Chamber and committees

The recently signed agreement with SUN will allow schools access to the Star Office software under a national licence agreement. Information has already beenpassed to local authorities and further publicity has been planned throughLearning and Teaching Scotland.

We areconsulting widely. The initial distribution of the consultation paper sentcopies to a wide range of interested organisations and individuals. Theconsultation has been well publicised and we are continuing to provide copiesof the paper to anyone who requests them.

Inaddition, the consultation paper is available on the Executive’s website.

Consultationwill be an active process. We will meet our stakeholders during theconsultation period, which ends on 30 July.

We will carryout a detailed assessment of the evaluation of the piloting of intermediariesin England and Wales and compare it with those carried out on other schemes usedelsewhere in the world.

We receiveregular correspondence on the issue and views previously expressed to the Executive have been taken into account as work on the forthcoming consultationhas progressed.

We set up astakeholder group to assist us in identifying the issues to be covered in ourconsultation paper. The group is made up of people from local authorities,industry bodies, trade unions, community and environmental groups, and otherplanning experts. Several members on the group have experience of raisingobjections on planning matters and have shared their views and experienceswithin the group.

Twenty-five thousand jobsare expected to be created following completion of the M74. It is not possibleto say how these jobs will be filled but the local authorities and localenterprise companies are taking steps to ensure that local residents areequipped with the skills to allow them to compete.

It is not possible to say if any single instance of flooding is attributableto climate change directly, and we do not collect separate data on any marginalincrease in annual flood damage cost it may cause.

The Executive is about to publish updated research entitledClimate Change: Review of levels of protection offered by flood preventionschemes. This research will allow a better understanding of the impacts ofclimate change on flood risk.

The Scottish Executive has made great strides towards ending the need to sleep rough. The rough sleepingcount for May and October 2003 showed a significant drop in the extent of roughsleeping during that period. Five local authorities had a small shortfall intheir direct-access accommodation at the time of the October count. We areworking in partnership with these and other local authorities to continue toexpand the level of accommodation and support services available.

The Scottish Executive has in place two licensing agreementswith Microsoft which provide significant levels of discount on published list pricesfor Microsoft software.

 We havea Select Agreement which offers participating organisations volume discount on Microsoftlist prices for their software licences. In addition, we have signed, in February2003, a three-year Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft which entitles us to receiveall upgrades for a defined list of software products (mainly MS Office) issued inthe agreement period. The terms of both agreements were negotiated by the Officeof Government Commerce on behalf of all government departments.

Expenditureon Microsoft software licenses in each of the past three financial years has been:

Year	2000-01	2001-02	2002-03
Select Licences	£191,368	£428,812	£489,956
Enterprise Agreement	-	-	£911,518
Total	£191,368	£428,812	£1,401,474

 

The figuresnoted include Value Added Tax at 17.5% and reflect the discounts the Scottish Executive receives from the licensing agreements.The costs in 2000-01 and 2001-02 do not include any elements of technology refreshupgrades.

Permitted development rights(PDRs) grant planning permission across Scotland for various classes of minor development. Where PDRsapply to the erection of agricultural buildings, there is a restriction on thesize of the building and a prior approval procedure exists. This provides anopportunity for the planning authority to examine the siting, design andexternal appearance of the proposed building and to seek amendments ifnecessary or to refuse to allow a development to go ahead.

We are satisfied that thereare sufficient safeguards in place to guard against inappropriate developmentand we have no plans at present to alter the existing arrangements.

Guidance on the use of opensource software by UK public bodies, including the devolved administrations, isset out in a policy statement, “Open Source Software, Use Within UKGovernment”, published by the Office of the e-Envoy on 15 July 2002. In supportof this policy, the Office of Government Commerce published a booklet “Guidanceon implementing Open Source Software” in September 2002. The Executive has notissued separate guidance.