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NorthLink Ferries Ltd have recently undertaken a passenger survey to improve their understanding of their customer base, including questions about customers’ opinions of the company’s ticket pricing regime.

Transport Scotland is currently undertaking a tender exercise to procure the next Northern Isles Ferry Services contract. This will be in place by July 2012.

In Your Scotland, Your Voice paragraph 8.42 sets out Scotland’s relationship to international defence organisations.

All applications received by the guarantee date were processed as submitted in advance of course start dates in September 2011. SAAS is up to date with the processing of applications.

Student loans may be restricted to the non-income assessed award if a student has failed to evidence actual household income in a previous year or has not made a declaration of estimated household income in the current application. The award is reprocessed if further information is submitted.

Student loans may also be withheld if the student fails to enrol or does not provide a valid National Insurance number.

Top-up loan applications for academic session 2011-12, for those students who did not request a loan in their initial application or requested less than their full entitlement, can be made at any point between April 2011 and March 2012.

Formal Complaints and Appeals to the Student Awards Agency for Scotland receive a response within 14 days.

As of the 12 December 2011, 150,633 applications for student support have been submitted to the Student Awards Agency for Scotland. This total includes student nurses and postgraduate students as well as the main student support programme.

All applications received in June and July 2011 have been processed as submitted by the student.

Reprocessing of applications can occur if the student later submits an application for additional forms of support or provides household income evidence to support an income assessed award.

The Student Awards Agency for Scotland (SAAS) handles around 3,500 calls per day during the peak processing session.

Action is in hand to improve call queuing. SAAS will also increase outgoing information on the status of individual applications and on the prioritisation, by course start date, of those applications received by the guarantee date (30 June 2011).

The draft regulation currently gives the following definition; “permanent grassland means land used to grow grasses or other herbaceous forage naturally (self-seeded) or through cultivation (sown) and that has not been included in the crop rotation of the holding for five years or longer; it may include other species suitable for grazing provided that the grasses and other herbaceous forage remain predominant”.

Heather is not an herbaceous plant. However, the draft regulation as it currently stands allows the inclusion of other species suitable for grazing provided grasses and other herbaceous forage remain predominant.

The draft regulation is currently being discussed at working group stage in Europe and is subject to change.

Farmers moving full double EID tagged or single “Slaughter” tagged sheep off their holding to a Critical Control Point can rely on the CCP to read and upload to the ScotEID database all individual IDs of the animals moved without fear of penalties in the event of missed reads.

Farmers moving single slaughter tagged animals on to their holding need only record the flock mark and number of animals per flock mark – there is no need to record individual IDs.

Farmers who choose to rely on ScotEID to record individual IDs of double EID tagged sheep moved on to their holding are advised to check ScotEID regularly but provided that read rates are close to the average of 95% or that no more than one or two animals have been misread then no remedial action should be required.

Measures have also been put in place by which farmers may contact ScotEID for information on read rates and advice on rectifying errors. These measures have been introduced in order to help farmers reduce the likelihood of penalties applying following an inspection. We have worked with NFUS to communicate this message and to raise awareness of the most common errors found at inspection.

The definition of permanent grassland has been discussed with UK and other Devolved Administrations on a number of occasions. The issue has also been raised with European Commission officials and our views have been fed in to the Commission’s Working Groups that are discussing the draft regulations.