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With regard to the Centre for the Moving Image entering into administration, it would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to comment on ongoing legal proceedings, but the Scottish Government is engaging with Creative Scotland, as well as Aberdeen and Edinburgh City Councils, to provide support where possible.

The Scottish Government remains committed to ensuring Scotland’s festivals have a global competitive edge. Our Festivals continue to be one of Scotland’s world-leading cultural brands, and we want them to retain their world-class status and continue to offer widespread accessibility to culture for community and education settings. We have and will continue to support our festivals and performers to get back in the international spotlight, backing our major festivals in Glasgow and Edinburgh, to ensure they stay globally competitive.

The Scottish Government will continue to work with the Culture sector to identify barriers to immediate and long-term recovery, and we will continue to do everything within our powers and resources to help those most affected by current economic challenges.

Our Fuel Poverty Act is the most ambitious fuel poverty legislation in the UK, setting us challenging but achievable targets, that in 2040 no more than 5% of households are fuel poor, and no more than 1% are in extreme fuel poverty. As required by the 2019 Fuel Poverty Act, a new statutory Scottish Fuel Poverty Advisory Panel was established from January 2022. The panel is an advisory non-departmental public body (NDPB) which will oversee the implementation of the Fuel Poverty Strategy, providing an important means of external scrutiny of our progress towards meeting the statutory targets.

As the 2019 Act requires the Scottish Government to formally consult with the panel on the strategy, we are presently working with them to seek their views in relation to appropriate next steps. The panel are also working collaboratively with the Poverty and Inequality Commission to inform advice for Scottish Ministers.

We are committed to tackling fuel poverty – not least by delivering on our Fuel Poverty and Heat in Buildings Strategies, which will help make homes warmer, greener and cheaper to run. We will invest at least £1.8 billion over the course of this parliament to insulate and install modern climate-friendly heating in homes and other buildings. This year alone (2022-23) we have allocated £336 million to heat, energy efficiency and fuel poverty measures including £119m targeted at fuel poor households. Our Warmer Homes Scotland fuel poverty scheme has its highest ever annual budget of £55 million, with recently revised eligibility criteria making a further 110,000 households eligible for support across Scotland. In addition, the Programme for Government commits us to using our Emergency Budget Review to double the value of our Fuel Insecurity Fund to £20 million, to ensure support continues to be available to people affected by rising energy costs who may be unable to afford their fuel bills this winter. Also subject to the emergency budget review, we will be investing an additional £5 million in Discretionary Housing Payments and allowing local authorities flexibility to use them to help with energy costs as well as rent payments.

We are greatly concerned by reports of children and under-age young people obtaining e-cigarettes or vaping products. Vapes and other nicotine products are part of a range of cessations tools available to existing smokers to help stop tobacco use. They are not a lifestyle accessory for children, young people or adult non-smokers.

There are already regulations in place which restrict the marketing, promotion and sale of vaping products to under 18s. We wrote to all retailers involved in their sale to remind them of their duty at the start of October 2022.

Our recent consultation proposed restrictions on vaping products that strike a balance between protecting all non-smokers from the potential harms of vaping, while still providing existing adult smokers with the information they need to make an informed choice on cessation. We hope to bring forward further regulation in the new year.

We recognise the importance of having a clear public health message for young people around the dangers of vaping. We are working with Young Scot and the Children’s Parliament to bring their voices into our work to develop a bold refreshed Tobacco Action Plan due to be published in Autumn 2023.

The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service have confirmed that in the last five financial years, as of 14 October 2022, there have been 11 charges reported and 2 charges convicted under the Tobacco and Primary Medical Services (Scotland) Act 2010 S4A(1) in relation to the selling of vaping products to under 18's.

The Scottish Government remains committed to reaching its target of eliminating HIV Transmission in Scotland by 2030.

In 2019, The Scottish Government commissioned the Scottish Health Protection Network leads to deliver a proposal for how Scotland can become one of the first countries to eliminate HIV transmissions.

Work on the proposal has been led by Professor Rak Nandwani, Honorary Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, with input from clinicians, academics, public health experts, the third sector and people living with HIV.

