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Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for MSPs to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

Find out more about parliamentary questions

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Question reference: S6W-27427

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Friday, 10 May 2024
Current Status: Answered by Tom Arthur on 28 May 2024

To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the growth in the food delivery industry in Scotland since 2020, including the estimated number of workers in the sector.

The Scottish Government is aware of the importance of understanding the food delivery industry, and the evolving challenges with measuring activity in this area.

At present, there are no official estimates of revenues or employment in the food delivery industry provided by the Office for National Statistics at UK or Scottish level, or how these have changed in recent years.

Independent organisations such as the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) have provided estimates of the scale of employment within the food delivery industry in the UK in recent years, as part of employment in the wider “Gig Economy”. The CIPD published estimates in 2023 in their report, “The Gig Economy: What Does It Really Look Like?”, based on experimental questions in the January to March 2022 Labour Force Survey. This estimated 82,649 people were employed as food delivery drivers as part of the ‘gig’ economy in the UK overall in the previous 3 months, although there are no estimates specifically for Scotland.

There are currently no Standard Industrial Classification codes that specifically identify food delivery as an industry; there are also currently no Standard Occupational Classification codes that specifically identify food delivery as an occupation. In the absence of these, it is currently not possible to provide robust and consistent estimates of numbers of individuals employed within food service delivery in Scotland from official data sources.

Recent related ONS communications on the issue of the Gig Economy are provided below for reference.

2021: Workers in the 'Gig economy' - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)

2024: Revenue generated from gig jobs in the UK - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)

Question reference: S6W-27255

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Thursday, 02 May 2024
Current Status: Answered by Kate Forbes on 16 May 2024

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the progress of the inquiry into the death of Sheku Bayoh, including the anticipated date for the publication of the final report.

The Sheku Bayoh Public Inquiry commenced evidentiary hearings on 10 May 2022. As of 2 May 2024, 102 days of evidence have been heard by Lord Bracadale including detailed evidence on the events at Hayfield Road on 3 May 2015; post-incident management by Police Scotland, COPFS and PIRC; cause of death; and Police Scotland training. The Inquiry will hear evidence on race, and whether it was a factor in Mr Bayoh’s death, in June 2024.

As the Public Inquiry is independent of Ministers, it is for the Chair to direct how the Inquiry carries out its duties. Lord Bracadale has previously confirmed that he anticipates that all the remaining evidence should be completed by the end of the year and a final report will be prepared and produced once all evidence has been heard and reviewed.

Question reference: S6O-03308

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 10 April 2024
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 18 April 2024

To ask the Scottish Government what the average waiting time is for a determination on Adult and Child Disability Payments in Mid-Scotland and Fife.

Question reference: S6O-03153

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 28 February 2024
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 6 March 2024

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its review of how to increase the number of co-operatives, social enterprises and employee-owned businesses, as part of the move to a wellbeing economy.

Question reference: S6W-25530

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 14 February 2024
Current Status: Answered by Siobhian Brown on 28 February 2024

To ask the Scottish Government on what date it plans to publish its consultation on the minimum age of marriage, in light of the concluding observation of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child that all marriages of under-18s should be prohibited in Scotland.

As I said in my answer to question S6W-23651 on 7 December 2023, the Scottish Government is aiming to publish a consultation on a substantial range of family and succession law matters, including the minimum age of marriage, by summer 2024.

All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers

Question reference: S6O-03118

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 21 February 2024
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 28 February 2024

To ask the Scottish Government how it is supporting events to commemorate the 750th anniversary of the birth of Robert the Bruce, which takes place on 11 July this year.

Question reference: S6O-02979

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Wednesday, 10 January 2024
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 18 January 2024

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on what action it is taking to make rail travel more affordable and attractive for passengers in the Mid Scotland and Fife region.

Question reference: S6W-23165

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Thursday, 07 December 2023
Current Status: Answered by Jenni Minto on 21 December 2023

To ask the Scottish Government what its assessment is of (a) any financial impact of NHS Scotland’s individual NHS boards referring patients to NHS England for magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) treatment, (b) whether individual NHS England trusts have the adequate resources to allow proper access by patients from Scotland to MRgFUS treatment in light of this cross-border referral system and (c) how much NHS Scotland has spent on referring patients from Scotland for MRgFUS treatment in England in each year since 2019.

