Chamber and committees

A report of the review ofnursing in the community will be published in due course.

TheExecutive has clearly demonstrated its commitment to our higher education institutionsby increasing funding to over £1 billion per year by 2008. This record level offunding represents a real terms increase of 23% since 2004-05. The Executivehas achieved this major increase in funding while firmly maintaining our policyof free tuition for Scottish students.

The Scottish Executive has noplans to encourage local authorities to privatise the delivery of social care services.Under their duty of best value, all local authorities are required to make arrangementsto secure continuous improvement in performance (while maintaining an appropriatebalance between quality and cost) and in doing so to have regard to economy, efficiency,effectiveness, equal opportunities requirements and to the achievement of sustainabledevelopment.

This information is not heldcentrally. I have asked the Chair of sportscotland to write to you settingout these details.

This information is not heldcentrally. I have asked the Chair of sportscotland to write to you settingout these details.

Every effort will be made toredeploy those staff who wish to remain with NHSScotland. This would involveworking with individuals to determine their skills and aspirations and to seewhat redeployment opportunities are available across NHSScotland. In someinstances staff may wish to retrain under the NHSScotland National ServicesScotland Careers in Transition policy which is currently under development.

A Framework for MaternityServices in Scotland published in February 2001 sets out clearly andexplicitly the maternity service which should be offered across Scotland. Thisincludes details of the number and timing of ultrasound scans which should beoffered during pregnancy.

We have received a draft copyof the report on the Choose to Reuse trial, run by the Waste and ResourcesAction Programme (WRAP), and WRAP will publish the final report on their websiteshortly.

Golf tourism is currentlyworth in the region of £300 million to the Scottish economy, and our aim is to growthis sector by 50% by 2015. The Scottish Executive and VisitScotland are thereforecommitted to substantial promotional activity in this area.

VisitScotland willspend around £1 million on promoting golf tourism this year. It has a verysuccessful presence at major golf tournaments such as the Open, the Scottish Open,the Scandinavian Masters and the Deutsche Bank Open in Germany. VisitScotland also attends the PGA Orlando Golf Show with trade partners– this is the biggest golf show in the USA;it undertakes the sponsorship of the International Pairs, which allows marketingexecutives to speak regularly to club golfers in the UK,and it produces the Official Guide to Golfin Scotland on an annual basis.

Sam Torrance, CatrionaMarshall and Steven O’Hara are all sponsored by VisitScotland as Ambassadors forScottish Golf, and to promote Scotland in key markets like the US.

Best Value in tendering processesis achieved through a number of means; all of which are set out in the ScottishPublic Finance Manual which applies to the Scottish Executive, its agenciesand non-departmental public bodies. These include requirements that goods and servicesare acquired by competition unless there is a convincing reason to the contrary,that procurement decisions are based on value for money having due regard to proprietyand regularity, that procurement processes are managed by staff with appropriateskills, experience and training and that purchasers preserve the highest ethicalstandards in their dealings with suppliers.

“Value for money” is definedin the manual as the optimum combination of whole-life cost and quality (or fitnessfor purpose) to meet the user’s requirement. Securing value for money in procurementis crucial to the wider objective of delivering high quality, cost-effective publicservices.

We are not aware of any evidenceof cartel practices amongst those submitting tenders to the Scottish Executive.