Equalities and Human Rights Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, October 6, 2016

Official Report 547KB pdf

Decision on Taking Business in Private

Good morning and welcome to the committee’s fifth meeting in session 5. This is our first meeting since the committee’s name and remit changes.

The Equalities and Human Rights Committee is known as EHRiC—I hope that you enjoy the acronym. That will help you to remember who we are. We will be filtering everything that we do through EHRiC because if it does not work for EHRiC, it does not work for anyone. We are really looking forward to that.

I ask everyone to put any electronic devices into flight mode. I am happy for you to use them, but you should turn off their sound, as it interferes with the broadcasting system.

You should be around a foot away from your microphone and you should not touch any buttons. The broadcasting team will deal with the sound for us. That is because you might switch your microphone on, the broadcasting team might switch it off, and you might switch it back on again, and we do not want that. That would not be good.

I am the convener of the committee. We have received apologies from our colleague David Torrance. Linda Fabiani is substituting for him. It is lovely to have her here.

Our first agenda item is a decision on taking items 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in private. Are committee members content to do that?

Members indicated agreement.