Chamber and committees

The Executive's Action Plan to reduce Youth Crime stated our intention to reconfigure the secure accommodation available across Scotland. Our objectives were to develop additional places for girls, to provide a better geographical spread and to introduce a wider variety of provision, which meets the needs of young people.We have now received and evaluated proposals from the five providers to help develop these objectives. In principle, subject to financial, value for money and other details being agreed, I am inviting four of the providers to develop the secure estate as follows:Kibble School - 18 secure places (boys only);St Philip's School - 18 secure places with six close support (mixed provision);Good Shepherd - 12 secure and 12 close support. (girls only), andKerelaw School - 12 secure (six boys only, six girls only) and 12 close support (mixed provision).The provision at Kerelaw will replace the existing secure provision. The other provision will be new.In addition, I have concluded that there is a need for 18 secure places in the north-east. Discussions are continuing with Rossie School to consider how this can best be achieved.We will provide grants to the successful providers to cover a substantial proportion of the capital costs.This proposal will increase the number of secure places in Scotland from 96 to 125: the 78 newly built secure places that will result from this proposal, together with the total of 47 places already available on four other sites: St Mary's Kenmure (31); The Elms, Dundee (4); Howdenhall (5) and St Katherine's (7), both Edinburgh. Once these developments are complete, all secure accommodation will be new or recently renovated to meet modern standards.This development will also result in an additional 30 close support places. Together with approximately 75 new intensive support and supervision places that are being funded through the Intensive Support Fund, this will provide a greatly improved range of residential options to meet the needs of our most troubled and troublesome young people.

The Crown Agent's report will be published today.The Lord Advocate and I welcome the report, which provides a careful and reasoned diagnosis of the fragmentation in our criminal justice system. The report describes how a more coherent approach could be achieved. We are committed to a "joined-up" approach at local and national level and will now study the details to see how this can best be put into practice. As the report shows, local co-ordination and liaison are of fundamental importance and we very much hope it will be possible to implement arrangements to bring together criminal justice agencies into closer working relationships at local level. We will be discussing further with Sheriffs Principal what role they might play in convening such arrangements, bearing in mind the limits of their statutory responsibility to secure the speedy and efficient disposal of business in the sheriff courts of their sheriffdom.We also propose to set up a national Criminal Justice System (CJS) Board, consisting of the chief officers of the main criminal justice agencies.The remit of the board will be to make recommendations on the overall aims, objectives and targets for the Criminal Justice System and to monitor the performance of the system as a whole. To enable the board to carry out its remit, members will be invited to share information and to consider how information on the performance of the system as a whole should be presented and measured.We have discussed with the judiciary their possible involvement in the national board to be sure that nothing the Executive does risks being seen to compromise their independence.A High Court judge will attend the national CJS Board when issues that would benefit from judicial input at that level arise. The Convenor of the Sheriffs Principal has also agreed to attend the board.We are anxious to ensure that closer local working relationships are based on practical projects with achievable results.To this end, we plan to set up one or more funded pilot projects to illustrate how a joined-up approach could be implemented at local level. The pilots will be in the area of the summary criminal business of the sheriff courts, with particular reference to eliminating avoidable delay. We are already committed, under Action Point 10 of our youth crime action plan, to considering measures to increase the speed of referral to the courts, and the introduction of specific targets discussed with the judiciary.The pilots would be overseen by the national CJS Board.This report complements the report by Lord Bonomy on improving the efficiency of the High Court, and the work being undertaken by Sheriff Principal McInnes's Committee on summary justice. Together, these three reviews will pave the way for the most radical improvements in our criminal justice system for over 20 years.Andrew Normand has already consulted extensively but we would welcome wider debate. We have therefore placed a copy of the report on the Scottish Executive website, and in the Parliament's Reference Centre. We are sending the report to key organisations within the criminal justice system and making copies available to other organisations and to the general public on request and we would welcome any comments they wish to offer.

The Child Strategy Statement issued by the Scottish Executive sets out the importance to all Scottish Executive Departments of taking account of the views and interests of children in developing policy that may affect them.The Executive commissioned Save the Children to develop the "re:action" Consultation Toolkit to facilitate consultation with children. Children's views are being taken into account in a range of specific contexts: for example through the Scottish Youth Parliament, the Young Scot website and the Children's Charter being drawn up in the light of the Child Protection Review It's everyone's job to make sure I'm alright. Children and young people participated in a wide range of events during the National Debate on Education. The views of young people leaving care have formed an important part of our work on throughcare and aftercare services, and Who Cares? Scotland have been commissioned to survey looked after children about their education attainments and improvements they would like to see.

Of the 209 people appointed during 2002 to the boards of those Scottish public bodies that fall within the remit of the Commissioner for Public Appointments, a total of nine were under 35 years of age.

The Executive is committed to promoting improvements to service delivery in our rural areas. Through our mainstream policies and programmes, for example in transport, health and modernising government, we are working to improve the access of rural communities to a wide range of services. We are also targeting the challenges facing our rural communities in accessing services, through specific programmes such as the Scottish Rural Partnership Fund and the Rural Transport Fund. This is in addition to the action we are taking to implement many of the recommendations of the report, Services in Rural Scotland, published by the Scottish National Rural Partnership in January 2001, aimed at encouraging more innovative approaches to service provision in rural areas.

A Policy Statement will be published today and will be available on the Scottish Executive website. Copies have been placed in the Parliament's Reference Centre (Bib. number 26600).

Historic Scotland has had a long-term commitment to improving access - both physical and intellectual - to the built heritage, including in particular those properties in its own direct care. During 2003 Historic Scotland will be: spending £200,000 on improving access to its properties for visitors with disabilities;issuing a revised version of the brochure for visitors with disabilities which explains the levels of access possible and putting the same information on the Historic Scotland website, andrevising its Technical Advice Note on access for the disabled to historic buildings. This provides practical advice and guidance and is available to other owners of historic buildings and monuments, local authorities, architects and planners.

The legal framework for private fostering will be considered as part of phase II of the Adoption Policy Review, which will report next year. In addition we have surveyed all local authorities to establish the extent of private fostering.

The recommendations in the Victoria Climbié Inquiry cover a wide range of child protection issues. We are carefully considering these recommendations to ensure that the lessons learned are taken into account in developing our child protection reform programme. The reform programme was announced in response to the national child protection review which reported last November. A Commissioner for Children and Young People could play an important role in this through raising the profile of children's rights and helping children to be heard.

From additional resources identified in 2002-03, the Scottish Executive has allocated £600,000 to sportscotland to establish a dowry for Scottish Disability Sport. This fund will allow Scottish Disability Sport to provide specialist support to ensure that the needs of children and young people with special needs are addressed as the Active Primary Schools and School Sports Development Officer Programmes are rolled out.