Chamber and committees

The Scottish Health Plan, Our National Health: A plan for action, a plan for change, set out our thinking on health services for rural areas. We expect NHS boards individually and through regional planning arrangements to ensure the provision of safe and accessible services. We have reviewed the funding allocation formula for NHSScotland to ensure that it recognises the higher cost of delivering services in rural areas. We have also introduced a number of initiatives designed to support and develop rural health care.

The Executive sees community hospitals as playing an important role in the spectrum of care provided to the communities they serve. They provide accessible services to meet a range of local needs and complement the other services available in the locality. It is important that the clinical staff in the hospitals have effective liaison with those working in the specialist hospital services, as well as other services within the local community. The Executive continues to encourage the local evolution of community hospitals that enables them to best meet local needs.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) is responsible for implementing the Pollution Prevention and Control (Scotland) Regulations 2000 (PPC). SEPA is resourced to undertake these duties from grant-in-aid provided by the Scottish Executive, and from the agency's PPC charging scheme. The level of grant-in-aid and charging scheme income is designed to ensure that SEPA is adequately resourced to enable it to process and determine applications for PPC permits, and take enforcement action in the event of any infringement of conditions in a permit. SEPA has recently consulted on amendments to the PPC charging scheme.

There is no proposal to replace the Pollution Prevention and Control (Scotland) Regulations 2000 (PPC). However, the Executive has consulted on amendments to the PPC Regulations, including to the transitional timetable set out in the regulations for a number of industrial sectors. It is expected that amendment regulations will be made in the near future.The PPC Regulations replace the previous Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) regime, which controlled emissions from larger industrial installations, and Local Air Pollution Control (LAPC), which regulated smaller processes. Under PPC, existing installations will transfer to the new pollution control regime on a phased, sector by sector basis between 2001 and 2007. It was recognised at an early stage that it would be impracticable to transfer all sectors to PPC simultaneously and that it would be necessary to phase in implementation over a number of years leading up to 2007, the final date for transferring existing installations allowed under the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive.

This is a matter for the Scottish Qualifications Authority.

This is an operational matter for VisitScotland. VisitScotland are well aware of the attractions of family history research, not least using the internet, to certain potential visitors to Scotland who can then be encouraged to come to see for themselves the places where their forebears lived and worked. To this end, I launched the website ancestralscotland.com in January and more recently the Secretary of State for Scotland, launched it in Australia and New Zealand.

The third party development arrangement is considered to be neither a private finance initiative nor a public private partnership. It is an additional reimbursement route available to General Practitioners (GPs) which was introduced to encourage private developers to build health care premises in areas that traditionally have not been attractive to such developers. Premises developed in such areas are then leased to GPs at or below a prescribed rent based on the approved development cost.

The information requested is not held centrally.However, 19 projects providing modern, fit-for-purpose accommodation for GP practices are understood to have been completed under the third-party development arrangement. Detailed information can be obtained from individual trusts on those health premises funded using the third-party development arrangement and the capital and revenue consequences. Increasingly GPs are located in property from which other health care or social care is being provided. Dependent on local circumstances a head lease can be taken by any of the occupants although Primary Care Trusts are not encouraged by the department to assume the role of head lessee.

NHS boards are given a unified budget calculated under the Arbuthnott formula. This allows each individual NHS board to decide the level of funding to allocate to meet the costs of services they provide including occupational health for the NHS staff they employ.

The Arbuthnott formula does not apply to the resources which are allocated to NHS boards to meet the additional costs of teaching.