 The next item of business is an urgent question from Paul Sweeney. To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports following comments made by the Home Secretary in the House of Commons today that local authorities across the UK, including in Scotland, will be obliged to accommodate the increasing number of unaccompanied child refugees crossing the English Channel. Cabinet Secretary, Shona Robison. That is of major concern to the Scottish Government, to COSLA and to local authorities. The Home Secretary wrote to all local authorities in July asking for more placements to be made available, and Scotland answered that call by creating a Scottish rota, which is supported by the vast majority of councils and COSLA. This rota has been in operation since October and is working well. It is ensuring that Scotland meets the target set by the Home Office, but it does that in a manner that prioritises the welfare of children, supports their needs and provides them with the best possible chance to integrate into our society. The proposals set out by the UK Government are a retrograde step that will create needless bureaucracy and do little to support the welfare and wellbeing of these highly vulnerable children. I made my views known to the UK Government in a short call with the minister and will be following that up in writing later today. I have spoken to COSLA, who are as concerned as I am at the way that this has been badly handled by the UK Government. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response. Let me put on record my absolute disgust at the way that vulnerable people, many fleeing war and persecution have been treated by the Conservative Government simply for seeking a safe place to live. We are dealing with unaccompanied children here, and it is important to be clear on the detail. I have a number of questions that I would like the cabinet secretary to answer if she can. Could she provide details of how many local authorities across Scotland meet the requirements set out by the Home Office in today's announcement and how many children are likely to be coming to Scotland? How long the Scottish Government envisages that they will be in Scotland and what work the Scottish Government is doing to make sure that all local authorities have adequate provisions to provide the necessary safeguards to those children while they are in Scotland? What type of accommodation will they be living in? It cannot be the case that they are put in hotels, surely, or unsupervised accommodation, so I would appreciate if the cabinet secretary would at least explicitly roll that out in her answer. Paul Sweeney raises a number of issues. Clearly, one of the reasons for the rota was the ignition that some Scottish local authorities are very small and do not necessarily have the infrastructure to support unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. That puts at risk the support that such a vulnerable child has. There are good reasons for why the Scottish rota was put together so that the children arriving in Scotland can go to the most appropriate place. I can tell the member that the rota would have seen, if it had been allowed to continue, 45 of every 650 children arriving in the UK coming to Scotland. That is one more than they are saying they are mandating Scotland to take. On the call yesterday, they said that Scotland's local authorities would be mandated to take 44 children, so we would be more than meeting the requirements but doing that in a way that supports the children. Since October, when participation commenced by the Scottish local authorities, 19 placements have been made. That is in addition to the 22 children who arrived under the NTS scheme from January to September. In addition to that, there are already around 200 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children that are already cared for by Scottish local authorities. On the type of accommodation, again, that is an important point. We want children to become, they are going to be here obviously for a long time, so we want them to become settled and settled accommodation as quickly as possible. It is no one's interest for people to be staying in hotels, and we recognise the challenges of that, which is why the Scottish Rota is so important, because it is the best way of making sure that appropriate accommodation is made available for the children arriving. Paul Sweeney. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I thank the Cabinet Secretary for her response and particularly the detail on the Scottish Rota, although I would appreciate if some additional information potentially could be followed up in writing. It is right that the Scottish local authorities are providing accommodation to those children, and I sincerely hope that the Scottish Government will do everything it can to ensure that their time in Scotland will be one where they are treated with dignity, care and compassion that they so will clearly need. After all, they are children who have seen unimaginable horror. I just want to be specific, however, on the funding issue, because while it is right that all local authorities in Scotland are playing their part through the Rota system, they are cash-strapped and, frankly, do not have the money available to top up the £143 being made available by the UK Government per child, per night. Can I ask the Cabinet Secretary to confirm that the Scottish Government, regardless of how much it is going to cost, will provide any additional funding that local authorities require on top of that £143 specified? That is about making sure that kids are safe, and, of course, we cannot put a price on that. I would strongly urge the Government