Chamber and committees

The Head of Police Division2 attended meetings of the Scottish Criminal Record Office Executive Committee.His role was to keep informed about the committee’s oversight of SCRO and torepresent the Executive’s interests in any relevant matters discussed by thecommittee. Whether to report any of the proceedings to ministers was a matterfor the judgment of the civil servant concerned. There was no practice ofredacting the minutes of the committee.

Yes.

As noted in my answer to questionS2W-21547, there were 15 vacancies in the Scottish Executive, excluding the CroftersCommission, in Inverness in 2003-04 and 2004-05. Of those, nine vacancies werefor posts in Band A and, therefore, no professional qualifications or experiencewere required. The six vacancies in Bands B and C in that period were professionalposts and required qualifications, knowledge and experience specific to the posts.For example, four of the posts were in the Deer Commission for Scotland so requiredspecific knowledge and experience of the deer industry and deer management. Theother two posts required a professional qualification in agriculture and knowledgeand experience of agriculture at the appropriate level.

The information is as follows:

in 2003-04, five of the vacancieswere in the Deer Commission for Scotland and the remaining four vacancies were in the Animal HealthOffice in Inverness,

in 2004-05, three of the vacancieswere in the Agricultural area office in Inverness and three vacancies were in the Animal Health Officein Inverness.

Planning the response to a legalrequirement for birds to be housed is a matter for individual poultry-keepers. Insupport of this the Executive has published guidance on the issues which individualpoultry-keepers will wish to take into account. A wide range of bird keepers havebeen reminded of this information in recent biosecurity guidance distributed bythe Executive.

Since 2003-04, the Executivehas provided £1.46 million in funding to support mountain rescue. A further grantof £300,000 will be paid to the Mountain Rescue Committee for Scotland in 2006-07.Future funding beyond that period will be considered in the context of the nextspending review.

The target date forcompletion of the re-development of Waverley Station is November 2007. Thiswill increase the number of trains which Waverley can accommodate from 24 per hour to 28.

The station will have thecapacity for four more train paths. Operationally, this will facilitate futureplanned rail projects such as the new Airdrie to Bathgate services.

Transport Scotland hasthe operational responsibility for this area, and can be contacted for moreinformation if required.

The Scottish Executive is fullyfunding the redevelopment of Waverley Station at an estimated cost of £150 million,broken down into the following components:

Item	Total Cost
Signalling and Telecoms	£34 million
Infrastructure	£32 million
Waverley Steps	£8 million
Network Rail	£13 million
Contingency and Optimism Bias	£63 million
Total	£150 million

Source of data: Network Rail.

Transport Scotland hasthe operational responsibility for this area, and can be contacted for more informationif required.

The Family Law (Scotland) Act2006 will come into effect in the late spring or early summer of 2006 once therequisite arrangements have been made in relation to rules of court andsecondary legislation.

Two thousand, five hundred copies of the consultation paper on the Aquaculture and Fisheries Bill were produced at a cost of £18,698. In addition, the Executive held 10 public meetings across Scotland, at a total cost of £2,151. The consultation paper included a Draft Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) which envisaged additional costs of some £250,000 to the public purse. The Executive has yet to analyse the responses to the consultation paper and Draft RIA and has not yet decided on the final content of the bill. An analysis of the estimated costs of implementing the legislation – including the costs of any regulator will be published in the financial memorandum that will accompany the bill when it is introduced into the Parliament.