Chamber and committees

If it is okay, we would be happy to send you more information about the policy test on some of the other projects.

Absolutely. That is critical, and we are committed to that. You will notice throughout the plan and the implementation route map that actions are set out and are under way to ensure that we enable that to happen. We want to strengthen Gaelic—which is part of our cultural heritage—and ensure that there continues to be a place for it.

There have been various ministerial groups in relation to that issue, as well as a task force focusing on Gaelic and the economy. We recognise that Gaelic needs to feature in all our policies, including those on housing, infrastructure and so on. You can see that throughout the plan.

On ferries and housing, when I visit island communities, basic infrastructure is always raised as a critical issue. That is where my work across Government is important. You will be aware that the Minister for Transport has re-established the islands transport forum, which now features as part of our islands strategic group, which brings key bodies around the table to ensure that we get that cross-cutting engagement in relation to housing. Again, that is a really important issue. Further, of course, I work closely with the Minister for Housing in relation to the development of the remote, rural and islands housing action plan, which will be critical in trying to address some of those challenges.

Absolutely, and I heard that message loud and clear when I visited Shetland last week. Again, I follow up and highlight such concerns with my colleagues—in this case, the Minister for Transport. You are absolutely right to say that the issue of transport is important, as is the availability of housing. That is why the cross-Government work that is going on is vital in trying to resolve some of those issues.

Ideally, we would all want to have more resources at our disposal. I have been at this committee a number of times in relation to my budget and, of course, we can always do more if we have more funding available to us. However, in the most recent settlement, there was an increase of about £800 million to local authorities, which was a 3 per cent real-terms increase. As part of that, there is also a special islands needs assessment, which gives our island authorities an extra uplift in recognition of their particular situation.

That was in September last year.

Yes, I am happy to do that.

I do not think that it is fair to say that there has been no improvement. An awful lot of work has been going on in relation to digital connectivity, which can be seen in the strategic objectives and the commitments. Project gigabit is an example. There has been £20 million of Scottish Government funding and £16 million from the United Kingdom Government to expand on the reaching 100 per cent—R100—programme. When I appeared before the committee last year, I talked about the sub-sea cables that were to be laid. That work has been completed, and we are continuing with the roll-out,

It is also important to remember that we first set out this plan in 2019, three months before the pandemic. There is no denying the absolutely massive impact that that had not only in relation to the implementation of our objectives and the commitments, but right across the country and all parts of Government, because we had to pivot our resource to deal with the immediate challenges that we faced. There has been some delay because of those challenges, but having resilient communities was really important, so that is where we pivoted the funds. It is important to bear in mind that the previous rounds of funding for the islands programmes that we had—the islands infrastructure fund, the healthy islands fund and the island communities fund—were to help us to deal with some of those challenges and to react to the pandemic.

Yes. You can see that the work is on-going. I mentioned project gigabit and the specific areas that will be targeted in that. There will continue to be progress.

Yes. Strategic objective 13, on the overall implementation, identifies a number of pieces of work that need to be done to enable us to gather the data that we need. We know that, if we want the plan to be implemented effectively, we need the data to inform that, and we need to ensure that we can monitor that. We know that there is quite a lot of work to be done to enable us to gather that data and take it forward from there.

You can see from strategic objective 13 that we have undertaken five projects to improve the data. There is the islands data dashboard, and the national islands plan survey was undertaken in 2020 by the James Hutton Institute. Around 4,500 completed surveys were returned. We sent out just over 20,000—I am sure that officials will correct me if I am wrong on that—so we had around a 22 per cent return rate.

In addition, we recently commissioned another survey, because, now that we have the baseline data, we can build on that for the future. Work has also been undertaken on geography data zones, the island region populations dashboard and the existing data indicators framework. We have commissioned EKOS to do some work on that and to look at what existing indicators we can use to analyse the issue and monitor progress.

There will be. All those different strands of work have been important in getting the baseline data, which, as I said, the survey helped to provide us with, and in disaggregating the data for the islands from the data for the mainland. That has been a challenge in itself.

I do not know whether Professor Sindico or any other official wants to discuss why that has been such a challenge so far and why all those different strands of work are important in building an accurate picture for each of our islands.