to show compassion and make that commitment here now, because it is certainly not something that we are going to see from the Conservatives. First of all, I think that we share COSLA and local governments' concern that the national transfer scheme does constitute a new financial responsibility on local authorities. The first call is on the UK Government to provide the additional funding that is required. The higher daily rate of £143 for funding contributions to local authorities now applies to those transferring through NTS, and it is a small step in acknowledging some of the costs, but it is only available once a child is in the care of the local authority. It does not recognise the steps that the local authority requires to take in advance of that placement. Obviously, to help with that, the Scottish Government has already provided £0.5 million to local authorities to help with the care of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arriving in Scotland, and we will continue to speak with local authorities on COSLA about that going forward. The first call is on the UK Government to step up and meet the full costs. I will take some supplementaries first from Miles Briggs. 7,900 children in Scotland are currently in temporary accommodation and 9 per cent increase on 2019, cabinet secretary. Seven councils across Scotland are saying that they are likely to breach Government's unsuitable accommodation order. What support will the Government be providing? I do not think that we have heard an answer to Paul Sweeney's question on this accommodation. Are hotels going to be part of that process? To Miles Briggs, there have been a number of pressures on temporary accommodation. Not least we have just been through a Covid situation where obviously temporary accommodation use has increased for all the understandable reasons. We are working with local authorities to address the unsuitable accommodation order issues, as the member is aware of. We want children to be in accommodation suitable for children, but perhaps his first port of call should be his colleagues in the UK Government to say that we have a system here in Scotland that is actually made for the needs of Scotland to receive children that need to be supported because they are very vulnerable. All we are asking is whether the Home Office allows the Scottish Rota to continue. We play our part. We will take our share of those very vulnerable children, but please let us do it in a managed proper way rather than in a way that the Home Office is saying they are going to, which could in theory mean that children being passed from one local authority to another around Scotland. That is not what we want to happen. I hope that the member will support us in lobbying the Home Office to do the right thing here. I was shocked to hear the Home Secretary, Prudie Patel's comments that Scotland has not played their part in asylum dispersal when this country has a proud record of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers. Does the cabinet secretary agree that the Home Secretary must apologise for his misleading claim and believe that asylum dispersal, both children and adults, must be done in a humane and dignified way and with the proper funding from the Home Office to provide the vital support that the people need? I agree with that. I am struggling to understand the remarks from the Home Secretary yesterday, which are extremely disappointing. Over the years, we have constantly made this point to the UK Government, but it has fallen on deaf ears. Scotland has more than played its part, and Glasgow is an authority throughout the UK that takes the most asylum seekers part of the dispersal programme. It is not correct the comments that she made and does a great disservice to local government and the efforts that they are making. Most of all, I think that it attempts to use asylum-seeking children and asylum seekers more generally as a bit of a political football to attack the Scottish Government. That issue is too important for that. We want to reach a sensible agreement with the UK Government and the Home Office, and my plea today is for them to listen to what not just what the Scottish Government is saying but what local authorities are saying. We want to give asylum-seeking children in particular the best support here in Scotland. Please allow us to do it in a way that we know will work best for them. I thank Paul Sweeney for raising this important issue, highlighting the human rights that are at stake here and the appalling approach that is taken by the UK Government. Can the cabinet secretary say what, if any role the Scottish guardianship service will have in this process and what we can do to support local authorities to work with the third sector that has been doing this work for so many years? Finally, what we can do, if anything, with our limited powers to ensure that lone children are not separated from their families in the first place? To Maggie Chapman on the issue of the Scottish guardianship service, I will write to her on that specific point. The role of the third sector more generally has always been important for asylum seekers and refugees. It is through the support of the third sector that they receive most of their support and we are keen to support the third sector in doing that. There were some very strong voices from the third sector yesterday in response to the Home Secretary's comments, which portrayed the Home Secretary as not giving a proper account of the experience of asylum seekers coming here to Scotland. I think that the third sector is pretty clear on their views on that matter. I will write to the member on the specifics of her question.