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Transport Scotland is considering the recommendations from the Strategic Transport Projects Review 2 as part of their work on the Islands Connectivity Plan and subsequently will consider how best those recommendations can be reflected within the contract specifications for our lifeline ferry services.

Ensuring businesses have access to the finance they need to invest and grow is a priority for the Scottish Government. Information on the range of funding available to Scottish businesses, including employee owned businesses can be found on https://findbusinesssupport.gov.scot .

As committed to in the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care, we undertook a data collection exercise to inform future decisions about workforce investment in 2022. This has informed actions in the new Cancer Action Plan for Scotland 2023-2026 including establishing and delivering the Oncology Transformation Programme. It also includes and action to ‘Complete a workforce review of key professions in cancer services, including modelling, to inform recruitment, training and allocation’.

The Scottish Shape of Training Transition Group (SSoTTG) is currently undertaking its annual review of medical training numbers and will be making recommendations to Scottish Minsters later this year for expansion taking place in 2024.

The statistics recently released show that last year Scotland created around 63% of all new woodland within the UK. Scotland has by far the most ambitious woodland creation targets in the UK and despite the challenges of Brexit, Covid and winter storms, landowners have created around 51,000 hectares of new woodland in the past five years or around 102 million trees.

To help meet future woodland creation targets the Scottish Government announced an action plan in June designed to speed up the woodland creation application process and encourage more landowners to get trees in the ground.

A Scottish Forestry Summit, with industry leaders and land management bodies, will be held later in the year to secure agreement on getting planting levels back on track.

As part of the package of new measures, Scottish Forestry will invest £1 million into training Scottish Forestry staff over the next two years to speed up the woodland creation application process. It will work closely with industry bodies and groups so that the training on developing and implementing woodland creation projects is expanded.

Scottish Forestry will also increase the level of support for smaller scale woodland projects, to help counter recent inflationary pressures and implement technical improvements and process enhancements to speed up applications.

The CHFS3 Project Team is a recently formed team which sits alongside the Ferries Unit within the recently restructured Ferries Directorate at Transport Scotland. Staffing for the CHFS3 Project Team was formalised in April 2023.

(a) The team consists of permanent staff members tasked with developing and procuring the next CHFS contract.

(b) The CHFS3 Project Team currently consists of 11 FTE members, with 2 FTE posts still to be recruited.

(c) Staffing costs for the team are included within the wider staffing budget of Transport Scotland and are not identified separately.

The Scottish Government has assessed the evidence presented by the independent Drug Deaths Taskforce, as well as the extensive evidence internationally on drug law reform, and today publish our response 'A Caring, Compassionate and Human Rights Informed Drug Policy for Scotland'. This outlines the need to consider urgent changes to our laws to support a public health approach to drug dependency.

Through our National Mission we are already working within existing powers to reduce drug deaths, and while there is more to do, we need every part of the system to support change and better outcomes. At present the legislative framework we operate within does not fully support our evidence-based public health approach. It is for this reason we explore alternatives, based on the best available evidence, which could be implemented whether through refinements to existing legislation, or through constitutional change, whether further devolution of powers or independence. We continue to stand ready to work with the UK Government to support the implementation of these policies.

A Caring, Compassionate and Human Rights Informed Drug Policy for Scotland is available here - https://www.gov.scot/isbn/9781835210093 .

Questions regarding day-to-day operational matters of Historic Environment Scotland, including how much it spends on promoting its sites, are best answered directly by Historic Environment Scotland.

I have asked Historic Environment Scotland to respond directly to the member with a reply to his question in writing.

I continue to regularly discuss the Properties in Care, and their management, with Historic Environment Scotland. I have held no discussions about the permanent closure of sites.

The Scottish Government usually publishes local authority analysis using a three year pooled data set to ensure sufficient sample sizes.

As set out in the most recent Scottish House Condition Survey 2021 Key Findings Report, (available at Scottish House Condition Survey 2021 ) there will be no Local Authority publication relating to the 2019 to 2021 three year period for two reasons.

Firstly, due to the Covid 19 pandemic the SHCS survey was suspended and there is no data for 2020. Secondly, the data from the 2021 external+ SHCS is not directly comparable with that for earlier years, due methodological differences, and therefore it would not be appropriate to combine it with the data for 2019 (or earlier) to produce a multi-year analysis.

As three years of data is required to produce local authority analysis there will not be a return to the usual approach for producing local authority estimates until the 2024 wave of the SHCS has completed and published in early 2026.

The most recent estimates of local authority fuel poverty rates are for 2017-2019 and are available at: Scottish House Condition Survey: Local Authority Analysis 2017-2019 , however these estimates pre-date the energy crisis.

Scenario modelling estimates that under the Ofgem energy price cap of £2,074 for a typical dual fuel households, from 1st July 2023, shows there will be around 850,000 fuel poor households in Scotland (34%) an increase of around 230,000 households and 9 percentage points since 2019. This analysis was based on one year of data so cannot be used to produce estimates at the Local Authority Level. However, the large increases in the fuel poverty rate will be reflected across each Local Authority in Scotland.

The Workforce Short Life Working Group set up through the Managed Service Network for Children and Young People with Cancer (MSN CYPC) has now concluded and no future meetings are planned.

As agreed by the MSN Board a Workforce Planning and Development Group will be established to review the pharmacy and Allied Healthcare Professional lead roles which were proposed as part of the 2020 workforce plan but have yet to be recruited to. This Group will also focus on education and training for the wider MSN CYPC community.