The vast majority of funding the Scottish Government provides to Moray Council is through the annual local government settlement, including funding for rural education needs. This funding is being provided by means of a block grant. It is the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them on the basis of local needs and priorities, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

Every local authority receives its fair share of the total funding provided to local government by the Scottish Government which is distributed using a needs based formula and takes into account a range of factors including the additional costs associated with delivering services such as education in rural communities. The distribution methodology is kept under constant review and agreed with COSLA on behalf of all local authorities.

The Scottish Government will publish Scotland’s first British Sign Language (BSL) National Plan - as required by the BSL (Scotland) Act 2015 – later this year. The plan has been developed alongside Deaf and Deafblind BSL users and includes a range of actions designed to increase the teaching and learning of BSL in schools as part of the 1&2 languages policy. We are also working with the General Teaching Council for Scotland to increase the number of Deaf people becoming registered teachers.

We have previously provided funding through the Scottish Association of Sign Language Interpreters to train two cohorts of Deaf tutors to teach BSL at higher levels, and to provide practical support to graduates of the course to help them to practice as BSL tutors across Scotland.

NHS Boards and Health & Social Care Partnerships are responsible for the planning and provision of services, including workforce, that meet the needs of their local populations.

NHS Grampian, in response to recruitment difficulties across the Board, have been working on different delivery models to provide unaltered paediatric services at Dr Gray’s Hospital.

Whilst NHS Grampian continue to develop and consult on delivery models that will ensure a sustainable, permanent solution, the in-patient paediatric services at Dr Gray’s will be withdrawn on an interim basis to ensure the safety of patients. This change took effect from 18 August 2017.

NHS Grampian will continue to work closely with their partners in Health and Social Care Partnerships, Scottish Ambulance Service, NHS Highland and community stakeholders to manage this interim change.

I have been assured by NHS Grampian that the 24 hour, 7 day, Emergency Department (A&E) service for paediatrics will not be affected by these temporary measures. Outpatient services will continue as normal and consultant led obstetric maternity services are will remain unchanged.

We want Scotland to be an open, accessible place for autistic people. It is crucial that autistic people are able to access social and leisure activities, cinemas and other public places and that reasonable adjustments are in place to enable them to access their community.

Equality law recognises that bringing about equality for disabled people may mean changing the way in which services, including those provided by entertainment venues such as cinemas, are delivered. This is the ‘duty to make reasonable adjustments’. This duty, which is anticipatory, ensures that a disabled person can use an organisation’s services as close as it is reasonably possible to the standard usually offered to non-disabled people.

The Scottish Strategy for Autism provides a framework for localities to improve the understanding of autism, improve access to community services and build capacity in communities to ensure services are able to make the reasonable adjustments necessary to break down barriers faced by autistic people. We are pleased to see that Cinema’s across Scotland are identifying autism friendly screenings as a priority. The Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) was the first cinema in the United Kingdom to win the coveted National Autistic Society’s Autism Friendly Award for their work with children and adults, joining other public places including the Scottish Parliament, Aberdeen Football Club and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in obtaining this award.

In 2016 the National Autistic Society, working with Aberdeen Health and Social Care Partnership, launched Aberdeen as Scotland’s first autism friendly city. This will increase public understanding of autism, help facilities and services in the area become more accessible, and develop new groups to meet the needs of autistic residents.

The Scottish Government is committed to improving the lives of people with autism through the Scottish Strategy for Autism.

There is no legal requirement placed upon Local Authorities to have specific autism partnership boards. It is up to the local system how they organise themselves around care group interests, and many have maintained specific working groups or planning groups covering all the main care groups, including for autism. We do require Integration Authorities to have in place a strategic planning group (SPG) and locality arrangements.

The Scottish Strategy for Autism published jointly with COSLA provides a framework for localities to work across sectors to deliver local autism strategies. Each locality is expected to have produced an autism plan to suit the needs of their own local autistic population.

How localities have approached this varies, some have multi-agency steering groups responsible for monitoring the delivery of local autism plans with an autism lead. Some are needs based approaches through neurodevelopmental pathways. The National Coordination project engages and supports localities in the implementation of these local strategies; however delivery of these action plans varies across Scotland.

As medical radioisotopes are not special fissile nuclear material and are not subject to international nuclear safeguards, their availability should not be impacted by the UK’s exit from Euratom.

However, the Scottish Government is committed to maintaining robust international standards where we have devolved responsibility, including for radioactive substances, and we look to the UK Government to ensure the same for reserved matters. We shall continue to work, including in cooperation with the other three administrations in the UK, to assess the impacts of exiting from the Euratom treaty, and to mitigate any negative effects for Scotland.

The Scottish Government's preference is for membership of Euratom to continue. If this is not possible, as a result of the UK Government's negotiations on taking the UK out of the EU, then we would favour a form of associate membership of Euratom that maintains close joint arrangements on the widest range of issues, including external assurance and inspection.

A Step-by-Step Guide on developing consultations, which includes advice on ensuring that consultations are accessible, is available on Saltire (the Scottish Government intranet) and advice is also provided in the Scottish Government publication Principles of Inclusive Communication: An information and self-assessment tool for public authorities (2011).

We have provided funding from the Equality Budget of £336,000 (2017-18) to support the Include Us All – Scotland’s Inclusive Communication Hub, and will actively promote it across the public sector as stated in A Fairer Scotland for Disabled People (2016).

Equality issues are regularly highlighted by articles on Saltire, and a range of equality learning events has been made available for officials including the promotion of inclusive communication across the organisation and a series of British Sign Language (BSL) Awareness raising seminars.

The Port of Cromarty Firth is not the competent authority for issuing licences for ship to ship oil transfers. That role is reserved to the UK Government under the Merchant Shipping (Ship to Ship) Regulations 2010, as amended. If invited to be a formal consultation body by UK Ministers on future ship to ship licence applications in Scottish waters, the Scottish Government will respond appropriately, following careful consideration of the application, its implications for the marine environment and any concerns from local communities.

The Scottish Government, or any other authority, do not issue permission to drive under green lights. Anyone wishing to do so must follow the Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations 1989.

These Regulations are clear that green lights are only to be used by medical practitioners registered with the General Medical Council with either full, provisional or limited registration. Green lights should only be used for the purposes of an emergency.

Green lights to not permit drivers with any specific exemptions from road traffic law but are simply a way of asking other road users, as a courtesy, to let them though.

The Scottish Government does not currently have any plans to request any amendments to these reserved regulations.