Scottish Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie has today called for the Scottish Government to scrap testing of pupils in P1 and spend the money on air filters for classrooms instead.

His call comes as a letter to the Scottish Parliament's education committee revealed that a new contractor has been brought on board to deliver Scotland's standardised national assessments in literacy and numeracy, with the cost to the taxpayer expected to be £17 million over five years.

The Federal Conference Committee (FCC) met on Saturday, 15th January to start its work on the final agenda for Spring 2022 Conference, which will be taking place virtually via the Hopin platform.

If you haven't yet registered for Conference, I would recommend doing so here.

We've had a few departures from the FCC in the last few months and welcomed two new members. Jennie Rigg ceased being the English Party's Representative to the FCC and Jenni Lang stepped down as the Scottish Party Representative after becoming the Convenor of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. I would like to place on record our thanks for their service to the FCC, they will be missed, and we would like to wish them all the very best for the future. We welcomed Matt McLaren as our new English Party Rep and Paul McGarry as our new Scottish Party Rep to the committee.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today (January 18th) urged the Health Secretary to take "immediate measures" as Public Health Scotland's newly published statistics showed that only 67.4% of A&E attendances were seen within four hours. This is the lowest percentage ever recorded since this publication began in February 2015.

The headline "two new MPs so far in this Parliament" is a welcome one. Winning, especially winning with record swings, is what we all want.

Underneath the headline is a lot of hard work, plenty of tough decisions, and a drive to improve. We should all be thankful to our activists, staff and supporters.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today (January 18th) urged the Health Secretary to take "immediate measures" as Public Health Scotland's newly published statistics showed that only 67.4% of A&E attendances were seen within four hours. This is the lowest percentage ever recorded since this publication began in February 2015.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today filed a motion in the Scottish Parliament calling on the Prime Minister to resign.

At the time the motion was filed, the Conservative party were facing 17 separate allegations of parties at a time when the rest of the country was facing heavy restrictions but this will probably have risen by the time you read this.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today set out his party's expectations for the forthcoming Covid public inquiry, including calling for initial findings to be reported within a year.

The Iraq Inquiry took seven years from when hearings first began to the publication of the Chilcot Report. The Penrose Inquiry into the contaminated blood disaster was set up by Nicola Sturgeon in 2008 and didn't report until 2015. The Edinburgh Tram Inquiry was announced by Alex Salmond in 2014 and is still to report.

You may remember, last November, taking part in a survey on members' views on Brexit and the party's campaigning on the future of UK-EU relations. Thanks to everyone who participated - 6,500 members, more than any previous survey of this type - and thanks to Greg Foster and Dan Schmeising at party HQ who organised it on behalf of the Federal Policy Committee. This article gives you the results.

After the disappointment and failure of the 2019 general election, an independent post-mortem was carried out into what went wrong. The findings of the Thornhill Review set a broad and challenging reform agenda for the party, which we've made good progress on implementing so far.

On the role of the Federal Board itself, the Thornhill Review found that:

FPC members started the year bright and early with our first meeting last week. We cancelled our December meeting so we could all focus on North Shropshire, so this was our first meeting since November.

Big areas of focus for FPC this year will be further work on our messages and key policies to support them, leading up eventually to the Manifesto for the next General Election; and our substantial programme of working groups developing policies in politically useful areas, to bring to autumn conference.