Chamber and committees

Investigations into the circumstances of the death of Ian Godley in February 1998 are not considered to be closed. Crown Counsel do not consider there to be sufficient evidence to bring proceedings at this time against any person in connection with Mr Godley's death. Accordingly the question of public interest does not arise.

The Information Centre has an annual budget of £163,250 for the purchase of whatever reference stock staff judge necessary to fulfill the anticipated information needs of MSPs, and maintain a central resource for the Parliament. MSPs may suggest items for Information Centre stock, which staff will consider for purchase.

There are no legal proceedings in progress against any of the parties that were responsible for the design and construction of the Kingston Bridge.The Secretary of State inherited two court actions against the consulting engineers who designed the bridge when he took over responsibility for this structure when the M8 through Glasgow was adopted as a trunk road on 1 April 1996. The actions were settled out of court in 1997 without any admission of liability on the part of the defendants. Each party bore its own expenses. Beyond that the terms of the settlement are confidential to the parties.

The total number of cochlear implants undertaken within the NHS in Scotland in the five years from 1994/95 is 176.

Cochlear implants undertaken in Scotland in the last five years have been carried out at the City Hospital, Edinburgh and Crosshouse Hospital, Kilmarnock. The number undertaken at each centre is provided in the table. During that period, 8 children were also referred to Nottingham and 9 children referred to Manchester for cochlear implants.Number Of Cochlear Implants Carried Out In Scotland : 1994/95 - 1998/99

		1994/95	1995/96	1996/97	1997/98	1998/99
Crosshouse Hospital, Kilmarnock	Adult Paediatric	11 10	11 12	13 17	15 19	19 21
City Hospital, Edinburgh	Adults	6	6	4	6	6

The specification for the Parliament web site was drawn up by reference to the recommendations of the Expert Panel on Information and Communications Technology (who reported to the Consultative Steering Group). The technical specifications were carefully designed to ensure that both excellent quality and wide accessibility (even by low-level or older versions of web browser software) were supported. The tendered responses for the web site design were rigorously checked to ensure that requirements were met in an appropriate and effective manner with due regard to technology standards, design objectives and best practice. The successful bid scored highly in these regards.

The need for searching was a principal consideration in planning the site. It is a major analysis and design task which will continue to develop over several months and which could only commence once the document formats and structure of the Parliament's published material had themselves been fully specified and developed. The implementation involves underpinning the whole site contents, including the Official Report, with a corporate database into which all the source material will be placed and which will enable a range of searching from the simple to the most sophisticated. The Communications Directorate has work well in hand to specify and model this database. It is intended to have the first elements of the corporate database developed and available to support site searching from mid September.

The original specification identified phases of work, starting with text-based initial content and subsequently enhancing the site with an underpinning database, once the format of the content could be confirmed and as the volume and complexity of published material increased. The work, although commissioned and completed under enormous pressure of time, has gone to schedule and met all mandatory requirements of the specification to date.

It was a mandatory requirement for the design of the Scottish Parliament's web site that it take account of how it could be accessed by people with a visual impairment. The facilities to translate or adapt internet material to accommodate visual impairment require to be used at the 'client' end, that is, they are modifications to the particular web browser tool used by the visually impaired person on their own PC. A well-designed web site will anticipate the use of standard tools of this type and ensure the fonts, colours and other formatting are as far as possible suitable for such interpretation. The Scottish Parliament web site continues to be developed with regard to the Royal National Institute for the Blind's guidance (www.rnib.org.uk) and that of W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (www.w3.org/WAI) (Web Accessibility Initiative International Program includes the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and research at the Institute National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, MIT, Keio University, The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.)

We are conducting an analysis of a random sample of questions from MSPs with a view to establishing an average cost figure.