Chamber and committees

Under the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988, a tenant with a short assured tenancy or statutory assured tenancy can refer a case to the Private Rented Housing Panel (PRHP) for a determination on market rents. The PRHP is an independent judicial body and we do not hold information centrally on the number of cases it considers each year. Information on rent cases can be found in the PRHP's annual reports published here: https://www.prhpscotland.gov.uk/who-we-are/annual-reports.

The Scottish Government introduced mandatory gender pay gap reporting for listed public authorities with more than 150 employees in 2012. The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 requires listed public authorities to publish information on the percentage difference among its employees between men’s average hourly pay (excluding overtime) and women’s average hourly pay (excluding overtime), every two years from April 2013.

In March 2016, the Scottish Government amended The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 to lower the threshold for listed public authorities to report their gender pay gap, from those with more than 150 employees to those with more than 20 employees. The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2016 came into force on 18 March 2016.

The Scottish Government is fully committed to tackling poverty and inequality, including in-work poverty. The First Minister's Independent Advisor on Poverty and Inequality, Naomi Eisenstadt, raised in-work poverty as a priority in her report, Shifting the Curve, when it was published in January 2016. We are already making progress with a number of the specific recommendations made.

One recommendation was that we build on Living Wage Accreditation. We have set a new target of 1,000 accredited employers by Autumn 2017. We have also increased funding for the Scottish Living Wage Accreditation Initiative to £300,000 to achieve this and to target larger employers.

The report also recommended encouraging pay ratio disclosure as a way of tackling pay inequality. We have already ensured public authorities with more than 20 employees publish their gender pay gap every two years and provide an equal pay statement every four. We will extend this legal duty to include disability and race pay gap reporting.

We included information on family friendly and flexible working in the business pledge in direct response to the recommendation to make family flexible working more explicit within the business pledge. We have also planned a joint Scottish Business Pledge/Family Friendly Working Scotland event for National Work Life Week, which will run from 3-7 October 2016.

We know that to promote inclusive growth and to provide opportunities for all, we need to encourage a fair and inclusive jobs market and promote regional cohesion.

We will do this by focussing on creating more jobs, better quality jobs and jobs that work for every individual in terms of skills, pay, security, and prospects.

The Scottish Government does not offer funding for the purposes of accessing private tutors.

This information is not held centrally.

The Scottish Government does not offer guidance on the use of private tutors.

The Scottish Government does not advocate the use of private tutors. This is matter for parents and local authorities. We recognise that children affected by poverty can face barriers to accessing education. That is why the Scottish Government has prioritised closing the educational attainment gap between children from the most and least deprived areas. To support this ambition, we will allocate an additional £750 million over the lifetime of this parliament. The funding will be available to schools and authorities to provide additional support to children affected by poverty. A key priority for schools and authorities is to encourage and support parents and families to engage with their children’s learning and to help them access the extra support and advice they need.

Despite the significant cuts that Westminster has imposed on the Scottish Budget, local government funding has been given a degree of protection with core funding protected and new money provided for additional responsibilities in each of the four years (2012-16). The total settlement for 2016-17 still amounts to over £10.3 billion and, taking into account the addition of £250 million to support the integration of health and social care, as a percentage of estimated total revenue expenditure, this year’s reduction in local authority overall estimated expenditure is less than one per cent. It is the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them on the basis of local needs and priorities, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

I believe, therefore, that such a marginal reduction should have minimal impact on poverty rates as Scotland's councils should be able to address these challenges from a healthy base.

In 2016-17 Glasgow City Council is receiving its fair share of total funding which this year will amount to almost £1,344 million.

The vast majority of this funding is provided by way of a block grant and it is the responsibility of each local authority to manage their own budget and to allocate the total financial resources available to them on the basis of local needs and priorities, including any funding to combat homelessness, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

The vast majority of the funding the Scottish Government provides to Glasgow City Council is through the annual local government settlement, including all of the funding for most of the services requested.

All of Scotland's 32 local authorities, including Glasgow City Council, make annual service level expenditure and income statistical returns to the Scottish Government and these are published on the Scottish Government's website and are available via the following link: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Local-Government-Finance/PubScottishLGFStats