Chamber and committees

The Scottish Executive set out its broadband strategy last year in the document, Connecting Scotland: Our Broadband Future. Our vision behind the strategy was to make broadband connections more affordable and pervasive across the country. We are pursuing this in three ways: Firstly, the Executive has developed the Pathfinder Initiatives to aggregate public sector demand for broadband in the Highlands and Islands and South of Scotland. It is hoped that this major investment on the part of the public sector will help to stimulate both demand for and supply of broadband within these areas which might not be immediately covered by the commercial market. Secondly, the strategy undertook to identify where there was a need for direct support measures; our programme under the UK Broadband Fund is developing this element through awareness raising measures and technology trials. Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise will be managing the projects under the Broadband Fund over 2002-03 and 2003-04. The last element of the strategy is ongoing regulatory liaison at UK level and we continue to work closely on this with our counterparts at UK level.Scottish Enterprise is spending £6 million on the first phase of its ATLAS project. The project will set up a Telecoms Trading Exchange and aims to substantially cut high bandwidth telecoms costs for Scottish businesses and encourage the use of broadband services. The first phase of ATLAS is planned to be operational by the end of this year.In addition, the Highlands and Islands Partnership Programme (HIPP) also has funding to stimulate demand and to enhance infrastructure in remoter areas.

The Scottish Executive is committed to achieving full compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Accessibility Initiative standards to ensure that its website is accessible to those with disabilities and a programme of enhancement work is already under way. The Scottish Executive also intends to seek "Bobby" approval - a self-certifying system which provides an indicative assessment of the site's accessibility for users with disabilities.

The proposal for a European Year of Education through Sport has been developed during the Spanish Presidency by the EU Council's Education Committee, which is attended by the European Commission. The Scottish Executive's interests are represented at all meetings of the Education Committee by the UK delegation, which has included an official from the Scottish Executive Education Department on five of the seven meetings of the committee held during the Spanish Presidency. A Proposed Decision will be discussed at the Council of EU Education Ministers on 30 May 2002.

The establishment of a European area of Lifelong Learning, as the main recommendation in the EU Memorandum on Lifelong Learning, is being driven forward here with a wide-ranging policy programme aimed at creating a culture of Lifelong Learning in Scotland.Ground breaking initiatives such as learndirect scotland, Careers Scotland, adult literacy and numeracy and individual learning accounts, have put Scotland ahead of many of our European counterparts.

I am aware that the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland wrote to the Public Petitions Committee on 28 February 2000 on this subject, but have had no correspondence from that body.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-24633 on 23 April 2002. I also wrote to the Minister for Europe, Peter Hain, on 23 April seeking close working arrangements between the UK government and the devolved administrations on the matter of representation. The Deputy Minister for Finance and Public Service was also able to raise the matter with Mr Hain in London on 25 April.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-25343.

I can today announce the publication of the second public consultation paper on the Review of Higher Education in Scotland. The first consultation paper was launched in October 2001 and focused mainly on the performance of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. We plan to publish a short report on the responses to that paper in June. The second consultation paper invites comment on the wider higher education context and proposes a set of underlying principles on which higher education should be developed over the next decade. Responses are requested by the end of July. I am placing copies of the consultation paper in the Parliament's Reference Centre (Bib. number 20840).

In addition to its general health allocations, each NHS board receives earmarked funding for drug treatment services in line with the Arbuthnott Substance Misuse Formula. This formula takes account of deprivation and need, including population, age sex structure and service delivery costs due to remoteness. It is for each NHS board, in partnership with the relevant drug action team(s) and their constituent agencies, to direct its spending of these resources in line with local needs and priorities, taking into account other local spending decisions on drug misuse issues.

As part of a programme of research reviews on the effectiveness of drug treatment, the Executive's Effective Interventions Unit is drawing together existing evidence on the effectiveness of drug therapies (including methadone, buprenorphine, dihydrocodeine and others) from systematic reviews conducted internationally. The findings from this programme of work will be available in June 2002.The Chief Scientist Office in the Executive has also commissioned a randomised trial of methadone versus dihydrocodeine to help in considering the effectiveness of substitute prescribing. The trial is due to be completed in September 2003.