Seòmar agus comataidhean

On 15 December 2022 the Scottish Government published its budget for 2023-24, which is available at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-budget-2023-24/documents/ .

The Scottish Government approves and provides croft businesses with over £40 million each year through various support mechanisms, including the crofting specific Croft House Grant, Crofting Agricultural Grant Scheme, and the Cattle Improvement Scheme. Crofters can also access the LFASS, BPS and Greening, Young Farmers Payment, AECS, the sheep and beef schemes, the Forestry Grant Scheme and the Small Woodlands Loan Scheme, the Sustainable Agricultural Capital Grant Scheme and veterinary support. The Farm Advisory Service provides advice and guidance to crofters through its one-to-one and one-to-many services.

The Risk Management Committee is scheduled to meet on 21 March 2023.

We are very concerned about the additional hardship women and children experiencing domestic abuse are facing as a result of the Cost of Living Crisis. We recognise this can impact their ability to leave their abuser and we are exploring options around the delivery of financial support in order that this is not a barrier to leaving an abusive partner.

We are working with Scottish Women’s Aid (SWA) and other organisations to consider how this support can be best developed and delivered.

No-one should have to endure domestic abuse and help and support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on Scotland’s Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline on 0800 0271234.

Statistics on the number of school pupils assessed and/or declared disabled and the number of pupils reported as having additional support needs for hearing impairment, visual impairment and deafblind are published in the pupil census supplementary statistics, available on the Scottish government website in the Pupil Census supplementary statistics tables 1.7 and 1.8.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

The Workforce Development Group is newly established and had its first meeting on 29 November 2022. The group will meet bi-monthly with the next meeting scheduled for 30 January 2023.