Seòmar agus comataidhean

The commitment to investing at least £500m over the life of this Parliament to create a Whole Family Wellbeing Fund is significant. This will enable transformational change which will enable the building of universal, holistic support services available in communities across Scotland giving families access to help when and where they need it, and help Scotland #keepthepromise.

We will work closely with The Promise Scotland and partners across local government, social justice, health, the third sector, and with children and families to design and deliver the Fund. Further details will be provided in due course.

Since 2018 Scottish Government has invested the following amounts on expanding the public and non public electric vehicle charging infrastructure across Scotland. These figures includes support provided to electric vehicle owners to install home charging points and support provided to Local Authorities, businesses and other organisations. The figures below represent all chargepoints that we have supported some of which are not publicly available chargers and as such won't appear on the ChargePlace Scotland network.

1) 2018-2019 – £13,405,324.67

2) 2019-2020 – £15,796,625

3) 2020-2021 – £14,416,073.57

The shift to electric vehicles is an important part of responding to the climate emergency and improving air quality in our cities. To help incentivise this shift, we have since 2013 invested over £45 million in ChargePlace Scotland, Scotland’s public charging network, which now has more than 1900 publicly available charge points. Scotland is leading the way on electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The latest figures show that Scottish electric vehicle drivers benefit from almost 40 public charge points per one hundred thousand people, compared to fewer than 30 in England, just over 20 in Wales and less than 20 in Northern Ireland.

We continue to work with key partners across Scotland to ensure that relevant information from patient health records is available to healthcare staff when and where they need it. Significant investment in national IT systems, such as those for GP practices and the TrakCare hospital patient management system in secondary care, has improved the flow of information across different healthcare settings and services. In addition, the availability of Regional Clinical Portals, the roll out of HEPMA ( Hospital Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration ) and availability of the patient Emergency Care Summary (ECS) to Community Pharmacists, Dentists and Optometrists have all improved the accessibility and quality of electronic patient information available to frontline staff.

Further improvements will be made including the implementation of Office365 across the entire NHS. This will include the rollout of single identities for NHS staff which will simplify secure access to relevant patient information. The refreshed Digital Health & Care Strategy, scheduled to be published in September 2021, will set out ambitions for greater access to medical information both for staff and the public.

In 2021 to 2022, over £215 million of targeted funding was allocated to the Attainment Scotland Fund, which will be invested to help close the poverty related attainment gap. This is at least 5.1% of total allocated funding for Education and Skills of £4,207.7m within 2021 to 2022.

Currently the ChargePlace Scotland (CPS) access card only enables CPS members to use electric vehicle charging stations on the CPS network, but developing interoperability is a key priority for the Scottish Government. Officials are actively exploring how access to other networks for CPS members can be enabled with the ChargePlace Scotland network operator, SWARCO, and are in discussions with other UK charge point network operators.

Scottish Government only holds information for chargepoint units that have been supported by funding from Scottish Government and added to the Chargepoint Scotland network or where funding has been provided from schemes managed by Energy Saving Trust on our behalf.

2018-2019 - 1506 units

2019-2020 – 2333 units

2020-2021 – 4411 units

2021-2022 – 3753 units

These figures include domestic home charging units and charging units installed by Local Authorities, businesses and other organisations.

There may be addition units installed that Scottish Government would have no information on as the host/owner may not have appointed the Chargepoint Scotland Network as there back office provider or received funding from Scottish Government.

It isn’t standard practice for Scottish Government to provide specific funding for maintenance of electric vehicle charging stations, and as such we do not hold such information. Units funded through Scottish Government schemes would have a 3/5 year warranty/maintenance pack included within the initial quote to install the unit, after this initial 3/5 year period it is the responsibility of the owner/host to maintain the unit and pay for any work that may be required to keep the unit fully operational.

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is a valuable tool for identifying geographic areas where deprivation is most concentrated, and was used in identifying the Challenge Authorities as councils with high levels of deprivation to be targeted in the first phase of the Scottish Attainment Challenge.

It is recognised that this method may not always account for poverty experienced in rural and remote geographic areas, or settlements where low-income families reside alongside other families who are not deprived.

As we work to refresh the Scottish Attainment Challenge from 2022-23, we are analysing the alternative data sets available to us for use in the distribution of funding. The aim is to achieve a distribution of resource that equally recognises the challenges faced by low-income children across the country. Closing the poverty-related attainment gap and ensuring every young person has the chance to fulfil their potential remains central to this Government’s work. Our ambition is a long-term one and we know that the challenges presented by the pandemic mean our efforts to deliver equity in education are more vital than ever.

There is a wealth of evidence supporting the efficacy of face coverings, which includes but is not limited to the impacts on children. Our decisions on face coverings have always and continues to be based on the available scientific and medical evidence. The Scottish Government Covid-19 Advisory Group and the Covid-19 Advisory Sub-Group on Education and Children’s Issues applies the advice from: World Health Organisation (WHO) ; Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) ; and other sources, and use it to inform decisions in Scotland.

We continue to review our face covering policy on a regular basis in light of the emerging evidence on coronavirus and in the light of that evidence we removed the requirement in regulations for children under the age of 12 to wear face coverings on 9 August 2021.

Negotiations are a matter for ScotRail and staff representatives through established collective bargaining arrangements. That being said, I have had discussions with Abellio ScotRail and the trade unions, and have encouraged every constructive effort to resolve the situation.

Through the pandemic we have supported rail operators, including ScotRail, with funding of around £1bn, of which over £450m is additional funding, to maintain services and full employment and salaries for rail staff. Any pay rise, including payments for rest day working, would need to be funded by efficiencies agreed by both sides.