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Under the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988, private landlords can apply to the courts for possession of their property where the tenant, or anyone living with the tenant, has caused a nuisance or annoyance to neighbours or has been convicted by a court of immoral or illegal use of the premises. This is a discretionary ground and the sheriff will only grant the landlord possession if he believes it is reasonable to do so. To complement this legislation, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 brought in extended grounds for eviction which allows landlords to repossess a house where criminal conduct has been committed or where anti-social behaviour has been committed or is likely to be committed, either in the locality of the tenanted property by the tenant, or someone residing or lodging with him, or by visitors to the property. In addition to these legislative measures, we are considering ways to encourage sociable neighbourhood initiatives and are evaluating existing initiatives to see if they should be replicated elsewhere. We have also commissioned the Chartered Institute of Housing in Scotland to produce a think piece on how to tackle the problems of anti-social behaviour in the private sector.

The numbers of cases involving alleged contravention of environmental protection legislation referred to the Procurator Fiscal service by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency are set out in the table.

The decision on whether or not to proceed with prosecution in a particular case is for the Procurator Fiscal. The numbers of cases proceeded with and convictions secured are shown in the table.

	1/4/1996 to 31/3/1997	1/4/1997 to 31/3/1998	1/4/1998 to 31/3/1999	1/4/1999 to 31/3/2000	1/4/2000 to 26/1/2001
Cases referred to Procurators Fiscal1	37	70	73	84	51
Cases proceeded with	26	49	38	48	172
Percentage of cases proceeded with	70%	70%	52%	57%	33%2
Cases resulting in conviction	24	44	30	43	15
Percentage of cases proceeded with resulting in conviction	92%	90%	79%	90%	88%

Notes:

1. Figures may differ slightly to those published in SEPA's annual reports, depending on when legal proceedings were resolved.

2. 25 cases are currently under consideration by the Procurator Fiscal service.

The cost of producing the adverts was £115,542 and the media costs to place the adverts were £735,000. This was part of a £4.6 million three-stage pig meat advertising campaign run by the MLC.This MLC Pig Meat advertising campaign was not run in Scotland. The Scottish Executive was not involved in the campaign, did not contribute to it and no Scottish Minister had been in contact with the MLC about this initiative. A separate £600,000 MLC-funded Scottish campaign promoting pork as a "lean and healthy" product was run by Quality Meat Scotland.

This is a matter for Aberdeen and Grampian Tourist Board and its funding partners to decide.

The Scottish Police College offers workplace and open and distance learning as well as residential training involving the use of special facilities so that there is no single measure of its training capacity. However its ability to offer residential training is constrained by the number of bed places it can provide. The number of bed places available on a daily basis over the past five years is as follows:

1996-97	1997-98	1998-99	1999-2000	2000-01
432	316	425	425	733

The figure for 1997-98 was affected by a move from dormitory accommodation to study bedrooms. The figure for 2000-01 reflects the sharing of bedrooms by probationers. This is intended to be a short-term measure for dealing with exceptionally high levels of recruitment by police forces.

Strathclyde Police currently have access to air support through an air support unit based at the city heliport in Glasgow. Funding for the police is provided annually through the GAE process and resources are not allocated to specific operational areas or policing tasks.

Decisions on the provision of air support are operational matters for Chief Constables and police authorities and it is for them to take decisions on the costs and benefits of specific investment proposals in light of the resources available. Since 1997-98 there have been no formal applications for funding for the provision of air support. At that time an ACPOS Working Group concluded that if air cover was to be provided for Scottish police forces, the preferred approach would involve a national arrangement. This has been considered since by the Scottish Executive, police authorities and ACPOS without a final conclusion being reached. Earlier in the current financial year, Tayside Police wrote to the Scottish Executive Justice Department with an outline business case for setting up an air support unit in conjunction with Fife Constabulary. The response indicated that in the light of previous work on air support the department was unwilling to provide central funding for local provision, although that did not of course rule out the use of local funding where a case might be justified on the basis of local circumstances. This is the approach that has been adopted by Strathclyde which has leased a helicopter.

The Executive does not hold information in the form requested. The "UK online: the broadband future" report, published this month by the Office of the e-Envoy maps out planned ADSL roll-out, areas served by cable operators and regions with broadband fixed wireless access (BFWA) licensees and, on this basis, estimates that some 15% to 20% of the UK population would be left unserved by higher bandwidth and broadband services by 2003. The report states that this figure probably overestimates coverage since the BFWA licensees are unlikely to offer services throughout the regions where they have licences.

I understand that just over 15,000 organisations in the above categories are affected by withdrawal of reliefs.Total revenue forgone as a result of existing reliefs to these bodies is as set out in the table. The withdrawal of reliefs is being phased in over a five-year period. For some groups, withdrawal began in April 2000, and for the remainder will begin in April 2001.

Authority	£000
East of Scotland	7,299
North of Scotland	5,404
West of Scotland	6,259
TOTAL	18,962

These figures also take no account of the possibility that many organisations will take advantage of water metering, where this will reduce their costs. It is therefore likely that additional income to the authorities will accordingly be reduced.

The Executive is currently considering how the procurement of public sector broadband services might stimulate the wider supply of high bandwidth services by the industry to businesses and the community.However, the Executive recognises that Public/Private Partnerships may be needed to overcome the scale of demand delivery in the more remote parts of Scotland, and welcomes the current activities of the Highlands & Islands Partnership to secure European support for infrastructure development in such areas.