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As part of our Future Skills Action Plan, we will provide more opportunities for the current workforce to upskill and retrain. To support this, we increased our investment in workforce development to £20m per annum from
‎ 2020-21.

The Flexible workforce Development Fund is now open to all employers, with up to £15,000 per year available for UK Government Apprenticeship Levy payers and £5,000 for SMEs to support workforce development supporting business growth.

In some sectors, such as Tourism and Hospitality, Cyber Security, green Construction, Aviation, Aerospace, and Digital, the National Transition Training Fund is supporting in-work skills development to enable economic recovery from Covid-19 and EU exit, as well as helping businesses gain the skills to for the transition to net zero.

In the current financial year, there is also support for businesses in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire through the North East Economic Recovery and Skills Fund. This £14.3m fund recognises the dual impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the downturn in Oil and Gas/ Local partners are working with businesses in key sectors to provide skills support to aid economic recovery in the area.

The need to raise awareness amongst employers on the necessary behaviour changes that will support a just transition to net zero is also recognised as a priority area in the Climate Emergency Skills Action Plan (CESAP), which was published in December 2020.

The current activity taken as part of the CESAP includes training developed by Keep Scotland Beautiful that has helped organisations to better understand the climate emergency and respond to the risks and opportunities it presents and the development of multi-disciplinary training on natural capital approaches. In addition to the actions already being taken, over the next year there will be a ‘toolkit’ developed to help small/micro businesses develop the skills and knowledge they need to adapt to the demands of the transition to net zero.

The Net Zero Technology Centre has not provided any funding directly for the benefit of any of the three Operators in question.

The Net Zero Technology Centre model provides funding for developers with a prerequisite that the project has industry support in order to provide match funding, industry engagement and access to the facilities and expertise that is required to prove the technology. This is in line with the Business Case approved as part of the Aberdeen City Region Deal, in which joint Government funding of £180m over ten years was to be matched by industry and academia to a target amount of £174.1m.

The Scottish Government recognises that the food we produce and consume has wide-ranging impacts in many areas of life. Our ambition is for Scotland to be a Good Food Nation where people from every walk of life take pride and pleasure in, and benefit from, the food they produce, buy, cook, serve, and eat each day. We have already been working across government on an extensive programme of measures to deliver on this ambition. This work will now be supported and underpinned in law by the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill, introduced on 7 October 2021.

The Bill will provide an over-arching framework for clear, consistent and coherent future Scottish food policy. It places duties on Scottish Ministers and certain public authorities to produce plans of their policies in relation to food and set out what they will do to make those plans real. These plans will also have to set out the main outcomes to be achieved in relation to food-related issues, the policies needed to do this and the measures we will use to assess progress. We want these plans to deliver outcomes which support our nation’s social and economic wellbeing, the environment, people’s health and economic development.

There have been 88 public facing Scottish Government websites launched since 2016, 15 were launched in 2016, 16 were launched in 2017, 13 were launched in 2018, 9 were launched in 2019, 29 were launched in 2020 and 6 were launched in 2021.

The Scottish Government operates 144 public facing websites.

The information requested is not held by the Scottish Government. The operational deployment of Police Officers is a matter for the Chief Constable, with oversight by the Scottish Police Authority.

The information requested is not held by the Scottish Government. The training and development of Police Officers is a matter for the Chief Constable, with oversight by the Scottish Police Authority.

The Scottish Government collects and publishes annual information on Common assault of emergency workers within two National Statistics bulletins.

The first is Recorded Crime in Scotland [1] . Table A8 of the Recorded Crime in Scotland, 2020-21 National Statistics shows the latest 10 year trend in Common assault of an emergency worker offences for Scotland and this information can also be broken down by local authority area. It should be noted that these figures will not include certain attacks or assaults on emergency workers (for example should an emergency worker be assaulted and sustain a serious assault level injury, this would be recorded as a serious assault). From previous research into common assault and further information published by Police Scotland, the vast majority of police recorded offences of Common assault of an emergency worker relate to police officers.

The second is Criminal Proceedings in Scotland [2] . The number of people proceeded against and people convicted in Scottish courts for assaults against emergency workers under various criminal offences are published in additional tables [3] alongside the annual National Statistics publication. Assaults against police officers may be charged under a range of statutory offences including under section 90(1) of the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012, section 1 of the Emergency Worker(s) Act (Scotland) 2005, and Section 89(1) of the Police Act 1996. People could be also proceeded against under Section 41(1) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967 for offences committed prior to the introduction of the Police and Fire Reform Act. Over 1,300 people in Scotland had a main conviction for assaulting a police officer under these acts in 2019-20. In addition, serious assaults against police officers may be charged under common law of assault and counted as serious assaults in the publication. We cannot determine if a proceeding for serious assault was against a police officer.

Note that the Criminal Proceedings data shows the main conviction in a proceeding, which is the charge that received the most serious sentence. This means that some charges for assaulting a police officer may not be recorded in the publication, as they weren’t the main charge.

Care should be taken when comparing different data sources relating to the criminal justice system. For example, recorded crime statistics count crimes and offences at the time that they came to the attention of Police Scotland while criminal proceedings statistics report on cases which have concluded in court. This means that a crime may be recorded by the police in one year and court proceedings concluded in a subsequent year. In addition, the criminal proceedings statistics only count the main charge in a proceeding, but a person may be proceeded against for more than one crime or a set of crimes with more than one victim. There is also the possibility that the crime recorded by the police may be altered in the course of judicial proceedings.

[1] https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2020-2021/

[2] https://www.gov.scot/publications/criminal-proceedings-scotland-2019-20/documents/

[3] https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/statistics/2021/05/criminal-proceedings-scotland-2019-20/documents/emergency-workers-tables/emergency-workers-tables/govscot%3Adocument/emergency-workers-tables.xlsx

The information requested is not held by the Scottish Government. The operational deployment of Police Officers is a matter for the Chief Constable, with oversight by the Scottish Police Authority.