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The original policy intent of the powers under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 was to support local decision making around non-domestic rates reliefs. Local authorities are independent bodies, and it is for local authorities themselves to consider whether to use those powers. However, the Scottish Government includes information on these powers in its issued to local authorities annually, and routinely works with councils and the Institute of Revenues Rating and Valuation to ensure those powers are clearly understood.

Under Part 11 of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, local authorities have very broad powers to reduce or remit any non-domestic rates bill for a property in their area. This part of the Act came into force on 31 October 2015.

Before using these powers, the local authority must take into consideration the council’s expenditure and income, as well as the interests of council tax payers. The local authority must also ensure that any use of the powers complies with obligations including those under the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and other international commitments.

In regards to part A of the question, there is no definitive list of closed care homes. The Care Inspectorate publish information relating to ‘Service Cancellations and Registrations’ in their quarterly statistical reports. The most recent version was published on 9 May 2025, which can be accessed via the following link:

This includes “care home services for older people, children & young people, mental health, alcohol & drugs misuse, learning disabilities and respite services.” The number of services that have been cancelled are available in the cancelled services column in the publication table.

It is important to note that in some cases the services listed as cancelled may have been re-registered under a different business name and care service number.

This data does not provide a breakdown to local authority or regional level, this is not available.

As regards part B of the question, no data is available on the number of residents affected by cancelled services. For more information we would suggest contacting Health and Social Care Partnerships to request this data for each area.

Data on full-time equivalent (FTE) secondary teachers by main and other subject taught is available in the Teacher Census Supplementary Statistics, here:

Information is not held on the subjects offered by individual schools as schools may be able to offer a subject even if they do not have a teacher for that subject in the staff census, for example through school-school or school-college partnerships.

Using the data published from the ‘Annual Report on Procurement Activity in Scotland’ the following table provides spend from the last available five years, broken down by supplier location and size. These figures are derived from the Scottish Procurement Information Hub - Scottish Government’s spend analytics shared service.

Public Procurement Spend : Supplier Location and Supplier Size Spend

Transport Scotland provides reimbursement to bus operators in Scotland for providing free bus travel to those eligible through the National Concessionary Travel Schemes (NCTS). Reimbursement is paid to operators at a level which aims to ensure they are left financially no better and no worse off as a result of their participation in the schemes, and is therefore not considered as a subsidy payment.

Details of total operator revenue over the past 10 years, including passenger revenue and concessionary travel reimbursement can be found in Scottish Transport Statistics tables 2.8 and 2.9, available at:

I have asked Teresa Medhurst, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), to respond. Her response is as follows:

The health and wellbeing of those in our care is of critical importance; we not only recognise, but are tackling, the risks posed by illicit substances within our establishments.

Preventing the introduction of illicit substances is not only important to the health and wellbeing of people in custody, but also to the establishments’ wider safety and security.

SPS continue to look at a range of tactical and technological measures to keep illicit substances from being introduced into prisons.

The tables below show the drug finds each month in both HMPs Greenock and Kilmarnock between January 2021 and May 2025:

Data are available on the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) share of businesses, jobs and turnover. These estimates, sourced from the Businesses in Scotland 2024 publication, are shown in the following table.

Table 1: SME share of businesses, jobs and turnover – Scotland – 2019 to 2024

The Scottish Government publish official workforce statistics on a quarterly basis. The figures shown below are for December 2016. The latest data is available at .

The data presented details workforce by contractual location – and includes staff home location for those on a home working contract. This is in line with the data submitted on a quarterly basis to the cabinet office for the Quarterly location survey of civil service staff.

The following table provides details of the working location of directly employed Scottish Government staff, split by Local authority, Full time/Part time working pattern and Permanent/Temporary status.

Scottish Government - Directly employed workforce headcount, December 2016

The number of prosecutions in Scottish courts where the main charge was under section 2(1) of the Air Weapons and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2015 since it came into force on 20 December 2017, to 2022-23, is noted below. Criminal proceedings data was most recently published in December 2024.