Chamber and committees

Information on waiting times for a first outpatient appointment with a consultant, following referral by a General Medical Practitioner/General Dental Practitioner, is collected centrally by the Information and Statistics Division of the Common Services Agency. This information is published in Scottish Health Statistics and in other ISD releases which are available on the Internet - http://www.show.nhs.uk/isd.

The numbers of cases involving alleged contravention of environmental protection legislation referred to the Procurator Fiscal service by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency are set out in the table.

The decision on whether or not to proceed with prosecution in a particular case is for the Procurator Fiscal. The numbers of cases proceeded with and convictions secured are shown in the table.

	1/4/1996 to 31/3/1997	1/4/1997 to 31/3/1998	1/4/1998 to 31/3/1999	1/4/1999 to 31/3/2000	1/4/2000 to 26/1/2001
Cases referred to Procurators Fiscal1	37	70	73	84	51
Cases proceeded with	26	49	38	48	172
Percentage of cases proceeded with	70%	70%	52%	57%	33%2
Cases resulting in conviction	24	44	30	43	15
Percentage of cases proceeded with resulting in conviction	92%	90%	79%	90%	88%

Notes:

1. Figures may differ slightly to those published in SEPA's annual reports, depending on when legal proceedings were resolved.

2. 25 cases are currently under consideration by the Procurator Fiscal service.

This is a matter for Aberdeen and Grampian Tourist Board and its funding partners to decide.

The cost of producing the adverts was £115,542 and the media costs to place the adverts were £735,000. This was part of a £4.6 million three-stage pig meat advertising campaign run by the MLC.This MLC Pig Meat advertising campaign was not run in Scotland. The Scottish Executive was not involved in the campaign, did not contribute to it and no Scottish Minister had been in contact with the MLC about this initiative. A separate £600,000 MLC-funded Scottish campaign promoting pork as a "lean and healthy" product was run by Quality Meat Scotland.

Decisions on the provision of air support are operational matters for Chief Constables and police authorities and it is for them to take decisions on the costs and benefits of specific investment proposals in light of the resources available. Since 1997-98 there have been no formal applications for funding for the provision of air support. At that time an ACPOS Working Group concluded that if air cover was to be provided for Scottish police forces, the preferred approach would involve a national arrangement. This has been considered since by the Scottish Executive, police authorities and ACPOS without a final conclusion being reached. Earlier in the current financial year, Tayside Police wrote to the Scottish Executive Justice Department with an outline business case for setting up an air support unit in conjunction with Fife Constabulary. The response indicated that in the light of previous work on air support the department was unwilling to provide central funding for local provision, although that did not of course rule out the use of local funding where a case might be justified on the basis of local circumstances. This is the approach that has been adopted by Strathclyde which has leased a helicopter.

I understand that just over 15,000 organisations in the above categories are affected by withdrawal of reliefs.Total revenue forgone as a result of existing reliefs to these bodies is as set out in the table. The withdrawal of reliefs is being phased in over a five-year period. For some groups, withdrawal began in April 2000, and for the remainder will begin in April 2001.

Authority	£000
East of Scotland	7,299
North of Scotland	5,404
West of Scotland	6,259
TOTAL	18,962

These figures also take no account of the possibility that many organisations will take advantage of water metering, where this will reduce their costs. It is therefore likely that additional income to the authorities will accordingly be reduced.

The Executive is aware of the potential benefit of digital technology to rural areas. The Arkleton trust (Research) Ltd produced a report for Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) in 1995 evaluating the Highlands and Islands Telecommunications Initiative (HITI). The report showed that the initiative had exceeded its job creation targets. Presently HIE attribute over 3,000 jobs in the call centre sector in the region to the publicly supported infrastructure projects of the past decade, including the HITI.The Executive is aware that local loop unbundling may have an impact on rural areas and has asked Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise to collaborate on a study to consider the likely extent of local loop unbundling in Scotland and to suggest measures to maximise its impact.

The Executive is currently considering how the procurement of public sector broadband services might stimulate the wider supply of high bandwidth services by the industry to businesses and the community.However, the Executive recognises that Public/Private Partnerships may be needed to overcome the scale of demand delivery in the more remote parts of Scotland, and welcomes the current activities of the Highlands & Islands Partnership to secure European support for infrastructure development in such areas.

The Scottish Police College offers workplace and open and distance learning as well as residential training involving the use of special facilities so that there is no single measure of its training capacity. However its ability to offer residential training is constrained by the number of bed places it can provide. The number of bed places available on a daily basis over the past five years is as follows:

1996-97	1997-98	1998-99	1999-2000	2000-01
432	316	425	425	733

The figure for 1997-98 was affected by a move from dormitory accommodation to study bedrooms. The figure for 2000-01 reflects the sharing of bedrooms by probationers. This is intended to be a short-term measure for dealing with exceptionally high levels of recruitment by police forces.

Strathclyde Police currently have access to air support through an air support unit based at the city heliport in Glasgow. Funding for the police is provided annually through the GAE process and resources are not allocated to specific operational areas or policing tasks.