A small service offering MRgFUS for benign Essential Tremor is available in NHS Tayside, to which people who live within the catchment area of other Scottish health boards can be referred for assessment and potential treatment. While the service in Dundee remains small, we understand it has capacity to increase the number of accepted patients if necessary.

For this reason the Scottish Government has not undertaken any assessment of any potential financial impact of referring patients to NHS England for MRgFUS, or of NHS England resources regarding MRgFUS.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on whether NHS Scotland Health Boards have spent any money referring patients to England for MRgFUS treatment since 2019. Specialist treatment provided outwith NHS Scotland is managed by the National Services Division (NSD) as part of NHS National Services Scotland (NSS). We can confirm that NSD Scotland has not incurred any costs associated with MRgFUS referrals since 2019.

Question reference: S6W-21859

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Tuesday, 24 October 2023
Current Status: Answered by Angela Constance on 8 November 2023

To ask the Scottish Government, further to the comments by the then Cabinet Secretary for Justice, during the stage 1 debate on the Culpable Homicide (Scotland) Bill on 21 January 2021, that the Scottish Government wants to work with bereaved families to produce a bill that could help to address the issues raised, but in a way that is within the Parliament’s devolved competence, and in light of Health and Safety Executive statistics on work-related fatal injuries in Great Britain in 2023, what its position is on whether the higher fatality rate in Scotland can be attributed to a greater proportion of people working in higher risk jobs; which employment areas it considers to be higher risk, and what sector-specific action it can take to address any increased risk.

The Health and Safety Executive (the HSE) operates across the UK including in Scotland under governance from the Department of Work and Pensions within the UK Government. The HSE is responsible for helping people be safer at work.

As part of their responsibilities for workplace safety, the HSE publishes workplace safety statistics for Scotland. In November 2022, they published the latest statistics:

Workplace health and safety statistics for Scotland, 2022 (hse.gov.uk)

In presenting these statistics, the HSE indicated that '... this report represents a profile of workplace health and safety in Scotland and its primary purpose is to provide Scotland specific equivalents of the statistics for Great Britain published across HSE’s Health and Safety Statistics pages. The figures also enable comparisons between Scotland and Great Britain to be made. However, any such comparative analysis should be interpreted with caution since any differences in health and safety outcomes are likely to be at least in part driven by differences in the industry sectors and occupations people work in.'

More specifically, the HSE has carried out a statistical analysis of fatalities in the workplace across the nations of the UK. On page 15 of their November 2022 report, they indicated the following:

'Over recent years, the fatal injury rate in Scotland has been consistently higher than that of Great Britain, but there is no difference in the rate of non-fatal injuries. One explanation is that in Scotland, a greater proportion of workers are employed in higher risk industry sectors or higher risk occupations, compared with Great Britain as a whole. It is possible to standardise fatal injury rates by adjusting them to account for differences in industry composition between countries and regions and a recent research report shows the effect this has on the relative rates of the countries and regions of Great Britain.

The following table shows estimates of the unstandardised and standardised country-specific fatal injury rates for the period 2015/16-2019/20 (the full report can be found at www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/adhoc analysis/updated-standardised-fatals.pdf) .

Number, un-standardised rate and standardised rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers (2015-16 – 2019-20)

Country	Number of Fatalities	Un-standardised rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers	Standardised rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers
Scotland	88	0.65	0.57
England	529	0.38	0.39
Wales	58	0.81	0.65
Great Britain	675	0.42	NA

The standardised rate for Scotland is lower than the un-standardised rate, demonstrating that its different industry composition does have an effect on the comparison between Scotland and Great Britain. However, even after standardisation the rate is still significantly higher in Scotland. It is likely that other factors, such as a different occupational distribution and other factors not related to employment, are also affecting the comparison. However, at present there is insufficient data available to enable the quantification of these effects.'

The Scottish Government will work with the HSE in any aspects where devolved issues arise to help the HSE deliver their reserved statutory responsibilities in the area of workplace safety.

Question reference: S6W-21860

Asked by: Claire Baker, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
Date lodged: Tuesday, 24 October 2023
Current Status: Answered by Angela Constance on 7 November 2023

To ask the Scottish Government when it anticipates it will receive the Scottish Law Commission’s findings and recommendations from its review of homicide law, which is due to report in 2023.