Chamber and committees

To confirm that the Scottish Government will consult on extending the coverage of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act to the following bodies:

Contractors who build and maintain schools

Contractors who build and maintain hospitals

Contractors who operate and maintain trunk roads under private finance contracts

Contractors who run privately managed prisons and provide prisoner escort and court custodial services

Leisure, sport and cultural trusts and bodies established by local authorities

Glasgow Housing Association

The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland.

A consultation paper will be published in due course. It will seek the views of any interested persons, as well as the bodies themselves (or their representative bodies). In particular the government is mindful of the impact of the economic downturn and will examine any potential negative impact on the bodies proposed before reaching its conclusions on extending coverage.

Additionally, the government will explore options for ensuring that Registered Social Landlords increase their transparency and accountability through the proposed Housing (Scotland) Bill.

The Scottish Government is currently carrying out a review of the Blue Badge scheme in Scotland, in order to ensure that it is up to date and relevant to those who need to use it. We have established a working group with representation from local authorities, the Mobility and Access Committee for Scotland, NHS Scotland and the British Parking Association to take this work forward. As part of these discussions, we will consider whether the qualification criteria are still relevant.

Local authorities already have discretion when making a decision on whether or not to award a Blue Badge. While badges are issued automatically to applicants in receipt of the higher rate of the mobility component of Disability Living Allowance or a War Pensioner''s Mobility Supplement, local authorities can also use separate legislative criteria to decide whether or not to award a badge to an individual with a mobility impairment who does not qualify for either of these benefits.

Our spending proposals for 2010-11 are set out in the draft budget, published on 17 September.

On 13 November 2009, the States of Jersey hosted the thirteenth Summit meeting of the British-Irish Council, attended by ministers from all the member administrations. The focus of the summit included useful discussions on the global financial situation and its implications for our economies, and on Indigenous, Minority and Lesser-used Languages, where we identified the scope for useful further joint work.

As with previous summits, the meeting received progress reports and agreed a plan for future work on the other subjects currently being taken forward by council members. These are drugs misuse; demography; digital inclusion; the environment; energy, both grid infrastructure and marine renewables; collaborative spatial planning; early years; transport, and social inclusion.

The council recognised the valuable work that had been achieved by all the work streams and considered a report on the Knowledge Economy Workstream which has now concluded.

It was disappointing that the council did not reach unanimity on the location of a standing secretariat. The St Andrews Agreement of October 2006 noted that the UK and Irish governments would facilitate the establishment of a standing secretariat, and this has been discussed at each of the subsequent summits. At the summit in Cardiff earlier this year, the Chief Minister of Jersey was asked to take informal soundings from colleagues on the council with a view to reporting back a broad consensus on where the Standing Secretariat might be based. Many member administrations felt that, more than three years since the St Andrews Agreement, the time to decide on the secretariat was overdue.

Edinburgh is one of the candidates to host the secretariat, and we were delighted with the overwhelming support that Edinburgh received from the member administrations. However, unanimity was not achieved and the matter has been remitted to the Chief Minister of Guernsey to see if we can overcome the obstacles to agreement and we are hopeful of that before the next summit in Guernsey in June 2010.

I am placing a copy of the Official Communiqu© that was issued by the British-Irish Council after the meeting in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre. (Bib. number 49690)

NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (NHS QIS) intends to launch the clinical standards for neurological health services formally in January 2010. They are currently available on the NHS QIS website to allow those with an interest in neurological services to begin to familiarise themselves with their content.

NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (NHS QIS) is developing an implementation and improvement plan to accompany the formal launch of the standards in January 2010. Central to this will be work with individual NHS boards, healthcare professionals and the public to establish local quality improvement groups.

NHS QIS will then work with these groups to identify priority areas for attention according to local need, agree key performance indicators to demonstrate continuous quality improvement and develop systems for data collection that will promote continuous quality improvement locally, the sharing of good practice and the facilitation of national audit.

This programme will also ensure that appropriate links are made to other national priorities, including the long-term conditions action plan and the wider approach to improving quality across healthcare services NHSScotland.

This information is not held centrally. The Diabetes Survey Monitoring Group is, however, considering whether the Scottish diabetes survey should in future include reporting of insulin-treated type 2 diabetes.

The Scottish Diabetes Survey Monitoring Group has asked the diabetes managed clinical network in each NHS board to check the position.

As the 2008 diabetes survey indicated, NHS Tayside data on numbers with each type of diabetes are considered to be the most accurate. These suggest that the proportion of those with type 1 diabetes is between 10% and 12% of the total number of those diagnosed with diabetes.

The Scottish Diabetes Research Network is also engaged in a project that seeks to establish with greater accuracy the national proportions of type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

This question was answered in the Chamber. The answer can be viewed in the Official Report using the following link:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/officialReports/meetingsParliament/or-09/sor1001-01.htm

The First Minister and I attended the plenary session of the Joint Ministerial Committee on Wednesday 16 September. It was a constructive meeting, providing the opportunity for an open exchange of views.

We discussed how best the four administrations can work together to tackle the challenges of stimulating and sustaining our economic recovery, and the Prime Minister provided an update on preparations for the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. We emphasised the effect that the economic situation has had on Scotland. With our Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts, we presented the case to the Prime Minister and his colleagues for further public sector capital acceleration, making it clear that the fragile economy recovery could be severely damaged by a sudden drop in capital spending. The First Minister argued that bringing capital spending forward would allow for a better exit strategy from the necessary fiscal stimulus. We also made the case for assistance in increasing bank lending, for tighter regulation of the banking sector and for contingency funding for the swine flu vaccine.

We also discussed the state of inter-administration relations, including the Calman Commission report, the Memorandum of Understanding and new dispute resolution procedures. We agreed that there should be more detailed discussions at official level on improvements to the memorandum and dispute resolution and to the functioning of the JMC, leading to ministerial agreement at a JMC Domestic in the near future. We also looked forward to the Finance Ministers'' Quadrilateral later this year. We noted that the Secretary of State for Scotland said the UK Government''s response to the Calman report''s recommendations will be published before the end of this year.

I am placing a copy of the communiqu© that was issued immediately following the committee meeting in the Scottish Parliament''s Information Centre (Bib. number 49312).