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Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL) has undertaken a major redevelopment of Brodick harbour. No upgrades will be required to facilitate berthing of the new ferry.

A Ministerial Task Force for Ardrossan was established in February 2016 to ensure improvement of the operational effectiveness of the Ardrossan facility in supporting the lifeline ferry services and the new vessel on the Arran route.

A number of options for infrastructure improvements at Ardrossan Harbour are currently being considered by Transport Scotland, North Ayrshire Council, Peel Ports, CalMac and CMAL as they look collectively to improve resilience of the facility over the long-term.

The original vessel design has been updated with the additional provision of mooring winches.

The MV Glen Sannox was launched on 21 November 2017. Sea trials are normally carried out by the shipyard 4 to 8 weeks prior to vessel delivery.

Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd (FMEL) have advised that they aim to deliver the vessel in Winter 2018-2019.

The new ferries are being designed and built by Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd (FMEL) to be capable of operating in the challenging weather conditions experienced on the Clyde and Hebrides ferry services.

The new ferry for Arran has 3 x bow transverse thrusters, each rated at 620kW and one stern transverse thruster rated at 480kW.

The new vessel has 3 times the transverse thruster power in comparison to MV Caledonian Isles, the larger of the two vessels currently operating the route; which has 2 x 360 kW bow transverse thrusters (total 720kW).

Operation of a vessel in adverse weather will remain at the Master’s discretion, in accordance with maritime legislation.

In October 2015, Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL) announced that Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd (FMEL) in Port Glasgow had been awarded the contracts worth £97 million to build two 100 metre ‘dual-fuel’ ferries; i.e. £48.5m per vessel.

In my letter of 9 November 2017 to the Convenor of the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee, I noted that FMEL has indicated that delivery of the first of these ferries, the MV Glen Sannox, is expected to be delayed from summer 2018 to winter 2018-19. The vessel will subsequently enter into service following trials and familiarisation by CalMac Ferries Ltd.

There have been some agreed design changes during the build process. Additional costs agreed between CMAL and FMEL relate to enhanced mooring winching arrangements at £800k per vessel.

The figures are defined as follows:

• Niche Occurrences (all crimes/offences) recorded on D Division, committed between 1 Dec and 2 Jan for each year

• Counts occurrences either flagged as Alcohol-related and/or alcohol-specific offences

• Counts only occurrences where premises are described as “On-Train”

The Scottish Government is strongly committed to encouraging increased use of public transport. That is why we invest over £1billion a year in public transport. It is a matter for individual employers whether they levy a charge on employees to park at work. In our draft Climate Change Plan we propose that, where there are charges to park at workplaces, that these should be used to incentivise ULEVs.

In 2010, the Scottish Government legislated to reduce the maximum class size in Primary 1 to 25, its lowest ever level. Since then the number of P1 pupils in a class size of 26 or more has decreased by 90% from 6,896 in 2010 to 631 in 2017.

The Scottish Government is taking a range of actions to help increase the number teachers, including committing £88 million this year to make sure every school has access to the right number of teachers with the right skills, investing over £1 million through the Scottish Attainment Challenge to support universities in developing new innovative routes into teaching, and launching the second phase of our “Teaching Makes People” recruitment campaign. This action has halted a period of steady decline in teacher recruitment, resulting in almost 800 more teachers than there were two years ago.

The information requested is not held centrally. The data the Scottish Government receives from Police Scotland is a general count of the number of crimes and offences recorded by the police, split by local authority, and the number cleared up by the police. We don’t receive further details on the specific dates of these crimes and offences. This means we are unable to identify how many drink driving offences were recorded over the festive period in 2015-16 and 2016-17.

The Scottish Government is currently undertaking a review of the water and sewerage charges exemption scheme. The results, including any proposed changes, will be published in early 2018.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on the stops that have skipped each year broken down by how many times, on the Borders Railway.

ScotRail provides Transport Scotland with performance information by Sector Group and these are monitored against the specified benchmarks contained in the Franchise Agreement.