The Scottish Government is committed to delivering the Promise, supporting families to stay together in a safe and loving environment, and reducing the amount of children who are taken into care. Fundamentally, Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) is the Scottish Government's approach to supporting children and young people. It supports families and helps to prevent family breakdown by making sure children and young people can receive the right help, at the right time, from the right people. GIRFEC is a strengths-based approach and is underpinned by principles that include working in partnership with families, and providing an early offer of support to improve outcomes for children, young people and families.

The Scottish Government also recognises more needs to be done to transform the system of holistic support that is provided to families. The Programme for Government 2021 commits to investing at least £500 million over the life of this Parliament to create a Whole Family Wellbeing Fund. This will enable the building of universal, holistic support services, available in communities across Scotland, giving families access to the help they need, where and when they need it. Furthermore, our ambition is that from 2030, we will be investing at least 5% of all community-based health and social care spend in preventative whole family support measures that will enable us to continue to Keep The Promise.

In addition, the Scottish Government continues to deliver a range of policies aimed at supporting the specific needs of children, young people and families. For example:

• National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland (published 2 September 2021), which places greater emphasis on prevention and support and working with children and families to reduce the risk of harm.
• Development of a Framework to improve holistic family support for families affected by a loved one's drug or alcohol abuse.
• £120 million through our Recovery and Renewal fund to address the mental health impacts of Covid-19 including a range of actions addressing relationship support.
• Funding to Relationships Scotland, who provide a number of services including family mediation, relationship counselling and “parenting apart” classes.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information centrally. However, the number of patients who are registered with a NHS dentist can be found on Public Health Scotland at: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/dental-statistics-registration-and-participation/dental-statistics-registration-and-participation-statistics-as-at-30-september-2020/ .

As set out within the Tackling Child Poverty third year progress report, published on 23 June 2021, it is estimated that the Scottish Government invested almost £2.5 billion to support low income households in 2020-21. The member can find the breakdown of this investment on pages 67-69 of the report using the following link:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/tackling-child-poverty-third-year-progress-report-2020-2021

Charges for National Qualifications have remained unchanged since 2012-13 despite changes in costs. While charges contribute towards the cost of awarding National Qualifications they do not cover the full costs. In addition, 2020 and 2021 late entry fees have been waived and there have been no charges for appeals. There are therefore no plans to reimburse National Qualifications payments.

For 2021, SQA estimates that the costs of providing certification for national qualifications was £41.7m, while income from local authorities, colleges and independent schools is expected to be £30.5m. The remaining cost is covered by SQA’s grant in aid budget from the Scottish Government.

The Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 provides local authorities with a discretionary power to set up workplace parking licensing (WPL) schemes.

As set out in our Climate Change Plan Update, we remain committed to plans to take forward policy consultation in advance of drafting regulations and guidance to enable local authorities to implement WPL schemes, should they wish to do so.WPL schemes have the potential to encourage the use of more sustainable travel modes, reducing congestion, improving air quality and reducing emissions.

The Scottish Government is currently consulting on the regulatory framework and supporting guidance which will underpin local authorities’ WPL schemes, with a view to this being in force in 2022. The consultation is available here: https://www.transport.gov.scot/consultation/workplace-parking-licensing-consultation-on-regulations-and-guidance

It will then be for local authorities to decide whether they wish to implement WPL locally and to shape proposals to suit local circumstances. Local authorities will be required to undertake a public consultation and impact assessments before implementing a WPL scheme.

The Scottish Government is committed to increasing our knowledge of the possible links between neurodegenerative disease (including dementia) and sports-related brain injury.

We recognise a call to establish a working group on this issue and we will respond directly in due course as part of our on-going consideration of this issue.

A University of Glasgow study on lifelong health outcomes in former professional footballers, especially in relation to dementia, was published in 2019 and contained evidence of a possible increased risk of dementia for professional ex-footballers. Further work is underway to establish why footballers and rugby-players may be at greater risk and we will also give full consideration to the report published in August led by Dr Willie Stewart.

We remain in close contact on these issues with experts at the sportscotland Institute of Sport and the Chief Medical Officer at the Scottish FA and will work with partners, including PFA Scotland, to carefully consider emerging evidence on former footballers developing dementia.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on the number of Neighbourhood Watch schemes before 2012. In 2012, there were approximately 1,500 Neighbourhood Watch Schemes in Scotland and the most recent figures to June 2021 show that there are now 1,976 Schemes registered.

Since March this year, 36 new Watches have been registered. Additionally, there has been an increase in the number of people signing up to receive free ALERTS, both as individuals and as points of contact for organisations, with total current figures at 26,832 individual registrations.

The Scottish Government does not hold the information requested. The data we receive from Police Scotland for production of the Recorded Crime in Scotland National Statistics is a simple count of the numbers of crimes and offences, for each local authority, which the police have recorded and cleared up. We do not receive further details on the characteristics and circumstances of individual crimes, therefore we are unable to identify how many crimes of vandalism were in relation to graffiti. Time series information on the total number of crimes of vandalism recorded by the police is available from the Recorded Crime in Scotland National Statistics (a link to the latest publication is found here: Recorded Crime in Scotland, 2019-2020 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) ). The 2020-21 Bulletin will be published on the
‎ 28 September 2021 here: Recorded Crime in Scotland - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) .

This information is not held centrally.

As part of our ongoing review of existing land value capture mechanisms, we commissioned independent research on the value of developer contributions in Scotland. The research, which was published in July 2021, estimated that the value of contributions agreed by Scottish authorities in 2019-20 was approximately £500m.

However, the research highlighted a lack of consistency between authorities in terms of the way information on planning obligations is recorded at the local authority level.

Scottish Ministers have powers under the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 to require the publication of, and annual reporting on, planning obligations entered into by planning authorities. The implementation of these powers forms part of the Scottish Government’s planning reform programme, much of which has been delayed by the pandemic. Nevertheless, we remain committed to introducing new reporting requirements for planning obligations in order to improve transparency around their use. We are currently in the process of updating the implementation programme for the remaining aspects of the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 and will publish this in due course.

A University of Glasgow study on lifelong health outcomes in former professional footballers, especially in relation to dementia, was published in 2019 containing evidence of possible increased risk of dementia for this group. Further work is underway to establish why footballers may be at greater risk and we will give full consideration to the report published into this subject in August 2021 led by Dr Willie Stewart.

We remain in close contact on these issues with experts at the sportscotland Institute of Sport and the Chief Medical Officer at the Scottish FA and will work with partners, including PFA Scotland, to carefully consider emerging evidence on former footballers developing dementia.

We are funding a new body, Brain Health Scotland, for five years , to embed brain health within clinical services and across public health. As part of this, we are exploring links between pilot brain health clinics from next year and the feasibility of additional national work focussing specifically on brain injury.