Chamber and committees

Regulations have been laid today which designate the following areas as groundwater Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs):

• Moray, Aberdeenshire, Banff and Buchan;
• Strathmore and Fife, and
• Lothian and the Borders.

Copies of the detailed maps of the NVZs which accompany the regulations will be placed in the Parliament's Reference Centre, at local Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department area offices and in the Executives' offices at Pentland House and Victoria Quay in Edinburgh. A tabulated summary of the monitoring evidence will accompany the map copies.

The Scottish Executive is responsible for lighting on motorways and trunk roads whilst the responsibility for lighting on local roads rests with the appropriate local authority. Both the Executive and local authorities work to the relevant British Standards for road lighting installation and employ technologies which take full account of advances in efficiency and design. All trunk road lighting schemes are also designed in accordance with the best practice guidance set out in the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges. The objective is to provide lighting which achieves night-time road safety objectives whilst minimising adverse environmental impacts and intrusion. All new and replacement trunk road lighting is of a less polluting type which offers superior control of the emitted light, giving a reduction in the amount of light spillage into the night sky. The Executive is not currently undertaking any research in respect of reducing visual pollution from street lighting

Statistically reliable estimates cannot be obtained from the sample of GP consultations collected nationally, because of the low number of cases recorded.

A central plank of our freight transport policy is encouraging freight to be transferred from road to rail and water. Our commitment to encouraging modal shift is demonstrated by a doubling of resources to £36 million in the three-year period up to 2003-04 for the Scottish Executive's Freight Facilities Grant scheme. This scheme helps companies invest in the alternative facilities needed to compete in financial terms with road transport.Awards of grant totalling up to £5.1 million have already been made to two projects transporting timber by sea from the Mull of Kintyre and the Morvern Peninsula to Ayrshire. There are a number of other timber projects that are now being looked at in terms of moving timber by rail or sea rather than road.

An order was laid before the Scottish Parliament on 28 March 2002 in exercise of powers conferred by sections 93(3) and 113 of the Scotland Act 1998. The instrument specifies certain functions for the purposes of section 93(1) of that act, which may be exercised by a Minister of the Crown on behalf of Scottish ministers. The relevant functions in relation to the deliberate release of genetically modified organisms are:maintaining the public register;determining those particulars which may be excluded from the public register for reasons of commercial confidentiality, andreceiving and examining applications for consent to release or market genetically modified organisms.The order does not transfer ministerial responsibility for these functions but, in practice, provides for suitably qualified officials in a UK Government department to carry out certain functions in accordance with the terms of an agency arrangement. This clarifies an arrangement which has been in place since the mid-1990s and does not constitute any change in practice.

The precautionary principle is already fundamental to the European regulatory framework governing the deliberate release into the environment of genetically modified organisms.

The Scottish air transport consultation document will be published in the summer. It is intended that its publication will be co-ordinated with the launch of other UK regional consultation documents.

The report A Bridge To Skye Feasibility Study was prepared by JMP Consultants Ltd for Highland Regional Council in 1986. It was subsequently lodged as production SORD11 at the public local enquiry into the Skye Bridge project in 1992. A copy has been placed in the Parliament's Reference Centre (Bib. number 20055).

We work closely with Scottish Enterprise to help Scottish companies working in the area of renewable energy to grow, and to encourage diversification of other companies into the manufacturing opportunities which are already arising in Scotland from development of renewable energy sources under the forthcoming Renewables Obligation (Scotland). We will continue to back our own renewables industry, to attract new investment to Scotland, and to persuade Scottish businesses to capitalise on this new business opportunity.

The Scottish Executive's timetable for the payment process to begin is dependent upon the formal wind-up of the Scottish Transport Group pension schemes by the trustees.