Chamber and committees

The Enterprise Growth Fund provides direct investment to third sector organisations to help ensure their long-term sustainability. This may include funding support towards employment costs, depending on the requirements of the applicant organisation. The fund will not support redundancy costs.

Just Enterprise provides business development support and advice to help enterprising third sector organisations move towards increased growth and/or financial sustainability. The support provided will be tailored to the individual needs of each organisation, and will include access to specialist advice if required.

Decisions on all applications to the Enterprise Growth Fund will be made within 20 working days of receipt of completed application. All awards from the Fund will be allocated by the end of January 2012.

The Just Enterprise initiative is a free service providing business development support and advice to enterprising third sector organisations across Scotland.

VisitScotland’s international and domestic marketing campaigns successfully develop and support Scotland’s tourism potential, consistently enjoying strong levels of return on investment. VisitScotland’s was the Grand Prix winner at the National Institute of Promotional Marketing Awards in 2011.

We further plan to maximise the long-term tourism potential of the Commonwealth Games and Ryder Cup in 2014 by:

working with media to build worldwide perceptions of Scotland as an attractive destination to visit through extensive positive media coverage

building on Scotland’s ability to attract major events, visitors and spend to Scotland using new world class facilities and enhancing Scotland’s reputation as a world class venue for events

developing a wide-ranging programme for Homecoming 2014

tactical marketing to encourage people attending the events to take in more of Scotland and stay longer.

This activity will be supported by core marketing activity, including the successful Drive it Home campaign aimed at the golf tourism market, specific Homecoming 2014 marketing activity, by working with partners to ensure Scotland can provide an unforgettable visitor experience, and by positioning the country as a must-see, must-return destination.

This information is not held centrally.

We are investigating the feasibility of pulling this information together at the end of the programme.

It is expected that all available resources from the Enterprise Growth Fund will be fully allocated by the end of January 2012. There is no plan to extend the Fund beyond March 2012.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-02018 on 24 August 2011. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/Apps2/MAQASearch/QAndMSearch.aspx.

Using the latest data on market trends, VisitScotland’s international marketing strategy aims to increase the number of tourists from China, South Asia, the USA and Canada through a range of carefully tailored activities such as dedicated PR programmes and trade/sales missions focusing on China and South Asia and also the “I am a Scot” and ancestral tourism campaigns which target the USA and Canada.

In June of this year, the Scottish Agricultural College published research on the links between community ownership of land and community resilience. It concluded that community resilience grows during the years following a buyout, both in terms of social development and economic growth as well as skills, empowerment and ambition. The SAC research was funded as part of this government’s research programme “Vibrant Rural Communities”.

Marine Scotland’s target time for providing consent for marine renewable developments is nine months. Since 2009, there have been three applications for marine renewable developments. One was consented in seven months, the other applications are still undergoing determination.

The majority of home insulation measures in Scotland are carried out as a result of the obligations the UK government places on the energy companies, through the Carbon Emission Reduction Target (CERT) and the Community Energy Saving Programme (CESP). The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change is responsible for these policies and they are administered by Ofgem. As UK-wide schemes, historically they have been reported on at a UK level and little information was available on delivery in different parts of the UK. It is one of the objectives of the CERT Strategy for Scotland to improve the availability of data and the Scottish Government has been working with relevant parties to achieve this.

There is no published data for these schemes on measures delivered in Scotland for the period prior to April 2008. For CERT, the Energy Saving Trust published for the first time in October last year a series of reports based on data in the Home Energy Efficiency Database that provides a geographic distribution of professionally installed measures - currently cavity wall and loft insulation. This is available at:

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/business/Business/Information/Homes-Energy-Efficiency-Database-HEED/CERT-reports-from-HEED.

It provides data for Scotland, Wales, the English regions, each local authority in the UK and each of the UK parliamentary constituencies.

In addition to the measures funded through CERT and CESP (a proportion of which will have been carried out with complementary funding from Scottish Government home insulation programmes), a number of additional measures (specifically, loft top-ups) have been wholly funded through the Scottish Government’s Home Insulation Scheme. For those parliamentary constituencies where a Home Insulation Scheme operated, figures are given in the following table.