Chamber and committees

Currently there are no plans for a separate public inquiry into the alleged historic abuse at Fornethy House Residential School. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry has the remit to consider the extent to which institutions and bodies with legal responsibility for the care of children failed in their duty to protect children in care in Scotland from abuse, regardless of where that abuse occurred.

Delivery partners hold the ScotSpirit budget enabling them to book breaks for unpaid carers and low-income families with participating businesses from October 2021 to December 2022. Therefore, the budget is spent with business as and when breaks are booked and taken rather than a set number of voucher being available for issue.

Curriculum for Excellence does not prescribe specific approaches or pedagogies for any aspect of the curriculum including learning to read but in practice, systematic synthetic phonics and other phonics approaches are widely implemented across Scotland's classrooms.

We expect health and social care employers, including community pharmacies, to follow the guidance on managing staff with symptoms of a respiratory infection, or a positive COVID-19 test.

This specifies that if staff test positive for COVID/19, regardless of whether they have symptoms, they should not attend work for a minimum of 5 full days. If they work with patients or service users in face-to-face settings, they can return to work if they have had 2 consecutive negative LFD test results (taken at least 24 hours apart).’

The Scottish Government is proud to be increasing our International Development Fund by 50%, over this parliament, at a time when the UKG has reduced its bilateral programmes for the most vulnerable communities in the world by 53%.

Our first uplift towards that commitment to a £15 million per annum International Development Fund was introduced from April 2022, an additional £1.5 million this financial year, as announced in the Scottish Government Budget.

We have agreed a 1 year extension period with the majority of our cohort of competitively awarded Zambia and Rwanda projects (2017-22), to now take them also to a new finish date of March 2023. We are also discussing with our partner countries additional funding to support their sustainable recovery from COVID, including on areas like vaccine equity.

We are also currently considering our programmes in the light of the findings of our Review into our approach to International Development, working towards new Programmes commencing in 2023. We will provide further details to the Parliament in due course.

Zero Waste Scotland advises us that they aim to publish the next update of the Material Flow Accounts by the end of September 2022.

Myself and officials used a low cost carrier to travel from Scotland to Catalonia for the visit.

Travel is an essential part of official Government business and Ministers take their responsibility to travel sustainably very seriously and aim to use more sustainable forms of transport wherever possible.

A carbon emission levy is collected against air travel on a journey by journey basis. The levy aims to compensate for the carbon that our business travel generates. It raises funds that are put into projects that will remove the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon emissions levy is applied to all journeys undertaken by air as follows:

Domestic – £5 per journey

European – £6 per journey

International – £15 per journey

Zero Waste Scotland advises us that the steel research project will include four reports. These are:

• An update to the published carbon assessment comparing the impacts of exporting steel with recycling steel using an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) located in Scotland;

• A market analysis to estimate the size of the scrap steel market in Scotland;

• An economic analysis that examines the business case for an EAF in Scotland; and

• An assessment of the role of Scottish steel in the energy transition.

The intention is to publish the series of reports at the same time, however Zero Waste Scotland does not yet have a confirmed date for publication.

In 2022, under the Climate Justice Fund, the Scottish Government will launch programmes to support the three pillars of distributive, procedural and transformative climate justice. These were identified as priorities by the independent evaluation of the Climate Justice Fund, as well as via stakeholder engagement, as central to achieving effective and sustainable climate justice.

We are in the process of finalising the procurement process, with the programmes due to be launched in Summer 2022. Additional details, including eligibility criteria, will be published on ScotGov’s website shortly.

The Scottish Government recognises the importance of measuring post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infections, or long COVID, in Scotland. This is needed to help forecast and plan the provision of healthcare services for people experiencing long COVID.

Currently the best source of data about people with long COVID in Scotland is the monthly Office for National Statistics (ONS) reporting on ‘Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following coronavirus (COVID-19) infection in the UK’. The ONS survey sample is weighted to represent people aged two years and over living in private households in the UK. This contrasts with the ZOE COVID Symptoms Study, whose participants are self-selecting and are not necessarily representative of the whole population.

The most recent ONS monthly report, published on 6 May 2022, covers the four-week period ending 3 April 2022 ( Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following coronavirus (COVID-19) infection in the UK - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) ). It showed that in Scotland:

• An estimated 151,000 people (2.88%) of the private residential population, who had (or suspected they had) COVID-19, self-reported experiencing long COVID of any duration .
• An estimated 105,000 people (2.00%) of the private residential population, who had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least 12 weeks previously , self-reported experiencing long COVID.
• An estimated 64,000 people (1.22%) of the private residential population, who had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least 12 months previously , self-reported experiencing long COVID.

It is estimated that self-reported long COVID symptoms were adversely affecting the day-to-day activities of 107,000 people in private households in Scotland with long COVID of any duration, with an estimated 36,000 of these individuals reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been limited a lot.

Going forward, Public Health Scotland will lead on surveillance of long COVID. It is currently anticipated that this will be undertaken via the EAVE II study, described below.

The Scottish Government’s Chief Scientist Office has funded nine research projects designed to improve our understanding of the longer term effects of long COVID. Three projects focus on measuring the prevalence and symptoms of long COVID. All started in early 2021 and will run for two years.

LTE2015.pdf (scot.nhs.uk) ‘Developing and validating a risk prediction model for long COVID-19’. Undertaken by the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with Public Health Scotland, this research uses the EAVE II study, originally funded by the Medical Research Council ( An Introduction to EAVE II | The University of Edinburgh ). EAVE II used a pseudonymised patient dataset to track the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded across Scotland. This dataset will now be used to create a tool to identify people at greatest risk of developing long COVID. In the course of developing that tool, the research will generate data about the number of people in Scotland diagnosed with long COVID and their use of health services.

lte2006.pdf (scot.nhs.uk) ‘Defining and understanding the longer-term effects of COVID-19: a mixed methods study exploring the frequency, nature, and impact of ‘long COVID’ in the Scottish population’. Undertaken by the university of Glasgow, this study will identify how many people continue to be unwell, their symptoms, and how it affects their lives. Scottish adults who had a positive COVID-19 test, and a negative test comparison group, will be sent an SMS message inviting them to take part in the study. If they agree, they will answer questions about their health before and after COVID-19, and any effect on their lives, with the questions repeated at regular intervals.

LTE2008.pdf (scot.nhs.uk) ‘COVID-19: Tracking Persistent Symptoms in Scotland (TraPSS)’ – undertaken by the University of the West of Scotland. This project aims to improve our understanding of long COVID in the Scottish population, and particularly in people whose original symptoms were relatively mild. The current evidence describing the types of symptoms other studies have reported will be reviewed, and people will be surveyed at different stages of recovery to find out what kinds of persistent symptoms they have.