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We do not require our Fuel Insecurity Fund delivery partners to collect the requested data from households. Payments are provided on the basis of an holistic assessment of their circumstances, which may include damp and mould issues.

The Scottish Government has not provided any funding support to Red Rock Power in relation to its offshore wind activities in Scotland. Officials last met with Red Rock Power in November 2022 to discuss progress on their development of the Inch Cape Offshore Wind farm off the coast of Angus.

Scottish Ministers are committed to protecting the natural environment which is demonstrated across a wide range of policy areas including biodiversity. A new global biodiversity framework was agreed at the UN CBD COP15 meeting in Montreal, in December 2022, with the aim of protecting and restoring biodiversity across the world. This framework includes a ‘whole of government’ approach – which we were successful in advocating for through the Edinburgh Process for biodiversity - and ‘whole of society’ approach.

We recognise the importance of biodiversity and the urgent need for action at all levels to tackle the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, to ensure a nature-positive world. In Scotland we will continue to work to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 and reversing declines by 2045, through our new Scottish Biodiversity Strategy and Delivery Plan.

The Scottish Government has had recent conversations with the UK Government in relation to the GREAT Talent Campaign. During this conversation, we requested a final evaluation to be shared with specific Scotland demographics.

The GREAT campaign is funded and monitored by the UK Government and questions relating to it are best directed to them. The Scottish Government does work alongside a range of partners in the Brand Scotland collaboration, which seeks to build our global reputation and present Scotland as a dynamic, fair and inclusive country in which to live/work, study, visit and do business. The campaigns run by Brand Scotland are designed to raise awareness of Scotland and can often be the first interaction between overseas businesses that encourages them to engage with our agencies on investment and buying opportunities.

An example of this is the Brand Scotland business focused campaign called Think Scotland which from April 2021 to March 2022 led to over 94 million global impressions of Scotland specific content and over 28 Million views of video content which was served directly to SDI target customers. This was supplemented with a further 500k social engagements on Scotland specific social channels and over 2 million visitor sessions to the Scotland.org website and over 379 visitor sessions to the SDI website. All of this campaign activity resulted in 873 calls, leads, enquiries being generated for relevant Inward investment or Trade teams to follow up on and a further 53 engagements generated from this activity with an estimated 650 further jobs in the pipeline for SDI to take forward.

Scottish Government officials have engaged regularly with the Department for Work and Pensions throughout the development of Winter Heating Payment. This engagement has covered discussion about policy as well as data requirements, system design and delivery of Winter Heating Payment. Regular engagement continues.

Zero Waste Scotland commissions updates to the Scottish Material Flow Accounts to allow for a consistent time-series analysis from the data; these updates provide consolidated data for a variety of stakeholders such as academic and third-sector organisations.

To supplement this research, Zero Waste Scotland also commissioned the Circularity Gap Report (CGR) which was developed by Circle Economy. The methodology used in the CGR allows more detailed inferences to be drawn on the structure of material flows within the Scottish economy. Additionally, as the methodology used in the CGR is consistently applied across multiple countries, it allows the opportunity to compare Scotland’s performance to other nations.

It is Zero Waste Scotland’s view that one estimate cannot be considered more accurate than the other.

Households of all tenures are eligible to seek assistance from the Fuel Insecurity Fund (FIF) if they are at risk of self-rationing their energy use or self-disconnecting entirely. Our trusted third sector delivery partners, namely Advice Direct Scotland (ADS), the Fuel Bank Foundation and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA), are not required to monitor the housing tenure type of the individuals they support. In the case of the SFHA, though, all of the support they provide, £6.6m this financial year, is directed towards social housing tenants of member RSLs.

We regularly monitor the support provided by our delivery partners; however we seek to avoid excessive demands for data gathering in order to ensure the FIF can be distributed with a level of partner discretion to target direct support to those most in need at the time.

We welcome the recent Circularity Gap Report which clearly sets out the size of the challenge ahead. The Scottish Government is clear that transitioning to a circular economy is key if we are to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis, and this means reducing our demand for raw material, increasing reuse and repair, and recycling more.

Scottish Water does not maintain information by parliamentary region or by local authority, however was able to extract leakage data for the equivalent area which is a close match to the South Scotland parliamentary region. A copy of the table which provides total leakage volumes in Mega litres per day for each of the months since April 2016 is available from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib Number 63968).

In response to the request for members and leaders of the groups and sub-groups names in the answer to question SW6-12170, this information is available from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 63939).

The groups and sub-groups named in response to question S6W-12170 that have an allocated budget are:

• Scottish Science Advisory Council £32,000
• Youth Work Strategy Review Group - £3,500
• National Bairns’ Hoose Governance Group - £14,400
• Race Equality & Anti-Racism in Education Programme Board - £350,000
• Gender Equality Taskforce in Education & Learning - £50,000

The other groups and sub-groups named in the previous response do not have allocated budgets. Any incidental costs associated with the running of these groups are covered by the relevant departments’ budgets.