The Scottish Government has unveiled its budget for 2024-25.
There will be a £6.3 billion investment in social security benefits, which will be increased in line with inflation and more than £19.5 billion for health and social care.
There will also be record funding for local authorities and frontline police and fire services.
There is £13.2 billion for frontline NHS boards, with additional investment of more than half a billion – an uplift of over 4 per cent.

The Mayor of London has proposed an increase in council tax, as a response to a lack of government funding for the police, fire and transport services.
The Mayor said that the Met Police is currently with the greatest period of sustained pressure on its resources since the Olympics in 2012, with a large increase in the number of marches, protests and national events taking place in the capital. However, the government has not provided additional funding.

Detectives from the Met's Counter Terrorism Command have made two arrests in an investigation into an explosion in Sidcup where a ULEZ camera and surrounding property.
The Met’s Counter Terrorism Command is leading the investigation due to its expertise in incidents involving explosives and made the two arrests on Monday 18 December.

The government has proposed a funding package worth over £64 billion to support councils in England to deliver frontline services.
The provisional local government finance settlement makes available almost £4 billion more funding for councils in England in 2024-25, which is an increase of 6.5 per cent on 2023-24.
The Funding Guarantee introduced last year will be maintained to ensure every council in England sees at least a 3 per cent increase in Core Spending Power before any local decisions are made around council tax.

Cardiff Council has revealed that air quality data for 2022 shows that the city's air is getting cleaner compared with pre-pandemic levels.
However, the council has acknowledged that more work needs to be done.
There are a variety of different air quality monitoring stations across the city that monitor a range of pollutants, including Nitrogen Dioxide(NO2)and Particulate Matter (PM10and PM2.5).
Each local authority in Wales has a legal duty to monitor pollutant levels and report the findings and mitigation measures, to Welsh Government every year.

Devon County Council has revealed that more than 21,000 supermarket vouchers, worth over £900,000, have been sent to low-income families in Devon to help them buy food over the winter school holidays.
Every child in the county who is eligible for free school meals during term time has received a £45 voucher to spend during the Christmas holiday and February half term break to replace the meals they would have had at school during the day. This is the equivalent of £15 per child per week of the school holidays.

The Mayor of London has launched his winter rough sleeping campaign.
The campaign urges Londoners to help end rough sleeping in London.
City Hall is working with charity partner TAP London this winter to raise money for frontline homelessness services in London.
Londoners have donated over £700,000 to nominated rough sleeping charities since 2017.

The government have brought forward a target to move 22,000 government roles out of London to 2027 instead of 2030.
Recently released figures show that 16,061 roles have already been moved out of London, which exceeds to target to move 15,000 roles by 2025.

The UK has reached a new milestone in EV driving, with recently released stats showing that over 50,000 public chargepoints have been installed across the country.
Statistics supplied to the Department for Transport by Zapmap reveal that there are 44% more public chargepoints (52,602) than this time last year.
The announcement means that the UK is on track to meet the target of 300,000 public charge points by 2030.
The zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate requires 80 per cent of new cars and 70 per cent of new vans sold in Great Britain to be zero emission by 2030.

The third round of the Brownfield Land Release Fund 2 has opened for bids.
The money will be used to deliver thousands of homes on council-owned brownfield sites through up to £80 million to transform neglected land.
Councils are now able to bid for a share of the final round.
It is hoped the latest round will release land for over 8,000 new homes by March 2028, create thousands of jobs and transform underused sites into places where people want to live and work.