Chamber and committees

We have taken a number of actions. We have invested £2.1 million directly to grow the credit union movement in Scotland to equip them to increase membership and further develop their services to their members, including insurance services.

In 2003-04, the Executive made funding of £500,000 available to local authorities and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA) in order that they could run seminars and workshops and produce leaflets to encourage the uptake of home contents insurance among tenants.

The Executive’s aim is to increase the number of tenants who have home contents insurance cover and we are looking at how we can support schemes tied to rents paid to landlords in the socially rented sector.

We shall also continue working with the insurance industry to ensure that as many households as possible have access to low cost insurance, including in flood risk areas.

I would draw your attention to the Partnership for a Better Scotland document  at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/government/pfbs-00.asp which sets out the Scottish Executive’s commitments in relation to children, young people and their families.

This confirms our commitment to ensuring that all children get the best start in life. There is a wide range of work underway to help achieve our vision that children are nurtured, safe, active, healthy, achieving, included, respected and responsible.

These include the three year child protection reform programme which is now in its final year where the multi-disciplinary action team continues to work closely with practitioners and agencies to ensure that children get the help they need when they need it. Information on the range of work being undertaken within the programme, which includes embedding the framework for standards across all agencies, delivery of a training and development framework for practitioners with a suite of national training materials to underpin this, follow up of assurances from local services that child protection has been reviewed and issues acted upon, is available at www.scotland.gov.uk/childprotection.

Guidelines for education have recently been revised and the publication of Safe and Well earlier this year makes clear the role of staff, schools and education authorities in supporting and protecting children and young people.

Pilot inspections of child protection services in two areas were undertaken earlier this year and a full programme will rollout from next year. A range of Quality Indicators have been developed to support this programme building on the Framework for Standards and the need to ensure effective inter-agency working that is child-centred.

The Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003, which established a Disqualified from Working with Children List, was commenced in January 2005 to aid safer recruitment and help ensure those who are unsuitable to work with children are not able to do so.

Getting It Right For Every Child in June 2005, was a consultation on revisions to the Children’s Hearings system and services for children in the longer term available at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/06/20135608/56098.

This also included a single Integrated Assessment Framework to be introduced across all agencies which will provide for a single record for a child and so reduce the risk that information is not appropriately shared. Development in information technology through the eCare programme is helping develop the IT infrastructure to underpin the speedy and efficient sharing of information to help in the early identification of risk and action being taken to reduce this. More information can be found at http://www.ecare-scotland.gov.uk/.

The information requested is not available.

The official source of low income data for Scotland is the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) dataset available from 1994-95. This is derived from the Family Resources Survey (FRS). The sample size of the FRS in Scotland is relatively small and can only be used to provide information for Scotland as a whole.

The following link provides the latest low income headline figures for Scotland (2003-04), together with data for previous years. This was published on 30 March 2005:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/03/29170611/06123.

The Scottish Executive has legislated to end the routine use of unsuitable temporary accommodation for households with children through the Homeless Persons (Unsuitable Accommodation) (Scotland) Order (S.I. 2004/489) which came into force in December 2004. The legal requirement on local authorities is to use temporary accommodation which meets the standards of suitable accommodation as set out in the order.

Local authorities use different types of housing in order to provide temporary accommodation; such as furnished and unfurnished flats, hostels and bread and breakfasts, and they have set out in their homelessness strategies how they plan to reduce the use of b and b accommodation.

The Code of Guidance on Homelessness, which local authorities must have regard of, says that temporary accommodation should not be used unnecessarily and residents of temporary accommodation should be moved onto permanent accommodation as quickly as possible, whilst also ensuring that this is only done at a time when the household is able to sustain permanent accommodation.

The benefits of completing the Larkhall to Milngavie rail line are that it will:

allow an increased frequency of services between Milngavie and central Glasgow and between Hamilton and central Glasgow;

reconnect Larkhall to the rail network, making this Scotland’s first fully reopened branch rail link for more than 25 years;

remove an operational bottleneck on the Northern Suburban line, improving reliability;

create a new station at Kelvindale, serving business and housing growth in the vicinity;

create three new stations on the Larkhall Branch: Merryton, Chatelherault and Larkhall;

encourage modal shift from private car to public transport, and

improve access to employment, leisure and education opportunities.

