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The Scottish Government has committed to undertake a review of the Welfare Fund, including examination of its funding, administration, promotion, take-up and accessibility. The detailed scope, delivery and timescales of the review will be determined in due course. We intend to commence it during the first year of the new parliament.

At 31st March 2021 there were 7816 directly employed staff within the core Scottish Government and 52 operated offices, however all staff continued to work from home where possible during this time.

Headcount and number of offices split by local authority are provided in the following table. Please note that staff may work from locations other than Scottish Government offices.

Scotland’s Baby Box Managing Agent, APS Group (Scotland), has continued to work with suppliers since the start of the programme to reduce the use of single use plastic in the Baby Box where possible. Currently, only items which require individual wrapping for safety or hygiene purposes are individually wrapped. This includes the baby wrap and the mattress which are packaged to ensure the important safety information is not missed and the teether which is packaged for hygiene purposes.

All clothing is delivered to APS Group (Scotland) as multiples in single protective outers (rather than individually wrapped) for protection in transit. The protective packaging included in the Baby Box is made from 50% recycled paper and is FSC accredited. Other packaging such as cardboard outers, is also recyclable.

We will continue to evaluate how Scotland’s Baby Box is helping families and continue to monitor how it can be improved. We will keep the contents under review and adapt these to meet the needs of babies and parents. This will certainly include removing single use plastics wherever possible.

At its heart, Scotland’s Baby Box strongly signals our determination that every child, regardless of their circumstances, should get the best start in life by ensuring that every family with a newborn has access to essential items needed in the first six months of a child’s life. It’s a simple idea which helps to tackle deprivation, improve health and support parents during the first few months of their child’s life.

To ensure that Scotland’s Baby Box is delivered in as cost effective manner as possible, the box and its contents are bought in bulk aligned to Scotland’s birth rate to maximise efficiency savings and the operation and delivery of the Baby Boxes is streamlined to provide the best value for money while maintaining the highest quality of service. Any customisation of the box and its contents would result in a cost increase to the overall programme.

The Baby Box balances practical items, such as the clothing, changing mat, digital thermometer and bath & room thermometer with items designed to have a positive impact on parent-child interaction such as books, a baby wrap and a play mat to support attachment, early learning and play. The current box and its contents have been shaped by the evaluation of the initial pilot and ongoing feedback from health professionals and families.

The Scottish Government continues to monitor the Baby Box programme and has commissioned an independent evaluation of Scotland’s Baby Boxes which will be published later this year.

The timetable that we have set to fund all deferrals from August 2023 is realistic and ensures that the roll out of 1140 hours of funded early learning and childcare to all eligible children from August 2021 is not put at risk.

To progress implementation, the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) have agreed a under which local authorities will pilot early implementation of this obligation in 2021-22 and 2022-23. The local authorities who are piloting this approach from August 2021 will be: Angus; Argyll and Bute; Falkirk; Scottish Borders; and the Shetland Islands. The Scottish Government has committed £3 million to support the pilot authorities this financial year.

We have committed to working to increase the number of authorities implementing the obligation fully or partially from August 2022, to further increase our evidence base ahead of the legislation coming into force the following year.

The reusable nappy voucher was first included in Scotland’s Baby Box in April 2019. The number of nappies claimed each year was as follows:

2019 – 4912

2020 – 7192

2021 – 3128 (this is up to 02-07-2021)

The Scottish Government has consistently called for the furlough scheme to remain in place for as long as it is needed to support businesses as we move through recovery. The UK Government should make it clear to businesses and workers, well in advance of the furlough scheme ending, what further assistance will be in place to support jobs and necessary labour market transitions in sectors that are most deeply impacted by Covid. Provisional figures from HMRC show at 31st May, 173,100 jobs (7% of eligible jobs) in Scotland were being supported by the Job Retention Scheme. This is a slightly lower than the UK (8%) and a fall of 102,600 from April when 11% of eligible employments in Scotland were on the scheme.

Whilst these figures show those on furlough are reducing, there is still a significant number of jobs which continue to be supported by this scheme. The Scottish Government is doing all it can to protect Scotland’s economy and ensure that as many people as possible on furlough keep their jobs. Our ambitious 10 year National Strategy will drive Scotland’s economic transformation, helping the country recover from COVID-19 and transition to a net zero economy, prioritising investment in the industries of the future and delivering new, good and green jobs.

During the period 1 January 2021 until 9 July 2021, CalMac Ferries Ltd had over 74,130 scheduled sailings to operate. From these, there were 62 instances where a vessel from the CalMac fleet was removed from service to allow unscheduled maintenance or repair work to be carried out at a cost £6,630,344. This represents only 0.08% of those sailings. Scheduled annual overhauls are carried out when vessels are not in service.

In many instances when a vessel is removed from service, a minimal number of sailings are affected.

The annual teacher census collects information on the basis of teaching posts, not people. Some teachers hold multiple posts which may mean the information held does not represent the nature of an individual teacher’s employment contract or the overall working pattern of that teacher.

Employment type in the following table relates to each post that a teacher holds, rather than their employment contract. This means that a teacher may have a permanent employment contract with the local authority but be recorded with a temporary employment type for an individual post.

The Scottish Government is committed to expanding the universal provision of free school lunches to include all primary school children, during school term-time, by August 2022.