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Both the work on developing the Islands Bond, and undertaking the Islands Bond consultation process were led by the Scottish Government’s Islands Team as part of their overall work to support our islands.

Additional input was sought from other policy areas as needed.

The evidence review of muirburn being carried out by SAC is currently going through NatureScot’s Quality Assurance Process and they will publish the final review shortly once this process has been completed.

Vehicle registration is generally a reserved matter operated by the DVLA. We have not been involved in discussions to date and would have to establish whether bicycles are classes as vehicles to understand what its impact on Scotland, if any, would be.

We are committed to supporting many more people to walk, wheel or cycle for everyday journeys and are allocating record funding for that purpose. Cycle licences or registration plates have played no part in our proposals and would run counter to our aims by making it harder for people to make the choice to choose cycling for everyday short journeys. There are many more effective steps that can be taken to ensure that roads are safer for all users – for examples, increasing accessible cycle infrastructure, improving street design and making sure that all road users are aware of good safe ways of using the roads.

In planning proceedings the parties are normally expected to meet their own expenses and expenses are only awarded on grounds of unreasonable behaviour.

Unreasonable behaviour would be deemed if another party to the appeal has acted unreasonably and this caused the party making the claim to incur unnecessary expense, either because it should not have been necessary for the case to come before Scottish Ministers or because of the manner in which the party against whom the claim is made, has conducted their part of the proceedings.

Under current constitutional arrangements in the United Kingdom immigration, including the Afghan resettlement schemes, are reserved to the UK Government and handled by the Home Office.

The UK Government has published statistics on the number of people who have arrived in the UK under the Afghan resettlement schemes since 2021, and have committed to providing more detailed data in their quarterly immigration statistics. Afghan Resettlement Programme: operational data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The latest published data (25 August) shows that across the UK 9,667 people are in temporary accommodation and 7,385 people are in settled accommodation. This does not include people who have made their own accommodation arrangements.

NatureScot are considering a range of studies regarding the muirburn season when reviewing the evidence for a muirburn licensing system.  

Research on this topic is continuing and NatureScot will take account of the evidence as it becomes available.  

The decision to bring ScotRail under public control avoided the need to run an expensive and inappropriate rail franchising competition. Though widely acknowledged as a failed model, franchise competitions remain the preferred approach in current UK Legislation. Such exercises typically cost in excess of £10m for franchising authorities, as well as the similarly significant costs of each bidder.

As confirmed during my Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee appearance on 15 March 2022, prior to that date, since the decision to proceed with the “Operator of Last Resort” (OLR) option was taken in March 2021, £3.6 million had been spent on the OLR activity.

Final reconciliation figures confirm that £5.5 million has been spent in total on OLR activity, and ScotRail Trains Ltd. was mobilised successfully on 1 April. I am confident you will notice the saving this achieved when compared with a franchising competition.

The cost of the analysis was £18,240.

The Robert Gordon University report – Making the Switch, funded through the North-East Economic Recovery and Skills Fund (NEERSF), estimates between 70,000 and 80,000 people are directly and indirectly employed in the offshore energy sector in Scotland, with around 65% working or based in the North East.

This report highlights over 90% of the workforce has medium to high skills transferability between adjacent energy sectors, such as offshore wind, the use of hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. This indicates the North East is well placed to capitalise on the opportunities associated with the energy transition and could become either a UK or Global Energy Hub, with the expected result of the energy workforce remaining broadly stable or increasing by 2030.

The Scottish Government is supporting this transition from the oil and gas sector to renewables and low carbon through a number of programmes, including, but not limited to, the £75 million Energy Transition Fund and our £500 million Just Transition Fund for the North East and Moray.

The Climate Emergency Skills Action Plan is key to ensuring everyone can benefit from the opportunities a Just Transition can create, whether the requirement is to improve on existing skills or retrain to a new or emerging green job.

In terms of recorded offences, the data received from Police Scotland for producing the National Statistics on Recorded Crime, is a simple count of the number of crimes and offences, for each local authority, which the police have recorded and cleared up.

The nature of this data is such that while some crime codes refer to a single act or section of legislation, others include a wider range of legislation. As such we are unable to separately identify crimes and offences recorded under either Section 2 or Section 36 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. We are able to separately identify crimes recorded under Section 3, which relates to careless and inconsiderate driving. This document has been placed with the Scottish Parliament, bib number 63591. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers .

The document provides figures for 2018-19 to 2021-22, along with data for the years of 2013-14 to 2017-18. Those earlier years were requested through a previous PQ S5W-22619 on 2 May 2019 and in preparing updated information for this PQ, statisticians identified a small coding error in the calculations made in 2019.

The error meant a small number of cases included in the earlier answer were for another part of the Road Traffic Act, beyond Section 3. This had a negligible impact on the implied magnitude of offences recorded under Section 3 (accounting for less than 0.5% difference for each year at the Scotland level). However we would like to use this PQ answer to highlight the amendment and issue the revised figures for 2013-14 to 2017-18.

In terms of (i) prosecutions and (ii) convictions: These are also included in the aforementioned document (placed with the Scottish Parliament, bib number 63591) – split into each of Sections 2, 3 and 36 of the Road Traffic Act 1988.

Care should be taken when comparing different data sources relating to the criminal justice system. For example recorded crime statistics count crimes and offences at the time that they came to the attention of Police Scotland, while criminal proceedings statistics report on cases which have concluded in court. This means that a crime may be recorded by the police in one year, with charges brought and court proceedings concluded in subsequent years. In addition, a person may be proceeded against for more than one crime, or a set of crimes with more than one victim, in a proceeding, but only the main charge is counted in these court proceedings statistics. There is also the possibility that the crime recorded by the police may be altered in the course of judicial proceedings.