Chamber and committees

I refer to my answer to question S1W-8817.

Historic Scotland has not awarded a grant of £3.6 million for the Merchant City in Glasgow. The Heritage Lottery Fund earlier this year announced an award of £1.6 million, under the Fund's Townscape Heritage Initiative, for a pilot project to assist the upgrading and improvement of buildings within the historic centre of Glasgow. It is for Glasgow City Council and Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, being formal partners with the Fund and providing a matching contribution, to determine the content of the five-year programme of work. Historic Scotland may be approached for top-up funding for buildings which meet the criteria for an award under the agency's Historic Buildings Repair Grants Scheme.

Current estimates would suggest that about 12% of under 16's in Scotland are regular smokers with a further 9% occasional smokers (source: Office for National Statistics, "Smoking, drinking and drug use among young teenagers in 1998", Volume 2: Scotland).

No information is available on Glasgow Kelvin.

The exact number of people contracting cancer as a direct result of smoking is unknown. The numbers of lung cancer cases diagnosed during 1996 and 1997 in the areas of interest are as follows:

	Year of diagnosis
	1996	1997*
Scotland	4,855	4,519
Greater Glasgow Health Board	1,144	1,006
Glasgow Kelvin Parliamentary constituency	75	71

* Data for 1997 is provisional.

It is expected that 80-90% of these cancers will have been caused by smoking.

The Scottish Executive is committed to reducing the levels of smoking by people in Scotland. The White Paper Smoking Kills outlines a comprehensive range of measures which we are now taking forward. These include health education and promotion activity; improvement on enforcement measures relating to underage sales; a Voluntary Charter on Smoking in Public Places; allocation of funding to health boards to spend on smoking cessation services and nicotine replacement therapy, and legislation to ban tobacco advertising and sponsorship.

The information is not held centrally. The precise cost of smoking related disease is difficult to ascertain, since cost data collected centrally from the National Health Service in Scotland cannot be attributed to individual disease. However, a report on hospital care for smoking related diseases in Greater Glasgow Health Board in 1992 estimated the cost of treatment at £14.4 million. Adjusted for inflation this equates to some £18 million in today's prices. This does not take into account costs associated with community nursing services, prescribing drugs in the community and GP services. (ASH Scotland/HEBS: The Smoking Epidemic: Counting the Cost in Scotland.)

The prescription charge medical exemption arrangements were reviewed by the UK Government in 1997. The decision taken was that the conditions which currently qualify for exemption would remain unchanged for the remainder of the current UK Parliament. The Scottish Executive has no plans to change this position.

We have begun to consider options for the future of the New Futures Fund once the current programme ends in March 2002 but it is too early to say what the outcome will be.

No. A once and for all transfer of funds was made to the health budget for Scotland by the Department of Health in 1989 to meet the costs of treatment carried out in Scotland under the reciprocal health care agreement. The cost to health boards of care provided under the reciprocal health care agreement is recognised within the total resources allocated to each health board each year.

In line with the measures in Smoking Kills, health boards were issued in April 1999 with guidance about extending and developing NHS efforts to help people stop smoking. One of the measures included the provision of one week's free nicotine replacement therapy for those smokers least able to afford to buy the products.

Health boards are investing an additional £1 million per annum over the period1999-2000 to 2001-02, on smoking cessation services.