The Executive has introduced a range of polices designed to assist older people live healthy independent lives such as free personal and nursing care, supporting people, care and repair scheme and rapid response teams. It has made provision for community care expenditure by local authorities of £48 million annually since 2003-04 to enable older people to be supported at home, and for a further £13 million in 2006-07 and £15 million in 2007-08 to enable older people to have faster access to home care services.

Building a Better Scotland published in September 2004 a copy of which is available in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 33956) introduced a national target to increase the number of older people receiving 10 or more hours home care to enable more older people to live or be cared for in their own homes.

Home Care Services, Scotland 2005 a Statistics Release published on 30 November 2005 notes the latest national statistics for home care services provided or purchased by local authorities in Scotland.

I have asked Angiolina Foster, Chief Executive of Communities Scotland, to respond. Her response is as follows:

Estimates of eligibility are based on data contained in the Scottish House Condition Survey 2002. However, that survey does not produce reliable estimates at local authority level.

I have asked Angiolina Foster, Chief Executive of Communities Scotland, to respond. Her response is as follows:

The Scottish Executive is contributing to the enhancement of capacity-building and self-sufficiency and improving social inclusion in a number of ways via housing and social justice funding initiatives introduced by Communities Scotland:

In East Dunbartonshire, the Affordable Housing Investment Programme (AHIP) has grown from approximately £500,000 per year in 2000 to £3.043 million in 2005-06.

Communities Scotland also expects to approve expenditure of £85,000 in East Dunbartonshire in 2005-06 from its Wider Role programme for housing associations on a variety of community-focused projects.

Additionally, East Dunbartonshire Community Planning Partnership has been allocated a total of £828,000 from the Community Regeneration Fund (CRF) for the period 2005-06 to 2007-08, based upon the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). The majority of this funding will be spent in the Hillhead and Twechar areas. A further £90,000 has been allocated from the Community Voices Fund, to support capacity building and social inclusion projects between 2005-06 and 2007-08.

In West Dunbartonshire, Communities Scotland’s programme in Clydebank in the next five years will amount to around £16.7 million, plus an additional £9 million related to Link Housing Association’s programme.

Communities Scotland also expects to approve expenditure of £822,000 in West Dunbartonshire in 2005-06 from its Wider Role programme.

West Dunbartonshire Community Planning Partnership has been allocated a total of £13.368 million from the CRF for the period 2005-06 to 2007-08, based upon the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, and a further £258,000 from Community Voices. Spending will take place largely within the most disadvantaged areas highlighted in the SIMD.

The Executive is limiting the negative environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, as a contribution to wider global reduction efforts, and taking action to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The Executive’s consultation on the review of its Scottish Climate Change Programme (a copy of which has been placed in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, Bib. number 38184) was published in December last year and summarised the Executive’s progress to date in responding to the threat of climate change. In September this year I announced that data published in Greenhouse Gas Inventories for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: 1990 – 2003 (Bib. number 37621) showed that greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland had fallen by 10% compared with Kyoto baselines.

Together with the UK Government, we have recently launched a consultation as the first stage in the development of a national climate change Adaptation Policy Framework. The document describes some of the action already taken by the Executive to build adaptive capacity in Scotland. A copy of the consultation document is available on the Executive’s climate change website at:

www.scotland.gov.uk/climatechange.

The Scottish Executive is committed to supporting the promotion of positive mental health and well-being and the prevention of mental illness. Delivering for Health sets out the Executive’s plans to build the lessons of the Doing Well by People with Depression programme into mainstream NHS mental health service delivery across every health board in Scotland.

NHS Greater Glasgow has invested £3 million in developing a new tier of services dedicated to common mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. These services support preventative measures such as early intervention in treating mental illness and promoting positive mental health.

NHS Greater Glasgow works in partnership with local statutory and voluntary services to supplement action on prevention of mental illness through its Community Mental Health Teams, this includes the Clydebank, Milngavie and Bearsden areas.