Chamber and committees

I am pleased to be able to announce that the Executive will take a financial interest in Partnerships UK, launched today, in a bid to ensure Scottish projects and interests are safeguarded.

Public/Private Partnerships have a significant role to play in delivering our agenda for new schools and hospitals. Last June I announced important reforms to the way we are taking forward these partnerships in Scotland to ensure better safeguards for the public and staff interest and greater transparency in the process.

The new body - itself a new PPP - will initially support schools projects for East and Midlothian, and refurbished primary schools for Glasgow City Council as well as a ground-breaking e-commerce project for the Scottish Tourist Board.

The Scottish Executive fully appreciates the need to articulate learning, training and skills development with opportunities for employment. Our Programme for Government has been designed to create the conditions for a lifelong learning culture; and also to ensure that education and training provision is relevant to the needs of employers and employees. Learndirect Scotland and the new Scottish Labour Market Intelligence Unit will have crucial roles to play in predicting the needs of the labour market and in matching these needs to relevant provision.

The Occupational Health and Safety Services Strategy Towards a Safer Healthier Workplace made clear that, as a source of trusted specialist advice on occupational health, the NHSiS should promote and facilitate the development of high quality occupational health with employers throughout Scotland.

Information on the level and standard of occupational health service provision outwith Scotland is not available. The Scottish Executive's aim is clearly set out in the Occupational Health and Safety Services Strategy Towards a Safer Healthier Workplace published in November 1999, which promoted an exemplar role for the NHSiS. The strategy also set out the minimum standard of service provision expected for staff of the NHSiS and advocated the development of clinical and audit networks to allow benchmarking and to ensure uniformly high standard occupational health throughout Scotland. An Occupational Health and Safety Service Strategy Implementation Group is currently being set up which will be responsible for ensuring the strategy action points are achieved, that includes a system of peer audit review and benchmarking.

The Education for Work and Enterprise agenda, promoted by the Scottish Executive, supports a wide range of enterprise education activities aimed at developing links between schools and the world of work. A research project has recently commenced, which will examine the impact of education for work related activities on disaffected young people.

Scotland's prisons offer a range of drug rehabilitation services to meet the needs, aspirations and motivations of their populations. These range from awareness programmes to improve knowledge levels and motivation for change, through one-to-one counselling, groupwork and in-depth therapeutic rehabilitation programmes. In reporting year 1999-2000 over 5,000 prisoners accessed these services.

There are many ways in which new technology can help to reduce the time police officers spend on administration. Electronic links with the procurator fiscal, for example, as part of the Integration of Scottish Criminal Justice Information Systems project (ISCJIS) are reducing the administrative effort required in handling police crime reports. The Scottish Police Information Strategy which will integrate forces' IT systems, and the Public Safety and Radio Communications Service, which will provide the police on the beat with online access to data, will bring significant benefits in the future.

Spending on drug treatment by health boards is being boosted by £6 million over a three-year period, bringing annual spend to over £11 million. This does not include HIV/AIDS expenditure, some of which is drug related. Health boards are also free to use resources from other Hospital and Community Health Services budgets for drug misuse work, if required.

Provision to local authorities for services to drug misusers is provided as part of Grant Aided Expenditure (GAE), but is not separately identified. GAE increased by £43.4 million (4%) for 2000-01 for social work services. In 1999-2000, the overall budgeted expenditure on drugs and alcohol services by local authorities was £8.8 million.

It is for each Drug Action Team to review the adequacy of local drug misuse services, and consider whether any action is required.

The deployment of police officers is entirely an operational matter for chief constables. However, the Scottish Executive is committed to having policies in place which ensure that the maximum number of police officers are available for policing duties. This includes the financial commitment we are making for a range of technology developments to assist the police such as PSRCS (a new radio communication system); SPIS (an information strategy to integrate Forces' IT systems); and ISCJIS (a streamlined electronic reporting system). In addition, the number of civilian staff is presently at an all time high thus releasing police officers from administration to concentrate on policing duties. We have also set up the Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency with a budget of £10 million over the next two years which will further increase the number of front-line police officers.

The Executive is committed to legislate to introduce a statutory right of access to land and inland water, subject to a Code of responsible behaviour. The legislation will benefit Scottish tourism by enhancing the opportunities for people to engage in recreational activities on land and inland water.