Seòmar agus comataidhean

This is a matter for individual Health Boards. The information requested is not held centrally by the Scottish Government.

Most emergency treatment for food allergies is provided in a primary care or emergency department setting and information on this specific activity is not centrally held.

The number of patients who have been admitted to hospital as an emergency due to food allergies and the number of deaths due to food allergies in the last five years are shown in the following two tables.

Table 1. Patients admitted to hospital as an emergency due to a diagnosis of food allergy; NHS Scotland; 2014–18.

This information is not held centrally. Information on patients who have been admitted to hospital as an emergency due to food allergies and the number of deaths due to food allergies in the last five years is available in response to S5W-22860 on 8 May 2019.

All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx .

The health and wellbeing of children and young people within our schools is vitally important and a priority of this government.

All school pupils health and wellbeing is underpinned by Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), Scotland’s curriculum for all children and young people aged 3-18. It is designed around eight curriculum areas, including Health and Wellbeing, and aims to develop the attributes, knowledge and skills needed to flourish in life, learning and work. For each curriculum area CfE has experiences and outcomes which set out what each pupil is expected to learn and how they are expected to progress through four levels of learning. It is up to teachers to decide what to study against the experiences and outcomes each year.

The Food and Health section within Health and Wellbeing sets out the experiences and outcomes that pupils should have during the course of their day to day learning about food choices and the relationship to their health and wellbeing. This learning can be delivered through a variety of classes and activities to help to ensure that pupils develop a full understanding of food issues in their widest sense. For example, as well as learning how to cook, food education encompasses things like how to understand food labelling and recognise that some people may have dietary needs, such as allergies, that require them to avoid certain foods.

In addition, Education Scotland have developed benchmarks to provide clarity on the national standards expected within each curriculum area at each level. They set out clear lines of progression across all curriculum areas from Early to Fourth Levels. Their purpose is to make clear what learners need to know and be able to do to progress through the levels, and to support consistency in teachers' and other practitioners' professional judgements. The benchmarks are designed to be concise and accessible, with sufficient detail to communicate clearly the standards expected for each curriculum level.

The duty to comply with the ban on biodegradable municipal waste landfill rests with those responsible for waste disposal. Our waste markets study, published on 23 April, assessed a range of processing and disposal capacity across the UK and elsewhere.

We are working with local authorities and other stakeholders who do not have a solution in place to identify ways, such as collaborative procurement and improved recycling, in which they can comply with the ban as soon as possible. We are also working to raise awareness of the forthcoming ban in the commercial sector and seeking improvements in recycling and waste minimisation performance.

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-22738 on 23 April 2019. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx .

We are committed to supporting local authority kerbside collection arrangements alongside our deposit return scheme. We have engaged extensively with stakeholders on the design of that scheme and will set out next steps with its implementation shortly.

The current consultation on reforms to the packaging producer responsibility scheme also sets out proposals for how these reforms could support local authority kerbside collections in future.

An analysis has been conducted of the impact of including glass in the deposit return scheme compared to current recycling systems, which consist of a mixture of bring sites and kerbside collections. This work has been undertaken as part of extensive evidence gathering and analysis to inform the scheme design.

Further to my response to question S5W-14917, I can confirm that Scottish Natural Heritage has not undertaken further work on the impact of beavers on beech trees and the red squirrel population.

Scotland’s Forestry Strategy places a high priority on understanding and mitigating the threats to Scotland’s forests and woodlands.

The physical impacts of the disease on ash populations are generally not yet as advanced in Scotland as in England and Wales. However, since its first detection in 2012, Ash dieback disease has become wide spread in Scotland, including in areas where there was some initial hope that the disease could be contained through statutory actions requiring the removal of diseased trees. Scottish Ministers therefore took a strategic decision in 2015, supported by the Scottish Tree Health Advisory Group, to focus on adaptive actions such as seed banking, assessments of susceptibility, and management advice to secure the long-term future of ash trees in Scotland.

As some ash trees appear to be able to tolerate or resist infection, our priority for securing the long-term future of Scotland’s ash trees is in the identification of the genetic factors in resistant samples, and using these to breed new generations of tolerant ash trees for the future. This work is part of a UK and Europe wide approach.