schools alongside our service capacity to support those needs.

In the answers that I have given, I have said that the Parliament endeavours to do that all year round. However, Stephen Kerr has asked me a specific question, and I would be happy to inquire into that with the corporate body and report back to him.

Will the member take an intervention?

As long as the minister will not miss his bus.

I made the point that there is a family-owned bus company in my patch that is doing a jolly good job, so I would have concerns if the local authority were to take over running that bus service. In my view, there should be a mix. Lothian Buses is particularly good, but it serves a large urban area with a large travelling population. My area is not like that.

I thank Mark Ruskell for bringing forward this debate—one in the spirit of members’ debates in which, in the main, we shine a light on the activities in our constituencies.

Borders Buses is the main provider of bus transport across the Borders and parts of Midlothian, and I commend it for surviving the Covid pandemic—a period during which it transported health workers for free. Now, the company is extending routes and consulting on others. It also has an app with a tracker, so there is no need to ask the usual questions, “Is the bus due?” and “Have I missed the bus?” It also lets people know whether there is wheelchair access to the bus. I have to say that, since Borders Buses took over from First Scotland East, much has improved, including the fleet. Therefore, I do not think that privatisation is always a bad thing. I think that the company makes a pretty good job of running that service. I would say that I am its critical friend.

You do not have to be a Borders MSP to realise the significance of tourism and its related benefits to local retail and the transport sector, but it helps. In my constituency, there are so many tourist destinations you can trip over them. They range from the large, such as Melrose abbey, Abbotsford, the Great Tapestry of Scotland in Galashiels, and the national mining museum of Scotland in Newtongrange, which has an exhibition in Parliament today, to the small, such as the Trimontium museum—it is all about the Romans—again in Melrose, and the diminutive paper-making museum in Penicuik, where you can actually make paper.

Financial support in the form of Scottish Government grants stretches across the sectors. Almost £7 million was committed to the Great Tapestry of Scotland project from the Scottish Government’s regeneration capital grant fund, the Borders railway blueprint programme and the Scottish Borders Council.

Trimontium most recently received £400,000 via South of Scotland Enterprise, which is itself funded by the Scottish Government—I visited Trimontium on Monday to enjoy the new, funded high-spec extension, which is already being used for educational purposes. Newtongrange’s mining museum recently received further funding, too, through the £1 million that was allocated to museums, as did Abbotsford, so there is continuing support for landmark attractions.

You have to factor in, too, the support for public transport—the Borders railway, the extended concessionary fare scheme, the support for ScotRail and, of course, the funding that was put in to support the transport and hospitality sectors and other businesses during Covid, when, for example, £129 million was provided to the sector in response to the immediate recommendations of the Scottish tourism recovery task force.

Indeed, I commend local businesses during that period, some of which received Covid funding and some which did not. In Peebles, the Tontine hotel, which is an iconic building at the end of the high street, secured not insubstantial funding through SOSE—again, that is Scottish Government funding.

Stobo Castle health spa near Peebles received Covid support but, with no guests, the proprietor took the opportunity to refurbish and redecorate. That was done in the modest Central bar, too, which is a free house in Peebles that did not qualify for Covid support but where, again, the owner updated the decor both inside and out—it now looks just braw.

One of the real difficulties for hospitality now, which is raised with me time and again, and which contributed at one time to a shortage of bus drivers, is lack of staff since Brexit. When you add in inflation on all fronts—for example, for food, fuel or any building works—it remains tough, no matter the support that the Scottish Government gives. The UK has one of the highest rates of inflation in the G20, according to today’s release from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Part of the solution is in our hands. If you can, even in these austere times, try a holiday or a wee break at home, or simply visit and explore your own town or country—you will surprise yourself, certainly help the local economy and support businesses locally, which deserve it.

I certainly do not rule out municipal ownership, but I am watching a family-owned company that has pulled up the service in my constituency by its bootstraps. I criticise when that is necessary, but there has been huge improvement across the Scottish Borders and into Midlothian.

The extended concessionary fares do, of course, support those services, but the over-60s have not returned to using buses in pre-Covid numbers. I understand why that has happened, but it is having an impact on services.

In rural constituencies such as mine, regular bus providers cannot reach every hamlet and village, and a car can be a necessity. That brings me to the issue of community transport in the Borders and Midlothian. Gala wheels, which I have visited, provides affordable and accessible transport for disadvantaged, rurally excluded, sensory impaired and elderly residents in the central Borders. The service, which uses volunteer drivers—subject to their availability—makes a big difference to users, who are often lone pensioners with no family or friends to help them remain socially included. The service has three vehicles, an accessible 11-seater minibus and two smaller five to six-seat vehicles specially adapted for wheelchair use. It takes groups and individuals from throughout the central Borders on outings, for shopping, to lunch clubs and so on. Its sister service, Tweed wheels, provides a similar service using a minibus that has been adapted to take up to three passengers with wheelchairs and a smaller vehicle that can carry two people in wheelchairs plus four passengers.

In Midlothian, Lothian Community Transport Services, which is an independent organisation, provides, promotes and supports high-quality passenger transport services to not-for-profit organisations in Edinburgh, Midlothian and West Lothian. A community bus covers the villages of Temple and Carrington, the larger Gorebridge, Birkenside, Newtongrange—home of the National Mining Museum of Scotland—and Gowkshill, which the other bus services may not reach.

LCTS also runs a dial-a-bus service for people with mobility issues. Users must book, but it is available to them if they want to go shopping or visit the general practitioner surgery. On Mondays—I am giving you the bus timetable now—the service picks people up in Penicuik and Auchendinny at 9.30, drops them off in the town centre and collects them at 11.30. On Wednesday, the service goes from Penicuik and Auchendinny to the large shopping centre at Straiton.

Broomhill day centre in Penicuik provides transport to pick up elderly folk who spend the day there. It, too, depends on volunteer drivers. I visited the service recently and saw the driver checking the addresses where he would pick folk up.

Those are just a few examples, and I welcome the extension of those services through the £1 million that the Scottish Government has allocated to the community bus fund. That is particularly important in the rural area that I represent.