Warmer Homes Scotland remains open for referrals and has an allocated budget of £65m in 2024-25, its highest ever budget level. Anyone that is considering applying to the scheme should contact Home Energy Scotland in the usual way.

The Scottish Government has introduced a waiting process for people who have been accepted onto the Warmer Homes Scotland programme due to the scheme’s success and high levels of demand. This is a necessary step taken to ensure that people who have been identified as eligible for the scheme can still receive assistance.

We understand that some customers will be disappointed with the waiting times. However, our managing agent Warmworks, continues to work hard to minimise the impact of this process, keeping customers informed throughout and making sure they are supported and receive regular communication every step of the way.

Warmer Homes Scotland is a demand-led scheme and it is important that we take the necessary steps to ensure the scheme remains within its allocated budget. In instances where someone has a broken boiler or no heating, Home Energy Scotland will explore with the customer if any suitable alternative crisis funding options exist.

I can advise that South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) are working closely with Bhagat Holdings in regard to the former Pinneys Site in Annan.

With apologies, SOSE need a little more time to report fully on the latest position and I shall be in touch as soon as I have this information.

The Scottish Government’s Tobacco and Vaping Framework, published in November 2023, committed to taking action to reduce vaping among non-smokers and young people.

Alongside the Framework, we launched the Take Hold marketing campaign which successfully increased parents, carers and young people’s awareness of the harms and risks of nicotine addiction from vaping. New resources were also launched on Parent Club, NHS Inform and Young Scot on vaping.

The Scottish Government is committed to aligning with a four-nation approach towards banning the sale and supply of single-use vapes.

In order to align with timescales recently announced by the Welsh and UK governments and provide consistency across the four nations, the Scottish Government will lay legislation to amend the coming into force date in the Scottish regulations banning the sale and supply of these vapes recently passed by the Scottish Parliament from 1 April 2025 to 1 June 2025.

We continue to work closely across the four-nations on the development of the UK Tobacco and Vapes Bill to ensure that it reflects Scotland’s public health ambitions and remain hopeful this will be reintroduced as soon as possible.

Scottish Forestry is reviewing its approach to assessing Forestry Grant Scheme applications for grey squirrel control. This has been necessary because the Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrel project is no longer able to provide assistance with the assessment of grant applications. This process will be concluded shortly and we hope to be able to continue the processing of grant applications. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the FGS grey squirrel control grant has been undertaken will be shared as part of an overall FGS evaluation report when finalised.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) does not hold the information requested. NHS Boards submit patient level records to the national waiting times datamart but the information provided on the clinical priority of a referral is not available for reporting as it isn’t quality assured. This is due to there being no agreed national definition on what constitutes an urgent or routine referral.

Statistics relating to the waits patients experience for a new outpatient appointment at a consultant-led clinic are published up to 30th June 2024 and can be found using the link https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/29135/newop_aug24.xlsx. The median and 90th percentile waits for cardiology in NHS Dumfries and Galloway, as well as a breakdown of the length of waits, can be found using the dropdowns in the 1.6 Table tab:

Please note, PHS does not publish the longest wait because this statistic can often reflect the wait of one of a very small number of patient records where there are inaccuracies in the information recorded at the time the data were extracted, and consequently the wait that can be derived is erroneously long.

To minimise this risk, PHS publishes the 90th percentile statistic (the length of time within which 9 out of 10 patients are seen) to provide a more reliable indication of the longest waits that are occurring, as this statistic is not susceptible to these outliers.

Since 2016, the Scottish Government has provided funding to ensure that adult social care workers, delivering direct care in commissioned services, are paid at least the Real Living Wage (RLW). This pay uplift has been extended to workers delivering direct care to children and young people in commissioned services for the first time this financial year. We have transferred £230 million to Local Government to deliver this £12 minimum wage for adult social care workers and a further £20 million has been transferred to support the uplift for children’s social care workers.

The Scottish Government is proud to be leading the way in increasing minimum hourly rates of pay for the social care workforce among the four UK nations.

We are working in partnership with key stakeholders – including trade unions, providers and COSLA – to introduce sectoral bargaining for the commissioned adult social care sector. Once developed and introduced, sectoral bargaining will encourage improvements in pay, and terms and conditions, and also take into consideration the varied roles and responsibilities across the sector.

The Scottish Government and our partners are also taking action to promote social care roles as an attractive career, support routes in to the sector, and enable career development.

In collaboration with COSLA, we established the Joint Social Services Taskforce (JSST) to address priority workforce issues. One of the JSST Workstreams led by the Scottish Social Services Council and NHS Education for Scotland, is the development of a new Career Opportunities Tool to map the range of roles and careers on offer in social care, and potential pathways open to new and existing staff.

The Scottish Government relies on advice on prostate screening from the UK National Screening Committee (UKNSC).

The UK NSC does not currently recommend population screening for prostate cancer – this was last reviewed in November 2020. As part of this review, the use of the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test to identify prostate cancers was considered.

The PSA test identifies the levels of PSA in a male’s blood, however, levels can be raised for a number of reasons and doesn’t confirm the individual has prostate cancer. As a result, while the PSA test can be one helpful tool for GPs when assessing a patient, the test is not definitive enough to detect prostate cancer which may require treatment, can falsely find people who do not have prostate cancer and can also miss some cancers. Therefore, the UK NSC determined that the test would not be a suitable test for a national expansion.

It is anticipated that the UK NSC will review their recommendation for prostate screening in 2024-25, and will take account of any new evidence as part of that process.

Scotland’s agricultural land and farming sector have a critical role to play in Scotland’s food security, producing food for consumption in Scotland, and increasing our economic resilience through exports of food and drink worth £7.6 billion in 2023.

National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) Policy 5 (Soils) sets out that development proposals on prime agricultural land, or land of lesser quality that is culturally or locally important for primary use, as identified by the local development plan, will only be supported in limited circumstances. This includes for the generation of energy from renewable sources where there is secure provision for restoration and the layout and design of the proposal minimises the amount of protected land required.

All development proposals are subject to site specific assessments.

The service the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) provide is based on a medical and mobility requirement and the Patient Needs Assessment (PNA) is designed to identify the patients who have the following needs. All patients requesting patient transport are taken through the PNA.

SAS support patients who:

• Require a high level of mobility assistance
• Need specialist ambulance equipment to help them mobilise
• Require oxygen and are unable to self-administer this during transportation
• Have a communicable disease with which travel on public/community transport or in a taxi is not advised, and do not have access to appropriate private transport
• Have undergone a procedure and the potential side effects of the treatment require the assistance of a trained ambulance crew for the return journey
• Have been clinically determined by an HCP as at risk from using alternative transport due to being immunocompromised and do not travel routinely by other means
• They have a cognitive or sensory impairment that requires oversight to safely travel, and no escort is travelling
• Have dementia, mental health conditions that means they are unable to make their own way with alternative transport and could be a risk to themselves or others

More information on Scheduled Care Service can be found on the SAS website at www.scottishambulance.com including information on some other alternative transport providers within the local area. Alternatively, patients/representatives can contact the attending hospital who may be able to provide additional advice on options for travelling to and from any future hospital appointments and if eligible, patients may be able to claim help with travel costs.