Chamber and committees

The available information is given in the following table. The table presents the data available, based upon the date of sentence. It is not known how many of these convictions relate to offences committed before October 2007 because the date of offence is not available in the data held centrally. Data for the financial year 2008-09 will be published in March 2010.

Persons with a Charge Proved in Scottish Courts under Section 46 of the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982¹, by Police Force Area, October 2007 to March 2008²

Police Force Area	1 October 2007 to 31 March 2008
Grampian	9
Lothian and Borders	7
Strathclyde	79
Total	95

Notes:

1. Where main offence.

2. By date of sentence.

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While the Scottish Government understands the case being made to extend the scheme to include people on the lower rate of mobility benefit, the review report made it very clear that it would not be practical to extend the scheme at this time. That view is shared by the Scottish Government.

The information requested is not collected centrally.

We liaise regularly with the Financial Services Authority on all aspects of their financial capability programme, to ensure that Scotland benefits appropriately.

We liaise regularly with a range of contacts in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), under the working arrangements established in our concordat with the department, which we are currently refreshing and work closely with the DWP on income maximsation. As part of our tackling poverty framework Achieving our Potential, to make the benefits and tax credits system work better for Scotland, we are committed to high level biennial meetings involving Scottish ministers, COSLA leaders and ministers from the Department for Work and Pensions.

The consultation has now closed and the analysis of responses will be published by the end of 2009.

Scottish ministers have now decided that the public sector duty on socio-economic inequalities in the UK Equality Bill will be extended to cover public bodies in Scotland.

The review of the Scotland-wide free bus travel scheme for older and disabled people estimated the cost of extending the scheme to include people in receipt of the lower rate of disability living allowance at around £12 million.

As of 25 November 2009, five applications have been received for the Third Sector Resilience Fund, for a total of £196,463. It would not be normal to disclose the names of applicants to a fund.

This level of applications is what we would have anticipated at this point in time. The fund has only been open for just over three weeks and a considerable amount of supporting material is required for an application. We anticipate that there will be a sharp increase in applications from now on until the closing date of 4 December 2009.

The Prevention of Homelessness Partnership evaluation findings were disseminated to local authorities through statutory guidance issued in April 2009 at the time of the introduction of section 11 of the Homelessness Etc (Scotland) Act 2003. We would encourage local authorities and their partners to use this guidance and the learning from such projects when developing their local schemes.

Prevention of homelessness is one of the key priorities agreed between Scottish Government and local authority partners in COSLA. Guidance was issued to local authorities in June 2009 which afforded a further opportunity to highlight guidance around the implementation of section 11.

The information requested is not collected centrally.