Chamber and committees

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.

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 funding to run the business activities of the General Register Office (GROS) for Scotland is given by the Scottish Executive to GROS, which in turn allocates funding to a number of business areas within the department. Records Enterprise is a branch of GROS. Its remit is to make available public records about individuals to customers, including genealogists. It does so by giving access to records held by the Registrar General which are open to the public, and charging for searching and for copies of the records in line with the statutory fees. Prices are set to recover the costs of Records Enterprise. The total income of Records Enterprise in 1997-98 was £818,491, in 1998-99 £992,142, in 1999-2000 £1,248,168, in 2000-01 £1,440,385 and in 2001-02 £1,515,947.

The General Register Office for Scotland plan to make the full set of digital images of genealogical records which are being generated as a result of the Digitally Imaging the Genealogical Records of Scotland's people (DIGROS) project, available to all local registration services which adopt the new registration software and therefore have the requisite communications links.The fee that is charged by a local registrar to a customer making a general search in the annual indexes to the records for an hour or longer is prescribed in The Births, Deaths, Marriages and Divorces (Fees) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2002 (SSI 2002 No. 390) which came into force from the first of October this year. However, local authorities, which provide the local registration service, may also charge for additional services offered by them. Such charges vary across local authorities.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-31506 today. 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/webapp/search_wa.

No decision has yet been taken on what will be done with the duplicate statutory registers held by local registration services when the digitisation of statutory registers has been completed. The registers themselves are the property of the Registrar General, while provision of storage and record accommodation is a matter for local registration services. Provision for the duplicate registers from a particular area will therefore be a matter for discussion between the Registrar General and the local registration service. The General Register Office for Scotland will be happy to be flexible in their approach to this, as they have been on previous occasions when registers have been replaced by microfiche.

An announcement about the Scottish Family History Research Service project, including plans to consult a number of bodies, will be made shortly.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-31506 today. 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/webapp/search_wa.