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The powers of direction granted by section 11 of the Natural Heritage (Scotland) Act 1991 and section 9 of the Further and Higher Education (Scotland) Act 1992 have never been used.

Copies of these documents have been submitted to the Education, Culture and Sport Committee.

The Scottish Executive is committed to integrating the principles of environmentally and socially sustainable development into all its policies. In pursuit of this commitment, we have let a consultancy to develop proposals for a set of sustainable development indicators covering waste, energy and travel, relevant to Scotland's distinctive environment. The indicators will help focus on specific actions and on measuring their effectiveness. They may also be important in applying strategic environmental assessment, stemming form a proposed EC Directive, now in final form. The cost of the consultancy is about £27,000. No further spend on consultancies on sustainable development indicators is planned. If the Executive decides to proceed with the development of indicators, there will be costs associated with data collection and dissemination. It is too early to say now what those costs would be.

The Scottish Executive also let this month a contract for about £20,000 for a scoping study to review the experience of strategic environmental assessment in other countries and consider how to apply it to Executive programmes. A key objective is to increase public participation in the process. We will consider carefully how to inform the public about the issues surrounding the application of strategic environmental assessment.

There have been no recalls of scallops by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) due to samples failing end product testing. In the event that a commercially processed product fails end-product testing, it is the responsibility of the producer to ensure that products which could pose a danger to public health are not placed on the market. The FSA are not informed of the results.

There are no plans to introduce end-product testing as the sole precondition for allowing scallops to enter the market.

A senior official within the Scottish Executive Communications and Information Services Division met with the Scottish Qualifications Authority on 28 March. Details of the meeting and further action by the Executive have been provided to the Education, Culture and Sport Committee.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-9735.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-9735.

It is not the practice of the Scottish Executive to make available advice from officials to Ministers.

There are a variety of categories of public bodies including Executive, Advisory and Tribunal Non-Departmental Public Bodies, NHS Bodies, state-owned companies and public corporations. They operate at various levels of delegated responsibility, including the way in which they use consultancy services. Information on the use of these services is not held centrally.