Chamber and committees

The Scottish Voluntary Charter on Smoking in Public Places was launched on 23 May 2000. It is too early to measure effectively the impact that the Charter is having. However, Charter Implementation Guides have been distributed to 20,000 businesses. A survey of the on-licensed trade businesses involved is to be undertaken in April 2001 to establish the awareness of, and uptake of the Charter. In addition, the Executive will be repeating its original survey (carried out by MVA), later this year.

The Executive does not hold information on council housing stock within parliamentary constituencies. On the basis of returns from the council, the total local authority housing stock in Glasgow at 31 March 1997 was estimated to be 105,035 and at 31 March 2000 it was estimated to be 92,216.

This information is not available.

As at 31 January, the Executive has received around 550 postcards from members of the public campaigning for a new Victoria Infirmary. The Department has asked Greater Glasgow Health Board to consider these, since public consultation on the review of acute services is a matter in the first place for the board.

I met the Chair, Chief Executive and other senior officials of Scottish Homes on 27 November to review their performance against ministerial targets in the current year. I had a further meeting with the Chief Executive on 5 December.

The Scottish Executive will judge the impact of Smoking Kills in part by measuring Scotland's performance against the smoking targets set out in Annex A of the Public Health White Paper, Towards a Healthier Scotland which was published in February 1999 (available in the Parliament's Reference Centre).

The Executive will also be monitoring progress in a number of other areas to check how the measures are working. Health boards are expected to monitor and evaluate the success of their smoking cessation initiatives. An independent survey on smoking in public places is planned to monitor the impact of the Scottish Voluntary Charter on Smoking in Public Places.

The total expenditure by the Health Education Board for Scotland on initiatives relating specifically to priorities outlined in Smoking Kills amounted to £749,544 in financial year 1999-2000 and £1.5 million in the financial year 2000-01.

The Scottish Executive regards action to tackle smoking among young people as a key priority and smoking cessation has been identified as an area for investment from the £26 million health improvement fund.

The Executive has provided the Health Education Board for Scotland with resources from the health improvement fund to develop work on cessation and to further set up prevention activity targeted at young people across a range of settings including schools, communities and youth work.

The Scottish Executive is taking forward a range of measures to reduce levels of smoking among young people. These include health education and promotion activities such as mass media advertising and Smokeline; a new enforcement package to target underage sales of tobacco and targeted smoking cessation services. A proportion of the additional funding being made available under the £26 million health promotion fund announced on 20 August will also be used for a major drive to cut young people's smoking.

I have asked Tony Cameron, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service to respond. His response is as follows:

The following table shows the average amount of additional time spent in prison through "loss of remission" and "additional days" in 1999.

	Number of awards	Total amount (days) awarded	Average (days)
Loss of remission	57	168	3
Additional days	4,727	25,541	5