As we have heard, the Scottish crime and justice survey 2008-09 found that, of those adults who had jobs involving contact with the public, 35 per cent had experienced either verbal or physical abuse and 7 per cent had experienced physical abuse.The previous Scottish Executive worked on the issue in partnership with my former colleagues in the STUC, and the initial secondment of Linda Shanahan, an STUC general council member, led to the publication of the strategy document “Protecting Public Service Workers: When the customer isn’t right”.I am pleased that that partnership has survived the change in Government and continues to this day.