Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government does not hold this information centrally, however each NHS Board will hold information on dental capacity for their respective areas.

The Scottish Government is committed to improving access to NHS dental services, which is why we have included several areas in the Scottish Dental Access Initiative grant (SDAI). This financial grant enables dentists to open a new or expand an existing dental practice in areas where there is a particular and protracted problem with patient access to NHS dental services.

The areas currently included in the grant are:

• Dalmellington and Patna within NHS Ayrshire and Arran;
• Kelso and Berwickshire (exc. Eyemouth) within NHS Borders;
• NHS Dumfries and Galloway;
• Auchtermuchty within NHS Fife;
• Banff, Fraserburgh, Huntly and Moray within NHS Grampian;
• Isle of Bute, Islay and Jura, Lochgilphead, Mull and Iona, and Tarbert within NHS Highland;
• NHS Orkney;
• NHS Shetland;
• NHS Western Isles.

Officials are in regular contact with NHS Boards about areas which may benefit from having the SDAI and the areas can be updated as and when required.

We have recently updated the Recruitment and Retention Allowance payments to independent dental contractors providing NHS General Dental Services.

The Scottish Government have invested over £50 million in ChargePlace Scotland, Scotland’s public charging network, which now has more than 2300 publicly available charge points, over 63 thousand member registrations and over 1,770,000 successful charge sessions recorded in the last 12 months.

Responsibility for repair of charge points lies with the host (also known as the ‘owner’) who procured and installed the charge point. The role of CPS is to advise hosts of faults as they arise.

Most faults on the network are transient and in the majority of cases require no physical intervention. This means that a high proportion are closed down swiftly and effectively. Overall reliability across the CPS network is typically very good and on average 95% - 97% of charge points are operational each day.

The subject of correspondence cases varies. These are not recorded or categorised by reason or by local authority area. Each piece of correspondence is dealt with on its own merit, given careful consideration with appropriate actions taken at the time of responding.

In 2021 we received 124 pieces of correspondence relating to ChargePlace Scotland and 80 in 2022.

We are currently in the process of evaluating minimum unit pricing (MUP) as a whole over its first five years of operation. Public Health Scotland will be producing a final report on MUP in 2023, which will inform our evaluation report which will be laid in Parliament and published in 2023.

Work on reviewing the level of MUP has started as part of our overall evaluation, as the impact of MUP is connected to the unit price. We are evaluating the impact of MUP at the current price of 50 pence per unit and will assess what level MUP should be set at going forward, if MUP is to continue. It is important that we have a robust evidence base to support any decision on a change in the level of MUP.

Part of this work includes a Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment which will look at the likely costs, benefits and risk of any proposed legislation. This will include how any changes to MUP will interact with any potential changes to excise duty.

The Scottish Government has no functions concerning the legal protections in place to protect disabled people from disability discrimination during the employment-seeking process. These functions are reserved to the UK Parliament, as set out in Section 5 of the Scotland Act 1998. More information is available on the Scottish Parliaments website( https://www.parliament.scot/about/how-parliament-works/devolved-and-reserved-powers )

From January 2022 to September 2022 the Social Housing Net Zero Heat Fund has committed grant support for the retrofit of 330 social housing properties across Scotland. The fund offers grant support of up to 50% of the total eligible costs of the project. Projects in the South Scotland region have been awarded an average grant of £5,668 per property.

The requested information on how many nurses have (a) joined and (b) left the NHS in each year since 2007 is not centrally available.

Information on how many Nursing & Midwifery staff have (a) joined and (b) left the NHS since 2012 can be found in the following link: NHSScotland workforce | Turas Data Intelligence

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-10987 on 27 September 2022. 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

SQA delivered a priority appeals process for learners requiring the outcome of an appeal for immediate progression to university, college, training or employment this year. These appeals were completed on 5 September and students informed of the outcomes.

Further industrial action has been averted following SQA’s unions accepting a pay offer on 23 September, and SQA is currently reviewing the remaining appeals with the aim of completing these by the end of October.