Chamber and committees

Public Health Scotland (PHS) officials began working with the Home Office on 8 June to secure access to the data on individuals arriving in the UK and residing in Scotland during self-isolation.

As the required security clearance allowing direct access to the Home Office database would take many weeks, and given the need to have the data as early as possible, PHS and Home Office agreed to develop a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which enables the Home Office to provide data extracts to PHS in line with data protection requirements.

The MoU was signed by PHS on 22 June and the Home Office on 24 June.

The current native woodland planting target is 3,000 - 5,000 hectares a year in the 2020 challenge for Scotland’s Biodiversity. The target will be reviewed in line with the new Biodiversity Strategy.

In the period since April 2017, over 4,000 hectares a year of new native woodland has been created.

The Places for Everyone programme received a grant allocation of up to £54.2 million in financial year 2020-21. £39.0 million of this has since been utilised to support the Spaces for People fund.

Therefore, £15.2 million is available for delivery of permanent active travel infrastructure through the 2020-21 Places for Everyone programme.

To date no management fees have been paid to Abellio ScotRail under the Emergency Measures Agreement (EMA) as this will be calculated at the end of the EMA term once a full reconciliation has taken place.

The Emergency Services Agreement (EMA) covers all the operating costs of the day to day operations of both Train Operating Companies that are not covered by revenue from passengers, and this includes rolling stock lease costs. A full reconciliation of all costs will take place at the end of the EMA term.

Transport Scotland has committed to publishing an update to the Rail Services Decarbonisation Action Plan in 2023. As part of the routine development work for all routes, the rail industry will engage with interested parties and updates will be provided when appropriate.

In the last 10 years the Scottish Government has invested around £1 billion in some 441 (track) kilometres of electrification and associated infrastructure improvements directly benefitting over 35 million passenger journeys each year.

This rolling programme of electrification has sustained a significant number of high value jobs within the rail industry.

As agreed with the Scottish Parliament, a snapshot of Level 4 budgets is published annually alongside the Budget.

Details of changes to Level 3 budgets were published in the Summer Budget Revision in May 2020 and further changes to these budgets will be published in the Autumn Budget Revision in late September.

Through our commitment to a long term rolling programme to decarbonise Scotland’s Railway we know that this will create more skilled and sustainable jobs in Scotland, providing a significant additional contribution to our economy.

Both the National Transport Strategy (NTS2) Delivery Plan and second Strategic Transport Projects Review (STPR2) were paused in response to the COVID-19 emergency. However, we remain committed to working with partners to publish a NTS2 Delivery Plan and to take forward the STPR2, albeit in revised timescales, to take account of the Covid-19 impacts in shaping our future transport system. Work has recently recommenced on both.

Regarding point (a) the first annual NTS2 Delivery Plan will be published online by the end of 2020. The Plan will set out the actions being taken forward by the Scottish Government to deliver the Strategy’s vision, priorities and outcomes for our transport system. The Delivery Plan will complement the actions to be outlined in the transport chapter of the Climate Change Plan update, which is due to be laid in Parliament in December 2020.

With regard to (b), we now intend to take a phased approach to STPR2, with phase 1 reporting in the original planned timescale, which will be within this parliamentary term. This will focus on recommendations which “lock in”, in transport terms, the benefits and travel behaviours of individuals and provide a step change in investment which supports the priorities and outcomes of the National Transport Strategy.

We currently envisage that Phase 2, which will complete the review, will report later in 2021.