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The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014 made a number of changes to the law on marriage and civil partnership, including in particular to allow same sex couples to marry. The marriage notice form and other registration forms were amended by the Registrar General for Scotland with consent of the Scottish Ministers, in consequence of these changes, by the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Prescribed Forms) (Scotland) Regulations 2014.

We wrote to 19 organisations, including three LGBTI organisations, to seek their views on the proposed changes to the registration forms before the Regulations were made. There were 18 responses to that consultation. These responses were not published.

I would be happy to write to the member with further information about this consultation and the outcomes, if desired.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-00570 on‎ 21 June 2021. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) and its predecessor Forest Enterprise Scotland (FES) has sold the following under the New Woodland Investment Programme (2021 - 2017) / Repositioning Programme (2007 – 2016). The figures in the following table include 6,598 hectares sold / transferred to communities and NGO’s under the National Forest Land Scheme and Community Asset Transfer Scheme:

Excluded are sales of ‘surplus’ assets, typically buildings and small parcels of land, sold under the Rationalisation policy.

The funds for disposals have been used for the following:

• Acquiring land for planting;
• Cost of woodland creation;
• Maintenance and management of new woodland creation;
• Starter Farms initiative;
• Transaction and programme costs both for acquisitions and disposals.

The New Woodland Investment programme was closed at the end of FY 20-21 and there will be no further land sales as part of the programme. Further acquisitions / residual obligations (to cover future costs as detailed above) remain to be discharged over the following four year period.

As announced as part of last year’s Capital Spending Review, FLS were allocated £30M of capital funding over the next five years (starting in FY 21-22) to purchase land for woodland creation and expansion of Scotland’s national forests and land.

The woodland sold by FLS / FES remains managed as woodland. Using the proceeds to subsequently purchase and plant additional land has ensured that the area of woodland in Scotland continues to increase.

The Scottish Government remains committed to modernising crofting law to make it more transparent, understandable and workable. This is a complex area of work and officials will continue to engage with key crofting stakeholders with issues for consideration being discussed with members of the Crofting Stakeholder Forum, the Law Society and others.

The timetable for crofting law reform is being considered as part of the Government’s wider legislative programme. In the meantime non-legislative administrative solutions will be sought wherever possible and work will continue with the Crofting Commission to bring crofts back into active use, aligned to actions in the National Development Plan.

The Improvement Service has been commissioned by the ELC expansion programme to collect data from local authorities on progress towards delivery of 1140 hours of funded early learning and childcare, and to report on this data. The most recent report, on data returned by Local Authorities in April 2021, was published on 15 June and can be accessed via the Improvement Service and Scottish Government websites. This provides detail on progress with both recruitment and construction work.

The Scottish Government is committed to reducing water pollution at beaches across Scotland.

We do not know what water quality data range was used by Save on Energy, a price comparison website, to support its claim. They do not reflect the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s bathing water classifications, which use statutory methods that are used across the UK and all EU member states.

Four of the seven Scottish beaches listed with the highest E.coli and intestinal enterococci in the Save on Energy survey are classified by SEPA as having ‘sufficient’ or better bathing water quality with one of these being rated as ‘excellent’. The three other beaches are receiving significant investment from Scottish Water totalling £23M in order to improve bathing water quality.

This bathing water season Scotland has more bathing waters rated as ‘excellent’, ‘good’ or ‘sufficient’ than at any point since tighter bathing water standards first came into force in 2015.

Scientific equipment for use in lessons is purchased by schools and the amount schools spend on scientific equipment is not decided centrally by the Scottish Government.

Scottish Government's policy towards local authorities' spending is to allow local authorities the financial freedom to operate independently. As such, the vast majority of the revenue funding is provided by means of a block grant. It is the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them, including on Education, on the basis of local needs and priorities, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

Boarding inspections in Port can only be conducted if a vessel lands in a Scottish Port. Therefore this largely depends on what vessels land in Scottish ports.

The following table is a breakdown of Boarding inspections in port by Month (January to May) in 2020 and 2021, by nationality.

The Scottish Government is committed to action to protect wildlife and to the effective monitoring of progress towards this goal. The Scottish Government has recently added a new single high level indicator to the National Performance Framework which measures trends in marine and terrestrial biodiversity in Scotland.

We have committed to introducing an ambitious new Biodiversity Strategy for Scotland within a year of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties (CoP15) and the publication of a new global biodiversity framework. Policies to take forward our commitment to tackle the nature crisis and methods to measure progress in this regard will be considered as part of the development of this Strategy and its supporting delivery plan.

NHS Lothian is performing in-line with the rest of Scotland and within national timeframes. All NHS Boards have the same timeframe in which to complete each JCVI cohort. There will be slight local variations in time taken to reach targets dependant on population demographics within each NHS Board i.e Lothian has proportionally the highest constituency population of younger adults. NHS Lothian have reached these targets for each cohort, with the percentage coverage for over 50s in line with the Scottish average.

The vaccination data are updated daily and can be found here: COVID-19 Daily Dashboard | Tableau Public