The aims of the Person-Centred Health and Care Collaborative are as follows:

Raise the profile of person-centred approaches to care across Scotland including staff health and wellbeing.

Develop and test a range of evidence-based interventions and approaches designed to improve person-centred care.

Focus on what can be done now to improve services.

Provide reliable opportunities to personalise support for every person all of the time.

Encourage sharing of ideas and approaches between people who use services and people who provide them.

Promote the use of approaches for obtaining feedback from people who use services.

Use feedback from people who use services to drive improvement.

Provide a framework to measure improvement.

Participating staff from across NHS Scotland will be able to demonstrate how they have introduced new approaches to health and care and how they are using feedback from people to identify and implement improvements to care. The Scottish Care Experience Survey Programme will also be a measure of change and improvement.

The Strategic Group on Women and Work was formed following the Women’s Employment Summit in September 2012. The first meeting was on 27 March 2013 with subsequent meetings held on 26 June 2013, 30 October 2013, 26 February 2014, and 7 May 2014.

The remit of the group is to:

Agree the range of actions and recommendations from the Women’s Employment Summit;

Agree priorities across each commission and the timescales for action and by whom;

Advise on actions to further address the challenges raised, in particular how those outwith the Government could support change, e.g. employers, the third sector, communities and education and training sector;

Monitor implementation of the agreed plans, reviewing progress and challenging inaction;

Agree the content of Ministerial reports to Parliament on progress; and

The group will meet 3 or 4 times a year.

This is a matter for Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS).

I am advised that HIS have published a correction to the report and the local report compendium. This can be accessed via the HIS website:

http://www.healthcareimprovementscotland.org/our_work/long_term_conditions/chronic_pain/where_are_we_now.aspx

(i) The UK Government provided £23.8 million for 2013-14 and 2014-15 to the Scottish Government for the Scottish Welfare Fund (SWF).

Scottish Ministers decided to use the full allocation from the UK Government to provide local welfare assistance and provided an additional £9.2 million of funding for both of these years. The total funding available for the SWF in each of these years is £33 million.

The UK Government also transferred funding for administration costs of just over
£5 million in 2013-14, falling to just over £4.6 million in 2014-15, while the Scottish Government has again provided additional funding to match the previous £5 million total.

Set-up costs in the region of £2 million were transferred from the UK Government in 2013-14 for the SWF.

(ii) Responsibility for information and advice provision rests with both the UK and the Scottish Government. There has been not been any transfer of responsibility in this regard in relation to the recent welfare changes.

(iii) The programme budget transfer from the UK Government was £328 million for 2013-14 and £320 million for 2014-15. The Scottish Government provided an additional £23 million in both 2013-14 and 2014-15 to assist with mitigating the
10% funding gap local authorities faced.

- The Scottish Government provided a one-off sum of £4.156 million to local authorities in 2013-14 for the set-up costs of the new Council Tax Reduction (CTR) scheme.

- The UK Government's funding for local authorities' administrative costs for 2013-14 (details can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/226452/s5-2012.pdf) was maintained as a single subsidy for both Housing Benefit and CTR, but was partially disaggregated for CTR only cases from 2014-15 with a transfer of £7.05 million to the Scottish Government. The UK Government continues to provide funding towards local authorities’ administration costs, but this is provided direct to local authorities and it is not possible to disaggregate to identify CTR separately.

I wrote to the Welfare Reform Committee on 2 May 2014 to advise them of our intention to introduce the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Bill in June 2014. A copy of the letter is available at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_Welfare_Reform_Committee/20140502_MB-MM_Scottish_Welfare_Fund.pdf.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-17591 on 29 October 2013. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

Yes, the Scottish Government expects everyone affected by the bedroom tax who applies for a discretionary housing payment to be awarded one.

The Scottish Welfare Fund comprises of Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

For Community Care Grants, £14.3 million was distributed between 1 April 2013 and 31 December 2013. Information on the distribution by local authority is published in Table 15 at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf/AprilDec2013.

For Crisis Grants, £3.7 million was distributed between 1 April 2013 and 31 December 2013. Information on the distribution by local authority is published in Table 16 of the publication.

Statistics on the Scottish Welfare Fund can be found at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf.

Funding levels for the Scottish Welfare Fund are based on historical spend by the Department for Work and Pensions. The budget for 2014-15 is detailed in the Supporting Document to the Budget (Scotland) Bill 2014-15 which was approved by Parliament on 5 February 2014. The planned budget for 2015-16 will be published in the Draft Budget 2015-16 in the autumn.

The Scottish Welfare Fund comprises of Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

The table below shows how many applications contained someone on a sanctioned benefit during the period 1 April to 31 December 2013.

For Community Care Grants, 31 applications in total contained someone who had been sanctioned. Of these 31, 12 applications were successful in receiving a Community Care Grant.

For Crisis Grants, 400 applications in total contained someone who had been sanctioned. Of these 400, 165 applications were successful in receiving a Crisis Grant.

The Scottish Welfare Fund guidance regarding sanctions changed in April 2014. The data in the above analysis pre-dates this change.

Statistics on the Scottish Welfare Fund can be found at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf