Chamber and committees

As I indicated earlier, the Scottish Government has now issued payments to around 3,500 farmers and crofters with a total value of around £33 million. Payments to the majority of farmers and crofters will continue throughout January 2016, with all final instalments being paid in April 2016.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-28621 on 2 December 2015. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

Data on attacks against ambulance, fire and rescue and accident and emergency personnel is not held in the format requested. Since 2009-10, and following the introduction of the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005, all of Scotland’s legacy police forces (now Police Scotland) have used a separate code for recording common assault in cases where the victim was an emergency worker. The number of cases for this code are shown in the following table.

It should be noted that the table will not include police recorded attacks on emergency workers which did not result in a common assault (for example a serious assault) as a recorded crime code will be used which doesn’t identify the occupation of the victim.

In terms of prosecutions and convictions, the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005 has provisions for a person who assaults, resists, obstructs, molests or hinders emergency workers when they are responding to emergency circumstances.

Assaults that happen outside of emergency circumstances, as specified in the Act, will not result in prosecutions under the Act, and these and those assaults on emergency workers which may result in other charges, such as serious assault or attempted murder, cannot be identified separately in the available statistics and so are not included. These numbers also relate only to those attacks which proceeded to court.

It is not possible to provide the detail requested regarding the breakdown of the type of emergency workers involved (under Section 1(3) of the Act), as this information is not held by the Scottish Government.

The question specifically relates to sections 1(1), 2(1), and 5(1) of the Act:

Section 1(1): Assaulting or impeding certain providers of emergency services.

Section 2(1): Assaulting or impeding certain emergency workers responding to emergency circumstances.

Section 5(1): Assaulting or impeding health workers in hospital premises.

The number of people prosecuted and convicted¹ in Scottish Courts for offences under the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005 Sections 1(1), 2(1) and 5(1) is given in the table below.

1. Where main charge.

Source: Scottish Government Criminal Proceedings Database.

Prior to the 2005 Act, offences against emergency workers, apart from the police, were not recorded separately, and so we are only able to provide data going back to 2005-06.

The Scottish Government has not provided any grants to Linlithgow’s Party at the Palace event and its organisers, nor has it been approached for funding.

Event Scotland supported the event through their national programme in 2015 where £10,000 was spent on marketing costs. The event was also promoted through the partner programme for the Year of Homecoming for 2014.

The Scottish Government has received no requests from representatives of Linlithgow’s Party at the Palace for meetings with ministers. There have been no meetings with Linlithgow’s Party at the Palace in a ministerial capacity.

Opinion polls:

(a) (i) The Scottish Government has not commissioned opinion polls during this period and therefore does not hold the cost information requested.

(b) (i) We are unable to provide information on opinion polls commissioned by Scottish Government agencies. This information is not held centrally and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

Focus groups:

(a)(b) (ii) It is not possible to provide cost information on the use of focus groups for either the Scottish Government or its agencies. Where focus groups are used in research they normally form one element of a programme of work and costs are not separately available.

The information being requested was first published in 2002 and was discontinued in 2009.

The 2002 publication includes data for the 2000-01 and 2001-02 school year. The link below to the Scottish Government website provides the annual publications for each year that the information is available:

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/School-Education/PubChildrenOutwithSchool

Illegal dumping or fly-tipping is covered by section 33(1)(a) and (6) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 which makes it an offence to deposit “controlled waste” unless the deposit is authorised by a waste management licence. The following table contains information requested in relation charges reported to the procurator fiscal for that offence for years 2013-14 and 2014-15. Information has previously been published for years 2002 to 2012 in answer to question S4W-19583 on 4 March 2014 and can be found at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx?SearchType=Simple&Keyword=flytipping&ExactPhrase=True&DateChoice=4&MSPId=4014&SortBy=DateSubmitted&ResultsPerPage=10.

Information is not held centrally on the number of people fined by their local authority, however Zero Waste Scotland has published some information on local authority fly-tipping fixed penalties in 2010-11 in its report Environmental Protection Act 1990, Part II and Part IV – Local Authority Monitoring Survey 2010/2011, available at:

http://www.zerowastescotland.org.uk/content/environmental-protection-act-1990-part-ii-and-iv-local-authority-monitoring-survey-201011

All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

Notes:

1. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) does not hold complete statistical data prior to the year 2002-03 and therefore cannot provide data for the years 1999-00 and 2000-01. COPFS records the number of individual charges reported to it, not the numbers of people containing a particular type of crime. A reported case can contain multiple charges of the same type against one or more offenders.

2. Instances of fly-tipping can also be prosecuted under sections 33(1)(b) and 87 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. However, other types of criminal act are also prosecuted under these sections. Accordingly, statistics in relation to these offences do not exclusively relate to fly-tipping and cannot be provided as part of this written answer.

While information on how many cleaning staff have been directly employed in each NHS board in each year since 1999 is not centrally held, information on the pre- Agenda for Change ancillary staff group from 30 September 1999 to 30 September 2006 is published by Information Services Division (ISD) Scotland and can be found in the following link:

http://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Workforce/Historic-Data/WFG01_HB_REG.xls

Information on the number of whole time equivalent staff working in hotel services from 30 September 2007 to 30 September 2015 is published by ISD Scotland and can be found in the following link:

https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Workforce/Publications/2015-12-01/Non-Medical_Trend_S2015.xls.

It is not yet possible to know what impact or lessons might be drawn from the pilots, given they have not yet been evaluated.