Chamber and committees

A two year allocation of £1,982,791 was made in 2006 to projects under the Race Equality, Integration and Community Support Fund covering the financial years 2006-07 and 2007-08.

The Race Equality, Integration and Community Support Fund only permitted a maximum grant of £50,000. The Minority Ethnic Carers of Older People Project and the Ethnic Minorities Law Centre both received the maximum grant of £50,000 per year for two years.

The Race Equality, Integration and Community Support Fund was allocated two years funding of £1,982,791 in 2006. This allocation covered the two financial years 2006-07 and 2007-08.

Since May 2007, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning has met with a range of organisations to promote and improve Scottish education and lifelong learning and the outcomes for our children and young people. Addressing inequalities is, of course, key to fulfilling our aim.

Our concordat with COSLA includes a commitment to deliver progress towards an extra 10,000 respite weeks per year. We have been working closely with COSLA to agree delivery of this commitment. We have now agreed that, taking Audit Scotland’s 2007-08 respite performance indicator figures as a baseline, local authorities will provide an extra 2,000 weeks over the baseline in 2008-09, an extra 6,000 weeks in 2009-10 and an extra 10,000 weeks in 2010-11.

Equality is a guiding principle of the Skills Strategy and, during the development of this strategy, Scottish Government officials met with representatives from the Commission for Racial Equality.

I have asked Karen Watt, Chief Executive of the Scottish Housing Regulator to respond.

Her response is as follows:

The regulator’s policy of not reporting who makes freedom of information (FOI) requests is in line with the approach taken by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament. The Data Protection Act 1998 prevents the regulator publishing personal data about private individuals. This includes information on who makes requests under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. The regulator’s website publishes a log of the information released in response to FOI requests where it may be of wider public interest and has not been published elsewhere.

A key challenge of the skills strategy is that we encourage the integration of employment and skills services to facilitate the journey individuals make from long-term unemployment to sustained employment and in-work progression. This includes working jointly with the UK Government and Jobcentre Plus who have the primary responsibility for helping disabled people find employment and working with COSLA to develop a framework for supported employment in Scotland. Equality is a guiding principle of the skills strategy and we will ensure that each programme underpinning this strategy will be equality impact assessed across six strands (race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, age and religion/faith) to make sure that they are appropriate.

Ministers have no plans to convene such a meeting. Ministers met with both Glasgow Housing Association (GHA) and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Forum in June. Both have committed to discuss the issues raised in the Mazars report and explore the areas identified in the Scottish Housing Regulator’s assessment. Their agreed objective is to make SST happen. Ministers welcome the fact that these meetings are now underway and that a positive start has been made.

The inherited unsustainable commitments referred to in the Affordable Housing Investment Programme announcement are commitments made to pay out Housing Association Grant (HAG) at levels per home which had increased in real terms by 35% in the four years between 2002-03 to 2006-07. The challenge of meeting the 2012 target on homelessness and also of meeting our aspiration to increase the supply of new affordable homes mean that continuing to approve HAG subsidies at this level is not sustainable.