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Tender documents are commercially sensitive and it is therefore not the practice of the Scottish Executive to make them public. The terms of reference for the independent review being carried out by Deloitte & Touche have been placed in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre.

As I announced to Parliament in my statement on 6 September (Official Report, col. 25), Deloitte & Touche were appointed on 5 September.

I have confidence in the professional judgement of those who undertook the making of scripts this year. The Scottish Qualifications Authority have long-established quality assurance procedures for the marking process. The inquiry, which I have commissioned, will determine whether they were applied fully and correctly this year and make recommendations about how quality assurance on marking should operate in future.

The recruitment of markers is an operational issue for the Scottish Qualifications Authority. However, the independent inquiry into this year's exam results which I have commissioned will look at recruitment of markers and will make recommendations about how the procedures should operate in future.

The independent inquiry which I have commissioned will determine what caused the problems with the production and issue of this year's exam results and how these can be avoided in future.

I refer Mr Ewing to the answer I gave in response to oral question S1O-2316 on 28 September.

Many public sector bodies already make extensive use of high speed communications links to facilitate dealings with the public and businesses; to provide access to information sources on intranets and the world wide web; and to speed up internal public sector processes. It is a matter for individual public bodies to decide whether such communication services represent an appropriate investment for them. The Executive's response to the Digital Scotland report made clear that where public sector investment in communication services is taking place we are keen to see closer collaboration between the public sector bodies involved where this will help to reduce costs or improve services.

The Scottish Executive has been connected to broadband services through the Government Secure Intranet (GSI) for two years, and has had active discussions with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and individual local authorities about the possibility of their organisations joining the GSI.

The Higher Education sector already has communications links with capacity many times larger than ADSL or ISDN can provide. All Scottish Further Education colleges will have high capacity communication links by April 2001. Over half of all Scottish secondary schools and nearly 40% of primaries are already using ISDN communications. PricewaterhouseCoopers are concluding an investigation for the Scottish Executive into how broadband communications will be provided to all Scottish schools.

The total current and projected future costs of high-speed communications services for the public sector are not held centrally.

I will have to see the nature of any interim conclusions in the reports of the two committees before deciding whether any consultation on the Executive's response is appropriate.

The expanding e-commerce sector is one which is expressing a strong interest in Scotland as a business location.

Locate in Scotland and its partners see these projects as representing substantial opportunities for inward investment and are ensuring that companies are aware of the attributes Scotland has to offer to make it a prime location for e-business. These include a first class telecoms infrastructure, the availability of suitable sites and a workforce which possesses the language skills that will encourage dot.com companies to make Scotland the base for their European operations.

HM Inspectorate of Schools has no locus in the administration of marking. However, Education Department officials including HMI became aware in June that SQA were short of markers in some subjects.