Their work has now concluded, and we anticipate the proposal, along with next steps, will be published on 1 December, to coincide with World Aids Day

A range of published data sources provide information related to the level of unmet need in adult social care in Scotland:

• The Health and Care Experience Survey collects data on unmet need for care and support. This survey runs every two years, and the latest version, published in May 2022 covers 2021-2022.
• The Social Care Eligibility Criteria And Waiting Times publication presents information on new clients meeting eligibility criteria for social care support, and the waiting times between first contact, completion of a community care assessment and delivery of a new personal care service. The latest edition, published in May 2022 covers the years 2012-2021. We are working with Public Health Scotland on approaches for improving the completeness and robustness of these data.
• Public Health Scotland (PHS) publishes Delayed Discharge data on a monthly basis. The accompanying Excel workbook on standard delay reasons provides the number of patients delayed in hospital at a monthly census point for patients delayed for health and social care reasons. Health and social care reasons includes those delayed due to issues with assessment, funding, place availability, care arrangements & transport. It should be noted that patients delayed in hospital are just a subset of all individuals with unmet social care needs. The latest edition includes figures up to and including August 2022.
• The Independent Review of Adult Social Care describes two indirect approaches to assessing level of unmet need, one of these involves comparing level of provision in different areas across Scotland and determining where areas are below the Scottish average level. The latest data on care provision is available in the PHS Insights into Social Care publication.

The Scottish Government is currently working with stakeholders at PHS and Health and Social Care Partnerships to collect robust data on the number of people waiting for assessment for Care at Home services and the associated number of hours to be provided. The first publication of these figures is expected from PHS later this year.

The National Records of Scotland published the latest life expectancy statistics on 22 September 2022. As reflected in these statistics, the pandemic has hit our most deprived communities the hardest, including many in Lanarkshire.

Reducing poverty and inequality sits at the heart of our investment across all portfolios and remain the best way of improving life expectancy. As a result we are mobilising action across government to tackle the underlying causes of inequality in our society.

This includes our commitment to providing free school meals, increasing the number of hours of free childcare, investing in affordable housing and continuing to deliver free prescriptions, concessionary travel and free personal care. Our Programme for Government and COVID Recovery Strategy include further commitments to improve life expectancy and to tackle health inequalities.

Offshore emissions generated as a result of the exploration for oil and gas in the North Sea are not counted as part of Scotland’s emissions inventory and instead are attributed directly to the UK emissions inventory and are not allocated to any devolved administration.

The Innovation and Targeted Oil and Gas Decarbonisation (INTOG) offshore wind planning and leasing round will build on the success of ScotWind and enable new innovative and unique offshore wind projects to directly remove oil and gas production emissions from our environment and help Scotland maximise our offshore wind potential and build our offshore wind supply chain.

Lease lengths and conditions were set out by Crown Estate Scotland following engagement with the relevant sectors. INTOG projects that are successful in gaining a lease and consent will help decarbonise the oil and gas production sector, as we manage the structured transition away from the fossil fuel sector, and by supplying excess energy to the grid or converting it to other fuels will directly help meet Scotland’s own net zero commitments. A full Sustainability Appraisal for the INTOG plan will be carried out before any projects are offered Option Agreements by Crown Estate Scotland.

The Scottish Government has stated that our contribution to climate change will end, definitively, within one generation. In line with this commitment, our Programme for Government 2021/22 states that "unlimited extraction of fossil fuels is incompatible with our climate obligations and meeting the aims of the Paris Agreement"; in a post-COP26 world.

The Scottish Government has undertaken analysis into the costings of implementing a pay increase to £15 per hour for social care workers.

An increase in pay from the current rate of £10.50 per hour to £15 per hour for adult social care workers providing direct care in commissioned services would be in the region of £1.2 billion per year. To also include workers within Children’s and Justice commissioned services would be in the region of £1.75bn.

It is important to note that this does not include any costs for uplifting the pay of social care workers employed within Local Authority settings who have existing pay arrangements, which are devolved to Local Authorities and COSLA.

Raising the hourly rate for social care workers to £15 per hour would likely cause significant issues of parity across public sector pay, as well as within Local Government.

The Scottish Government are considering all options to tackle delayed discharge and officials will continue to engage with external partners to develop appropriate approaches.

The Scottish Government have also announced significant additional funding to address delays in discharge. This includes for 2022-23:

• £124m to enhance care at home
• £200m to increase the hourly rate of pay to £10.50
• £20m to support interim care arrangements
• £40m to enhance multi-disciplinary teams

Since 2020 we have invested more than £4.5m to scale up Hospital at Home services, now established within 20 HSCPs. A further £3.6m is available for 2022-23, taking our total investment to over £8m.

Through expanding our virtual capacity we have avoided or saved bed days equivalent to adding a large district general hospital. This has already saved 45,000 hospital bed days this year and is being further rolled out over the coming months.

The Scottish Government has no current plans to review and update its Good Practice Principles for Community Benefits from Onshore Renewable Energy Developments (2019).

We are currently reviewing our Good Practice Principles for Community Benefits from Offshore Renewable Energy Developments (2015) and we intend to consult on the updated draft guidance next year. As part of the consultation process, we will also gather evidence to help inform the need for any further updates to the Scottish Government’s Good Practice Principles for Community Benefits from, and Shared Ownership of, Onshore Renewable Energy Developments.