Chamber and committees

All Audit Scotland's recommendations on Transport Scotland’s ferry services, including those related to value for money, are currently being considered. The Scottish Government has a strong track record in securing value for tax payers from investment for transport services, including ferry services. Arrangements for the paused tender for the Gourock-Dunoon town centre Ferry Service will be announced shortly.

As indicated in the reply to S5W-18681 on 20 September 2018, there are services in place in Scotland to allow farmers to arrange for the collection of their plastic waste. The burning of some types of biomass waste and , under certain conditions, animal carcasses, will still be permitted.

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

The ban does not extend to all types of agricultural waste. The burning on farms of some types of biomass waste and, under certain conditions, animal carcasses, will still be permitted. However, the burning of plastic waste on farms will be banned.

A list of plastic waste service providers is available on the Zero Waste Scotland website https://www.zerowastescotland.org.uk/resource-management/farm-plastic-recycling . In addition, detailed advice for farmers is available on the SEPA website at: https://www.sepa.org.uk/regulations/waste/agricultural-waste/burning-on-farm-waste/ .

Recycling service providers already provide services to island communities, including Bute and Orkney and they have indicated that they plan to significantly extend their collection area to cover other areas as farmers and crofters move into compliance and start to demand their services. A transition period until 1 January 2019 has been agreed in order to allow this to happen. Initial feedback from providers following the recent announcement has shown a marked increase in interest in recycling services from farmers. SEPA is working closely with NFUS and local authorities to monitor the situation as the ban takes effect.

We do not expect that there will be any additional financial costs to be borne by the Scottish Government as a result of the ban on the burning of most types of agricultural waste.

Scottish Water's new leakage cycle time reporting system has been fully effective since 2016. Scottish Water report that from the data easily available the longest repair time on record is 119 days. Issues which may delay repair include the need to sample and trial digs or deal with access issues. Scottish Water need to plan each repair efficiently which includes road notices, network rezoning, customer notifications etc to ensure limited customer impact. Only 3% of all jobs take longer than 20 days to complete.

The average repair time has reduced over the last 3 years from 7 days to 3.96 days. Where the leak is impacting customer supplies, or causing the loss of significant water volume, it is repaired as a priority under emergency work.

Between 2008-09 – 2017-18 Scottish Water received over 111,450 customer reported leaks. Yearly totals are detailed in the following table.

Scottish Water report that according to its records all customer reported leaks on the network have been resolved by Scottish Water over each rolling 12 month period. Customer reported leaks last year accounted for around 60% of total leaks, the remainder were found by Scottish Water's leakage teams identifying underground unseen leakage. Scottish Water has achieved or beaten its leakage target (set independently by its economic regulator) for the past 7 years.

This is a complex landscape and we expect the review to submit its findings to the Scottish Government in the Autumn.

The £10 million Saltire Prize was established to accelerate the commercial development of wave and tidal energy technology. The Prize has helped draw international attention to the potential of marine energy, and sparked the interest of technology developers around the globe, and in doing so, put Scotland and its marine energy expertise on the map.

As the member is possible aware, the Prize has not been awarded, as the independent Saltire Prize Challenge Committee’s view was that, due to fundamental changes in availability of financial support available for renewable energy projects, and the lack of a 'route to market' for developers to pump-prime commercial scale developments, no competitor was in a position to meet the conditions of the Prize by the deadline of June 2017.

Redesign of the Prize, to better reflect the circumstances of the wave and tidal sectors and to ensure it continues to drive innovation and incentivise investment in Scotland, is currently being considered.

The costs to date for administering the Saltire Prize between 2012-13 and 2017-18 were published earlier this year and can be found at https://beta.gov.scot/publications/foi-18-01056/ . Over this period, of course Scotland has led the world in testing and demonstration of tidal and wave converter devices in Scotland's waters and to the establishment of EMEC, Orkney, as a recognised centre of expertise in ocean energy.

Scottish Water publishes statistics on leakage in its annual reports. The latest report for 2017-18 is available here http://www.scottishwater.co.uk/assets/about%20us/files/key%20publications/annualreport201718.pdf with leakage management reported on page 29.

Since 2006 Scottish Water has reduced leakage by 51% - see following table.