Chamber and committees

This Government has made clear that whilst a cautious approach to removing or reducing mitigations will continue to be taken, we do not want mitigations to be in place in schools any longer than is necessary. Therefore, as confirmed on 19 October existing safety measures are to remain in schools for now, following advice from senior clinicians.

As has been the case throughout Scotland’s response to the pandemic, all decisions related to schools draw on expert advice, including that received from the Advisory sub-group on children’s issues , and consider the valuable feedback from partners and stakeholders, including the COVID-19 Education Recovery Group?(CERG) . There is no fixed threshold for decisions to either increase or decrease mitigations, but instead a range of indicators are monitored. All adjustments to mitigations in schools, and other education settings, are made after very careful consideration of all available advice and continue to be kept under regular review in light of emerging scientific evidence.

The Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution and External Affairs and I met with the then Minister for Immigration Compliance and the Courts on 16 June 2021 to discuss the New Plan for Immigration. This was prior to the introduction of the Nationality and Borders Bill at Westminster on 6 July. Scottish Government Ministers have had no subsequent discussions with UK Government Ministers on the Nationality and Borders Bill.

The First Minister wrote to the Home Secretary on 26 July, setting out significant concerns about the implications of the Nationality and Borders Bill, including measures which propose to differentiate between refugees and treat them differently based on their journey to the UK and not their protection need.

I wrote to the Home Secretary in further detail on 1 September. That letter is available on the Scottish Government website: Nationality and Borders Bill: letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government to Secretary of State for the Home Department - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

The Scottish Government publish annual estimates of spend targeted at supporting low income households, with almost £2.5 billion invested to support low income households in 2020-21, including nearly £1 billion specifically targeted to children.

Full detail of this calculation, including the policies and funding streams included, are set out within the Tackling Child Poverty: third year progress report. This can be accessed via the link below:

Tackling child poverty: third year progress report 2020-2021 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

In light of increasing pressure on household budgets, as a result of the rising cost of living and £20 cut to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits, the Scottish Government have committed a range of further action this year.

This includes investing around £65 million to support around 500,000 low income households through £130 Low Income Pandemic Payments, to be made by the end of October; putting £130 million in the pockets of families through the Scottish Child Payment and Bridging Payments and making additional investment of around £21 million to double the December 2021 Carer’s Allowance Supplement payment for more than 91,000 people.

We are continuing to explore what more we can do to provide the support people need this winter and will announce plans in due course.

The National Transition Training Fund (NTTF) is being delivered through various sector-based projects which will have different application procedures. The data below sets out information on course participants in Year One as far as it is currently available.

In Year One of the NTTF, support for the Aviation sector was provided through Scottish Union Learning. Unite the Union developed a programme which continues this year to enable Aviation workers – many of whom were furloughed - to upskill to help support job retention. This provided a variety of training opportunities for ground and air crew.

In addition, Strand One of NTTF, which was managed by Skills Development Scotland, supported driver training, including Driver CPC, LGV with CPC and PCV with CPC.

In terms of NTTF college delivery, The college figures for 2020-21 are yet to be finalised as collection of college data only concluded on 12 October 2021 and still require to be quality assured before publication as Official Statistics in January 2022.

I have previously advised that a final report on NTTF Year One will be made available this year. As the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) will not publish data until January 2022, I intend to issue a report immediately after the SFC publication is released. I do however, intend to update Parliament in November on anticipated outturns.

Through our work to bring forward a Circular Economy Bill and develop a route map to achieving our targets to 2025 and beyond, we are investigating how further reuse and repairs could be encouraged and incentivised, including through more responsible production as part of our transition to a fully circular economy in Scotland.

We currently have no plans to amend the existing waiting times standards although recovering our NHS and improving waiting times for patients is a top priority for this Government.

In response to the pressures on NHS services caused by the pandemic the NHS Recovery Plan was launched on 25 August 2021. The Plan which is backed by more than £1 billion of investment, sets out the Scottish Government’s key headline ambitions and actions to be developed and delivered now and over the next 5 years. While recovery is the immediate task, the Plan is fundamentally about ensuring that the process of recovery focusses on alternative pathways of care that allow people to be treated sooner and closer to home .

The report Making Things Last: A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland set out that the reuse economy in Scotland has a yearly turnover of at least £244 million, supports over 6,000 jobs, reuses 89,000 tonnes of material annually, and provides opportunities for individuals to obtain high quality products at considerably lower cost than new. This data came from a baseline report( https://www.zerowastescotland.org.uk/research-evidence/scottish-reuse-mapping-sector-analysis-report ) which was used to inform support for reuse.

Zero Waste Scotland operate the Revolve certification scheme for second hand stores and internal analysis by them indicates that, based upon totals reported by the Revolve Network, the weight reused has more than doubled between 2017-18 and 2019-20.

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) sets the legal obligations to monitor and assess a range of chemicals in the water environment.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) monitors the water environment for a range of contaminants of emerging concern (including 4 antibiotics, 1 antidepressant, and 3 antifungal medicines) at targeted watercourses. Through the WFD watch-list prioritisation mechanism environmental quality standards for a number of pharmaceuticals are currently being developed by the EU. This includes antibiotic clarithromycin, painkiller ibuprofen, anticonvulsants and painkiller carbamazepine, anti-inflammatory diclofenac and estrogen medication EE2 in this study.

SEPA is working with partner organisations on the identification of chemicals of emerging concern in the environment, and is developing new analytical techniques that will allow it to screen environmental samples for a much larger number of chemicals, including a number of pharmaceuticals. This work will allow us to better understand the risks posed by pharmaceuticals in Scotland’s water environment.

In 2019 COPFS began to experience delays in the provision of toxicology reports from the University of Glasgow, the main contractor for this service. This was further compounded during 2020 due to the pandemic.

Once a toxicological report has been finalised, it is then considered by the pathologist(s) who conducted the post mortem, and thereafter a final post mortem report is issued to the appropriate team in COPFS, who require to review it in detail before the next of kin can be informed of the final cause of death.

Working with Glasgow University, COPFS put various measures in place to address both the backlog and the increasing number of new deaths requiring toxicological analysis. The measures included agreeing a new format of abbreviated report for some cases, and an Improvement Plan which set out weekly performance targets and ensured focused progression with both the backlog of cases and newly reported cases.

Successful implementation of the Improvement Plan in particular means that there is now no backlog of toxicology reports and toxicology analysis is being completed in the majority of cases within 8 weeks.

Since the start of the outbreak, Public Health Scotland (PHS) has been working closely with the Scottish Government and health and care colleagues to support the surveillance and monitoring of COVID-19 amongst the population. There is a large amount of data being regularly published regarding COVID-19. For example, the COVID-19 Education Surveillance dashboard is updated daily and published by Public Health Scotland. COVID-19 PCR test results in educational populations and settings are not broken down individually but are included as part of the wider community-wide surveillance in the PHS COVID-19 dashboard .

We are also reassured by PHS analysis on the risks to teachers when compared to similar working age adults. Analysis published in the BMJ shows that neither teachers, nor their household members, were at increased risk of hospital admission with COVID-19 when compared to similar working age adults from March 2020 to July 2021.