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Each local authority was awarded an allocation of funds, to be used in the last financial year, ending 31 March 2022. Where it has not been possible to spend this in full, local authorities can continue to use their allocation in 2022-23 until fully spent.

Existing funding has not been exhausted and there are no plans to provide additional funding at present. However our emergency budget review, published on 2 November 2022, has outlined significant funds to help those most affected by the cost of living crisis. The Scottish Government will continue to do everything within our resources and powers to help those most affected by the cost of living crisis.

Updated guidance on the expanded criteria is being finalised and agreed with local government partners and will be published on the Scottish Government website in the coming weeks.

The Scottish Government have been in dialogue with NHS Highland on the matter raised. NHS Highland have confirmed that they will honour the two tier agreement in respect of facilities management colleagues working on behalf of NHS Highland at New Craigs Hospital. This will ensure that these staff are on terms and conditions that are no less favourable than the Agenda for Change equivalent. The Health Board are now working with Robertson Facilities Management and local trade union representatives to ensure a smooth transition.

My condolences go to any families who have lost loved ones through drink-driving. The Scottish Government takes this issue very seriously and any road death, no matter what the cause, is tragic.

The Scottish Government is committed to achieving safer road travel in Scotland. Scotland’s Road Safety Framework to 2030, launched in February 2021, sets out a compelling long-term vision for road safety, Vision Zero, where there are zero fatalities and injuries on Scotland’s roads by 2050. The journey to achieving this vision also includes ambitious interim targets where the number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads will be halved by 2030.

On drink driving, through Road Safety Scotland, we have campaigned on this issue for many years. These campaigns have been developed and delivered with our partners in Police Scotland to ensure that our innovative media campaigns align with Police targeted enforcement campaigns.

In 2014, this Government introduced the lowest drink-drive limit in the UK. Working closely with Police Scotland and Transport Scotland, we will continue to support the use of police enforcement initiatives and awareness-raising campaigns to help eradicate drink-driving in Scotland.

Public Health Scotland’s surveillance programme monitors the progress of COVID-19, flu and other respiratory infections, (including RSV), and reports regularly on the ongoing impact of those infections during the winter months. This has been incorporated into detailed modelling that has been used to support development of our winter resilience plan.

For all scenarios we know that effective and timely delivery of the seasonal flu and COVID-19 vaccines is crucial, and our winter vaccination programme is now well underway. The degree of protection wanes over time, which is why booster vaccination is needed to maintain the best protection against COVID-19 and flu, especially for those at highest risk. We continue to do all we can to encourage and support every single eligible person to come forward, ultimately, the decision to get vaccinated has always been, and remains, a matter of personal choice. We are working to ensure that more than two million eligible people in Scotland are offered and able to receive vaccines, in turn helping to protect the public and relieving pressure on the NHS.

Introduction - Winter Vaccination Programme 2022 to 2023: COVID-19 and seasonal flu deployment plan - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) .

The Residential Property Developer Tax is a tax on corporate profits levied on certain companies operating across the UK primarily in the domestic construction sector. This is a reserved tax and Scottish Government has no power to introduce the same.

We are carefully considering the next steps on how to address the responses to our engagement with people affected by historical adoption practices. We are in the process of obtaining some additional consultation from the Cabinet on how we should proceed with this matter.

In the meantime, we have issued a tender to commission research into support services and have also started the implementation of a new dedicated peer-support service for mothers affected.

As committed to in the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care we will, for the first time, publish our high level indicative projections for the Health and Social Care Workforce.

As part of the development of the indicative workforce projections a Short Life Working Group, comprising of key stakeholders developed an initial specification for workforce projections. Development of any projections is complex with many interlinking factors and as such we will look to continue to build the complexity of our workforce projections over time. Initially we will include job families from across the health and social care sector and utilise data from existing workforce data sets. Unfortunately we currently do not hold national level workforce data on consultant hepatologists, liver nurse specialists and alcohol liaison nurses and are therefore unable to include these specialities in initial workforce projections beyond the level of nurse and medical job families.

As part of the strategy we have also committed to taking forward specific actions to improve how we gather, use and assess workforce data. This includes taking steps to improve the demographic data we collect and the analysis we undertake of data obtained at different geographic levels within our health and social care system. This work to improve workforce data will be done in concert with development of workforce projections and the continued development of these.

We awarded a contract through a competitive tender for independent VAT advice from Anderson Anderson & Brown LLP. AAB have been commissioned to provide advice and support to SG on VAT implications. This work is ongoing. We will engage with the wider sector and HMT prior to any decision being taken which would have a VAT impact.

We awarded a contract through a competitive tender for independent VAT advice from Anderson Anderson & Brown LLP. AAB have been commissioned to provide advice and support to Scottish Government employees on VAT implications, to produce an options paper exploring the VAT implications of different NCS scenarios, and to produce a final report on the considerations of VAT and eventual outcome. This work is ongoing.