Chamber and committees

The provision of fire and rescue services is currently a matter for each of the Joint Fire and Rescue Boards and Fire and Rescue Authorities not Scottish ministers.

No conversation took place between the Scottish Government, its agencies and the Shetland Times with regards to the editorial on the First Minister's visit to China. The inclusion of the editorial article about the First Minister’s visit was entirely at the discretion of the editor of the Shetland Times.

The Shetland Times is one of 108 local newspaper titles to carry a regular Scottish Government sponsored column under the terms of a commercial arrangement between the newspaper publishers and the Scottish Government’s media buying agency which was put in place by the previous Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition administration.

The column is designed to support Scottish Government public information and behaviour change campaigns. In this case the column was used to inform people about the arrangement with China whereby the pandas were loaned to Edinburgh zoo as part of a programme of strengthening ties with China in the areas of trade, culture, and education.

The cost of the sponsored column across the 108 local titles was £24,025.77 gross.

No discussions of this sort have taken place.

Clawback payments received go back into the “Support for Ferry Services” budget.

Please see the following information:

This is in the context of increasing subsidies paid to NorthLink Ferries Ltd, net of clawback payments, as set out in the following table:

Source: NorthLink Ferries Ltd and Transport Scotland.

The Road Equivalent Tariff scheme is funded from the “Road Equivalent Tariff” budget line.

Please see the information in the following table:

Source: David MacBrayne Ltd and Transport Scotland.

Note: *Included in this amount is the grant for the last three months of Cowal Ferries Ltd (April-June 2011) redundancy costs, grant for the first six months of the contract (30 June to end December 2011) to Argyll Ferries Ltd and the estimated grant for the remainder of the Financial Year for Argyll Ferries Ltd.

The following table details the Scottish Government spend on the Road Equivalent Tariff scheme since it started in October 2008.

Source: David MacBrayne Ltd and Transport Scotland.

The fee was increased, by Tavish Scott, from not exceeding £2 to not exceeding £20 from 1 April 2007, through The Disabled Persons (Badges for Motor Vehicles) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2007. At that time, I believe the then Scottish Executive recognised that the fee had not changed since 1983 and the increase was made to take account of inflation and assist local authorities meet the costs of issuing badges to successful applicants.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ssi/2007/162/contents/made.

The Scottish Government is not changing the fee as part of the current Blue Badge reforms.

It was not possible to calculate the average days taken to re-process applications across all applicants. This would require manually sifting through over 90,000 individual student records to determine which of multiple pieces of information supplied contributed to the recalculation. This would exceed the upper time limit for answering a parliamentary question.

However, at 11 January 2012 in the 2011-12 session, a total of 144,840 students have received at least one award notice, and of those 53,885 students (37%) have been issued with more than one award notice letter due to a re-calculation of their award. An average of 1.6 award letters have been issued per student. Note that these figures do not include “duplicate” award notices requested by students.