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The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) publishes statistics covering freight volumes for Prestwick Airport, Glasgow Airport and Edinburgh Airport at: .

The decision to cease our funding to Voluntary Action Scotland (VAS) at the end of their current grant period in September 2018 was informed by both the independent evaluation into VAS and the TSIs (published December 2016) and by a subsequent year of engagement during which we held extensive discussions with VAS, TSIs and wider third and public sector partners.

Our overall resource allocation to support TSIs and the network is not being reduced. We are retaining the resource currently supporting VAS for the TSI network, to create flexibility to respond to ambition and collaborative approaches, and to continue to support network support, knowledge and practice sharing.

Our priority is supporting TSIs to deliver against an ambitious vision that puts them at the heart of local decision making and ensures they can support and respond to the needs of local communities.

The following table details the funding from the Scottish Government’s core Third Sector budget provided to Voluntary Action Scotland, SCVO and the 32 Third Sector Interfaces for 2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17 and also funding from the Scottish Government’s core Third Sector budget covering a period of 18 months from 1 April 2017 to 30 September 2018. This does not include funding for specific projects across Scottish Government. Funding beyond 30 September 2018 will be confirmed following agreement of the draft Scottish budget.

Creative Scotland’s Board has reviewed decisions on the Regular Funding Network and announced on 6 February 2018 that a further 5 organisations will now receive regular funding, including the Dunedin Consort.

Decisions on the Regularly Funded Organisations are a matter for Creative Scotland. Details of the criteria and assessment process used are published on the Creative Scotland website .

A breakdown of the loan funding provided to Prestwick Airport by financial year is included in the following table.

Ìý* the figure for 2017-18 represents potential loan funding as this is the amount allocated within the budget.

The Scottish Government does not routinely hold skip stopping information at route level.

The member will be aware that an independent review of train service performance is underway which will propose steps for improvement, and aim to reduce the number of incidents of skip-stopping.

The ScotRail Franchise contract does not contain a commitment for ScotRail to routinely publish information on skip stopping.

However my officials at Transport Scotland will work with ScotRail to review the level of information that can be published.

ScotRail’s performance is reported by railway industry periods (13 periods in a year) therefore the information is contained below in this format,

Over the last year the number of ScotRail services subject to skip-stopping was 5,980 trains and this equates to 0.78 percent (part of period 10 falls in the 2018 calendar year).

The member will be aware that the independent review underway will propose steps for improvement, and aim to reduce the number of incidents of skip-stopping.

I refer the member to the answer to question to S5W-14218 on
9 February 2018. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at .