Chamber and committees

There are no national standardsfor the frequency of contact between a social worker and a child onsupervision.

Children’s Hearings havewide ranging powers to make whatever disposals they consider appropriate tomeet the individual needs of the child. If service providers such as local authorities and voluntary agenciescan make an appropriate disposal available, the hearing may consider it as acondition of the supervision requirement.

Measuresproposed in the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill will further extend the range of disposals,e.g. the power to impose electronic monitoring on young people as one elementof a package of support measures. The Scottish Executive has increased funding tosupport the Children’s Hearings system and improve service delivery.

Later this year we will lookconstructively and critically at how the system is operating, where and how itmight be made more effective in addressing the needs of children, young peopleand their families.

The Scottish Executive has significantly increased resources to the Scottish Children’sReporter Administration in recent years to ensure that referrals areappropriately investigated.

A number ofpolicies and programmes provide support for parenting either directly orindirectly. These include Integrated Community Schools and Sure Start Scotland,which targets support at families with very young children (0-3 years),particularly vulnerable and deprived families. Further parenting support services are to be made available throughout Scotland aspart of our antisocial behaviour measures.

Responsibility for the maintenance of individual historic buildings and monuments rests with their owners. Historic Scotland is directly responsible for the maintenance of over 300 properties in the care of Scottish ministers and one of the agency’s keytargets in recent years has been the completion of condition surveys on all these properties in order to prioritise more effectively its programme ofmaintenance.

Castle Tioram is a scheduledmonument and as such responsibility for its maintenance rests with its owners.At the public local inquiry held in 2001 into an application for scheduledmonument consent for the restoration of the Castle, Historic Scotland argued thecase for consolidation. Scottish ministers subsequently refused scheduledmonument consent for the application.

Any future application forscheduled monument consent in respect of the Castle would be considered on itsmerits and in line with Scottish Executive policy.

The Act contains a range ofdifferent provisions which are at varying stages of implementation and monitoringto ensure that they are achieving what was anticipated when it was enacted.

The first stage of theExecutive’s review of the Children’s Hearings System will involve wide and opendiscussions on the hearings system, its principles and its objectives. Laterthis year we will look constructively and critically at how the system isoperating, where and how it might be made more effective in addressing theneeds of children, young people and their families, including how volunteersmight be supported.

The 2002 study into children on home supervision Children (Scotland) Act 1995 Research Findings No. 4: Home Supervision was conducted by Stirling University on behalf of the Scottish Executive Education Department.

The Audit Scotland report Dealing with offending by young people (December 2002) was carried out on behalf of the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission. Dealing with offending by young people: A follow up report was published in November 2003.

We are developing the actionplan and hope to make an announcement shortly.

We have created the Forumfor Renewable Energy Development in Scotland to bring together stakeholders to work with the Executive to ensure that Scotland can take full advantage of these opportunities. Withsupport from the enterprise networks, Scotland has already succeeded in creating new jobs in theproduction of renewable energy devices, most notably at Vestas Celtic inCampbeltown. The recently published gap analysis study commissioned jointly bythe Executive, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and theDTI showed that there are currently around 2,000 jobs in the renewablesindustry in Scotland with the potential to increase this number significantlyin the period to 2020, both in the existing technologies of wind and hydropower and in the new renewables technologies such as wave, tidal and biomass.