Chamber and committees

The information requested is not available. But as part of an ongoing programme, the Scottish Energy Efficiency Office (SEEO) is endeavouring to make Scottish businesses aware of how the Climate Change Levy will affect them and what they can do to mitigate its impact. Information on the CCL is being disseminated by way of seminars; other business events, press articles, the SEEO website, and the Enterprise Network. The SEEO is also working with the major energy suppliers in Scotland with a view to sending information on the CCL to their business customers.

My answer to question S1W-3919 by Duncan Hamilton confirms that the Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health which provides advice to the Executive on such matters, holds information on influenza vaccination policies for European countries.

Decisions concerning vaccination programmes are made on the basis of locally relevant scientific information and take into account the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.

The Scottish Utilities Forum has met twice this year, on 21 March and 27 June. The Scottish Executive has been represented at both of these meetings.

The Scottish Executive would expect all employers, including publicly funded bodies, to adopt workplace policies on alcohol. We work closely with key national organisations to ensure good guidance is available.

The Health Education Board for Scotland has produced a policy guide, "Alcohol in the Workplace" which sets out the main issues involved. In addition, the Health and Safety Executive has published a useful booklet, "Don't Mix it - A Guide for Employers and Alcohol at Work".

The Scottish Utilities Forum was established as a means for the Executive and the Scottish Parliament to maintain and develop contact with the utility companies in Scotland. It has no function in relation to the Climate Change Levy, which is a UK taxation measure, and consequently reserved.

The problems associated with young people's drinking are already well documented and the Executive attaches great importance to tackling the issue. The Scottish Advisory Committee on Alcohol Misuse is developing a comprehensive new strategy for tackling alcohol misuse in Scotland.

Service provision, prevention and health promotion are key components of the emerging strategy and the particular needs of young people are being taken into account.

The Scottish Executive is committed to tackling alcohol misuse and has made an additional £2.5 million available over three years to support national strategic developments.

The Scottish Executive has no plans to review the current procedure for the suspension of a liquor licence. The matter of liquor licensing is kept under general review.

No formal response is available. However, the Scottish Executive has endorsed the Action Plan, and work is already in progress to implement its various strands.

MSPs and their staff can already access a fully searchable database of Scottish parliamentary questions via staff in SPICe. This is currently the House of Commons Library's POLIS database, on to which SPICe staff are indexing Scottish Parliament proceedings. Unfortunately staffing and technical difficulties have caused a backlog in this work, which is being addressed.

The connection service from Westminster is insufficiently robust to make direct access to POLIS more widely available. However, this month we are launching an improved search facility on the Scottish Parliament website, which will enable information such as Scottish parliamentary questions to be retrieved more readily by users outside SPICe.

Work is also in progress on a strategy for data resources for the Scottish Parliament as a whole, and Phase 1 of this development will include Scottish parliamentary questions. We anticipate that a pilot system will be available for testing by the end of this year.