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This year, we allocated £123 million to NHS Boards to improve the quality and delivery of mental health and psychological services, including neurodevelopmental services, for both adults and children and young people.

Baselining this funding within NHS Board’s core budgets from 2025-26 will allow NHS Boards and IJBs greater stability and improved longer term financial planning, increasing their ability to support longer-term sustainable improvements and reform.

The Scottish Government is also providing more than £16.2 billion in financial year 2025-26 for Health Boards to deliver front line and other key services.

We are continuing to work closely with NHS Boards and other partners, including local authorities and the third sector, to develop and redesign services to improve access to diagnosis and support.

For example, we know that 78% of autistic adults supported have reported improved wellbeing as a result of accessing community support services funded through our £1 million Autistic Adult Support Fund. The £15 million we have invested annually in local authority community-based mental health supports has also benefitted many neurodiverse children and young people.

The following data provides the requested breakdown. Please note, for workforce purposes, the Scottish Government People Directorate defines a contractor as temporary workers, typically brought in under a service contract which has been let to an organisation to deliver a specific product.

A contractor is one subset of our wider Contingent Worker classification.

A Contingent Worker is defined as non directly employed workers that are engaged in any capacity for the Scottish Government, such as contractors, inward secondment and temporary agency workers.

Please also note that workforce data is held within DG areas rather than by Ministerial portfolios.

Headcount of Contingent Workers recorded as Contractor by DG

Spend on locum psychiatrists is managed locally by NHS Health Boards. It is our expectation that Boards should always be seeking to secure best value whenever they enter into arrangements regarding use of locums.

We recognise that the use of temporary staff in an organisation as large and complex as NHS Scotland will always be required to ensure vital service provision. However we are taking forward work in partnership with NHS Health Boards, overseen by two national oversight groups, to agree measures designed to reduce our reliance on agency staff, with a view to filling more shifts with staff in either NHS substantive or bank roles.

To address specific challenges in the recruitment and retention of permanent psychiatrist posts in Scotland, we have established a Working Group which is actively considering locum usage and complements the work ongoing nationally. The working group will make a series of recommendations and is due to report to Ministers in Spring 2025.

The Scottish Government established the Psychiatry Recruitment and Retention Working Group as committed in the Mental Health Workforce Action Plan (November 2023) to address recruitment and retention challenges facing psychiatry in NHS Scotland.

The working group is actively considering the pipeline of trainee doctors as well as issues such as the use of locum staff and how we can encourage and support applications to permanent positions within NHS Health Boards. We also continue to invest heavily in our future consultant workforce and have created additional training places in psychiatry.

Representatives from the Royal College of Psychiatry in Scotland and the Senior Medical Managers in Psychiatry Group are critical partners in this work.

The working group is due to report to Ministers with recommendations in Spring 2025.

Published national statistics on CAMHS waiting times captures children who meet the CAMHS criteria. Children who require neurodevelopmental support are not reported in these statistics unless they have co-morbid mental health issues. We do not currently collect data on length of waits for neurodevelopmental services centrally.

However, the Scottish Government are working closely with NHS Health Boards and Local Authorities to improve services and support for children and young people and their families and will continue to ensure long waits are appropriately addressed, as well as continue to provide tailored support to NHS Health Boards.

Our National Neurodevelopmental Specification places an expectation on NHS and Children’s Services to work together to provide the support required by children and families, which may include assessment, diagnosis or other intervention. The Specification makes clear that support should be put in place to meet the child or young person’s requirements when they need it and should not be dependent on a formal diagnosis.

This year we have provided health boards with £123 million to support improvements across a range of mental health services, including neurodevelopmental services. We have also provided local authorities with over £65 million since 2020 to fund community-based mental health supports and services for children and young people aged 5-24 (26 if care-experienced) and their families, including supports for neurodiverse children and young people.

The Scottish Government does not hold FTE data on contractors. Information on the headcount of contractor staff whose information is captured in the Human Resources Management Information System statistics are available on the quarterly published statistics on Scottish Government workforce. ().

Local Authorities are democratically accountable to their local communities for the service outcomes they deliver. As independent corporate bodies, local authorities are responsible for managing their own budgets and allocating the total financial resources available to them on the basis of local needs and priorities in line with their statutory obligations and a small number of jointly agreed national priorities.

The Local Government Benchmarking Framework (LGBF) is a high-level benchmarking tool designed to support senior management teams and elected members to ask questions about key council services. The LGBF, which is run by the Improvement Service on behalf of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers (SOLACE) (Scotland), helps councils compare their performance against a suite of efficiency, output and outcome indicators that cover all areas of local government activity.

All new policy commitments or changes to existing policy, that have a financial impact on local government, must be approved through the formal financial governance process which requires agreed recommendations from the joint Scottish Government and COSLA Officers’ Settlement and Distribution Group and political agreement from Scottish Ministers and COSLA political Leaders.

The Scottish Government also publish the Scottish Local Government Financial Statistics (SLGFS) annually that provides a comprehensive overview of financial activity of Scottish local authorities based on authorities audited accounts.

VAT is a reserved power of the UK Government. Under the Barnett formula the Scottish Government is not entitled to a proportion of revenues raised by the UK Government under reserved powers. Changes to the Block Grant are calculated by reference to UK Government spend in devolved areas.

The UK Government had initially indicated that funding raised from the removal of the VAT exemption on independent schools would be ring-fenced and applied to the budget for the Department of Education in England to increase teacher numbers in England.

Under this arrangement the Scottish Government would effectively have received a population share of the total funding raised under the Barnett formula.

Following discussions with HM Treasury we have now been advised that there is no ring-fencing being applied to this funding stream by the UK Government. While additional funding was applied to the Department for Education as part of the UK Government’s Autumn Budget, on which Barnett consequentials were received, we cannot confirm the extent to which this has been funded by the removal of VAT on independent schools.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-34982 on 26 February 2025. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at /chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers

The Scottish Government has taken a progressive approach to the overall arrangements for Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, prioritising support for first-time buyers and home movers while raising vital revenue to support public services.

The Scottish Fiscal Commission has forecast that increasing the rate of the Additional Dwelling Supplement will raise an additional £32m in 2025-26. The Scottish Fiscal Commission assume that half of those Additional Dwelling Supplement transactions which do not proceed will be replaced by first-time buyer and home mover transactions in 2025-26 and that this will increase to three-quarters from 2026-27 onwards.

The priorities set out in the Tax Strategy will enable us to deliver tax policy which considers the whole tax system, informed by a programme of evidence, evaluation and engagement.