Chamber and committees

I refer the member to the answer to S2W-11318 answered on 3 November 2004. 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/wa.search.

The 196 swimming pools broken down by local authority area are noted in the table. Information on how many of the pools are open to the public outside school hours is not held centrally.

Local Authority	Number of Pools
Aberdeen City	16
Aberdeenshire	11
Angus	3
Argyll and Bute	2
City of Edinburgh	26
Clackmannanshire	3
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar	7
Dumfries and Galloway	3
Dundee City	7
East Ayrshire	3
East Dunbartonshire	3
East Lothian	3
East Renfrewshire	2
Falkirk	5
Fife	14
Glasgow City	13
Highland	8
Inverclyde	4
Midlothian	4
Moray	4
North Ayrshire	1
North Lanarkshire	12
Orkney Islands	6
Perth and Kinross	5
Renfrewshire	3
Scottish Borders	1
Shetland	3
South Ayrshire	0
South Lanarkshire	3
Stirling	6
West Dunbartonshire	2
West Lothian	13
Scotland	196

 

The information requested is set out in the table. It does not include swimming pools attached to schools.

Local Authority	Number  of Pools
Aberdeen City	7
Aberdeenshire	8
Angus	5
Argyll and Bute	3
City of Edinburgh	10
Clackmannanshire	1
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar	1
Dumfries and Galloway	4
Dundee City	2
East Ayrshire	1
East Dunbartonshire	2
East Lothian	5
East Renfrewshire	3
Falkirk	3
Fife	9
Glasgow City	13
Highland	13
Inverclyde	2
Midlothian	4
Moray	3
North Ayrshire	4
North Lanarkshire	8
Orkney Islands	1
Perth and Kinross	4
Renfrewshire	5
Scottish Borders	7
Shetland	8
South Ayrshire	5
South Lanarkshire	7
Stirling	2
West Dunbartonshire	3
West Lothian	7
Scotland	160

 

Information on the number of people using local authority swimming pools is not available nationally.

The secretariat comprises two Scottish Executive secondees and two consultants. The Executive canvassed internally to fill the two secondment opportunities; none of the appointments was advertised externally. The Cultural Commission’s Chairman appointed consultants with the necessary mix of skills, who could rapidly take forward the requirements of the commission’s work plan.

I can confirm that the Cultural Commission’s budget has been set at £487,000. We expect to commit £400,000 of this from programme expenditure, and the remainder from the Executive’s Administration Budget.

Executive support for theatre, as for all art-forms, is largely channelled through the Scottish Arts Council (SAC). The total SAC drama budget for 2004-05 is £12,792,900. This includes initial funding of £3.5 million for the National Theatre of Scotland for which further funding of £4 million per year up to and including year 2008-09 has been identified.

The Executive is fully committed to the creation of a Scottish Human Rights Commission within the lifetime of this Parliament. We are making the necessary progress on detailed consideration of all aspects of policy, including follow up on the consultation responses, in accordance with this timescale.

Officials from the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) completed the cataloguing process in February 2004 in accordance with NAS business objectives. 

The relevant documents were transferred to Crown Office in March 2004 in order that they could be reviewed in detail by Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service officials to allow me to determine what of the material can be released in its entirety, what can be released in an edited format to “anonymise” data and what is unsuitable for release.

The review and editing process has been a lengthy, complex and detailed one, necessitating the removal from documents of the names of living individuals and replacing with individual designations, such as “Witness 1” or “Child A” to preserve anonymity but ensure that the edited documents would still makes sense to any reader. Removing an individual’s name may, in somedocuments, not preserve anonymity, so it is also necessary to consider whether redaction of names is sufficient in each case. It will not be possible for each and every document to be released, even in an edited manner.

The process is nearing completion and it is anticipated that material will be available to the public at NAS in early 2005.

The Lord Advocate’s Guidelines on the Operation of Police Conditional Offers of Fixed Penalty, that contain instructions on the relevant thresholds for speeding offences, are confidential. It would not be in the public interest for those who are intent on driving in excess of the speed limit to know at what levels and in what way the various speed limits are enforced. The guidelines do not set hard and fast rules, but allow for downward variation of thresholds for action by local agreement between Area Procurators Fiscal and Chief Constables where there are particular issues of road safety. It could therefore be misleading to motorists if normal thresholds were published, since these local agreements allow for enforcement at lower speeds.

I refer the member to the question S2W-11072 answered on 2 November 2004. 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/wa.search.