Chamber and committees

Fuel duty rebate may only be paid on services which are registered with the Traffic Commissioner as local bus services. We have no plans to extend the scheme to include mobile shops.

Bus services provided or secured by a local education authority are eligible for fuel duty rebate if they are registered with the Traffic Commissioner as a local service, and if they are normally available to, and regularly used by, members of the general public.We have no plans to extend the FDR scheme to bus services which only take pupils to and from school. We have no information centrally about fuel consumption by these school buses and therefore no estimate of the cost has been made.

The Scottish Executive has no evidence that flight supplements on Scottish flights are in breach of competition legislation. If it received such evidence the Scottish Executive would refer it to the competition authorities.

This information is not held centrally

Information about taxi trips made by Scottish residents is available from the National Travel Survey (NTS). The figures given below relate to the years 1992 to 1998 inclusive.(i) the average length of a taxi trip was 3.1 miles(ii) a breakdown of taxi trips into distance bands is as follows:

Length of trip	Percentage of taxi trips
Under 2 miles	43 %
2 to under 5 miles	41 %
5 miles and over	16 %

(iii) a breakdown of taxi trips by their purpose is as follows:

Purpose of trip	Percentage of taxi trips
Commuting; business; travelling to/from education	23 %
Shopping and other personal business; escorting someone to/from education or elsewhere	27 %
Leisure	50 %

(iv) a breakdown of taxi trips by the traveller's socio-economic group is as follows:

Socio-economic group	Percentage of taxi trips
Professional / managerial / non-manual	40 %
Manual	27 %
Retired / other economically inactive	33 %

(v) It is estimated that Scottish residents make a total of around 75 million taxi trips per year, of which about three million are "linked to rail trips" ( 4% of the taxi trips in the sample were part of a journey for which rail was used as the main mode of travel).The NTS's Scottish sample provides information about travel by Scottish residents. It cannot provide information about the use of taxis by others, like tourists from abroad: such information is unavailable.Because the NTS's Scottish sample size is not large, and because only a small proportion of journeys involve the use of a taxi, the NTS's Scottish samples for seven years had to be combined in order to obtain a sample of taxi trips which was large enough to produce these statistics. As with all surveys, the results could be affected by factors such as sampling variability and non-response bias.

I have already explained that the Crown Office was not aware of allegations about the FADEC system until after the conclusion of the Fatal Accident Inquiry.

The deployment of resources in policing this conference is an operational matter for the Chief Constable. Funding for the police is provided annually through the GAE process and not on an ad hoc basis for specific events.

The Scottish Executive's Energy Efficiency Office works with the Energy Saving Trust in Scotland to promote the UK Powershift programme, which supports the introduction and use of vehicles using clean fuels. These include natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas and electricity. This programme is an important initiative in kick-starting the switch to clean fuels within Scotland and operates across all sectors without targeting specific vehicles or organisations. The UK Government reduced duty on LPG to 7.5 pence per litre in the 1999 Budget providing an incentive to potential users, including taxi drivers.

The possibility of providing licensing authorities with a power to licence taxi and private hire car booking offices is under consideration and consultation will take place in due course.

The research relating to rural transport which, the Executive is currently funding or has funded in the last year is as follows:

Monitoring and Evaluation of the Rural Transport Funding Package will gather information on the number and type of transport initiatives which have been set up as a result of the package, and assess their impact on transport provision in rural Scotland. The study is being carried out by Steer Davies Gleave and is due for completion in October 2000.

The Executive is contributing towards a study to develop methodologies to identify areas where environmental and transport policies work in harmony and also areas where tensions exist. The Executive funded element of the work is the refinement and testing of methodology by applying it to a review of transport and environment policies in rural Scotland. The Scottish study is being carried out jointly by the Universities of Cardiff and Aberdeen and is due to be completed in August 2000.Research is planned for 2000-01 into Rural Accessibility; Accidents Involving Tourists in Rural Scotland and a Good Practice Guide on Rural Transport which will provide advice on how to develop multi-agency community transport initiatives.