Item 7 is a brief discussion of the proposed chamber event on workforce planning. The Conveners Group has approved in principle support for the event and the Presiding Officer has given us permission to use the chamber. I invite members' views about proposed dates for the event. Two dates have been identified that seem likely to be the most useful: Monday 21 March, which members might consider a little too soon; and Monday 11 April, which is the Monday immediately after the Easter recess. Do members have strong feelings about either date?
Should we go for the later date?
We should hold the event on the later date.
Is it the general opinion of the committee that 11 April is preferable to 21 March?
Members indicated agreement.
In that case, we will go ahead and start to make the various logistical arrangements that are required to ensure that the event works.
There may be criticism from some people about that. We identified and engaged with people during the inquiry process and our evidence taking, and those people should form the target group that we bring to the final conclusion, rather than MSPs from the committee identifying people from their areas. I do not know how we have arrived at this situation.
First, I do not regard the public debate as a conclusion to the work that has gone before. We are using our report as a springboard for the public debate, but we should remember that we said that we will return to the issues when Professor David Kerr reports. Secondly, I do not want the public debate simply to be a debate between the various institutions that are involved. If we simply go back to the people who gave us evidence, the danger is that we will just replicate what has gone before. I want to give the wider public an opportunity to be directly involved, and given the nature of the geographical areas that are represented by members of the committee I would have thought that we could provide the names of a wide range of people in Scotland who can come forward and be part of the debate.
How many people do you envisage being involved?
The event will be held in the chamber.
Would it be possible to include the people who have just been mentioned as well as the members of the public whom we invite?
Of course. We will invite many of what might be termed the usual suspects, but I want to go beyond that. The event is called a public debate, and I would like to try to include some individual members of the public, and not simply members of the various—
You have said that already. We are not excluding the people who have been campaigning. I do not know why you are suggesting a different method. What about Jamie Stone and some of the other people who have been dealing with campaigns, such as Maureen Macmillan? To me, the point has not been well argued about why, by giving members the opportunity to select people in their own back yards, we should depart from the practice of the clerks and others identifying people to bring to the committee.
I am not asking you to select people. I am asking you to put forward suggestions, because the clerks are not necessarily in a position to know in every area of Scotland who might be most representative of the on-going campaigns. I am keen to ensure that the campaigns that have been proceeding in various areas of Scotland are represented. If there are identifiable gaps in respect of the geographical spread of the committee, that can be dealt with by the clerks individually going to see members from some of the areas that are not represented here, such as the Western Isles or Caithness and Sutherland. That is fair enough, but my suggestion is simply to ensure the widest possible access to the debate.
The guiding principle should be that the debate goes as wide as possible. We should build on the contact that we have made with people so far, but we should also take other organisations into account—[Interruption.]. Could we have a bit of silence, please? There are some organisations that we did not contact when we were out and about previously, simply because of where we went.
A detailed proposal will still have to come before the committee. At this stage, we have an agreement in principle for the use of the chamber and an agreement in principle for the event from the Conveners Group. There will be cost factors to consider, and we still have to agree a final invitation list. A detailed paper on that will be required. I ask members to think beyond the usual suspects. There is a danger of having a repetitive and sterile debate if we do not ensure that the widest possible areas of the public are given access to the debate.
Who are the usual suspects?
We could go through the various people from whom we have taken evidence on workforce planning.
So we are excluding them, then.
No, we are not going to exclude them. It is not an either/or situation; it is a them-plus situation. I want to ensure that the plus part of that encompasses the widest spread possible.
Never mind abstinence plus—this is invitations plus. Your suggestion is absolutely right, convener. The wider debate that we aim to hold is possible. I understand what you are saying: the clerks will work up a guest list, and you are inviting members of the committee to contribute to that guest list. I do not think that there is anything wrong with that.
Such events are better if more than just the usual suspects take part. I am not entirely convinced, however, that people who have been involved in specific campaigns for specific facilities are necessarily the people who will be able to give the most to the debate. When people get involved in campaigns for facilities and services, it is largely due to an emotional attachment to those facilities and services. They will not necessarily know what the workforce reasoning behind some of the decisions or proposals has been. In some areas, there have not been campaigns over specific facilities. I hope that we will be able to nominate people whom we feel are able to put something into the debate.
The point is to have a debate, and a debate means having more than one side to the argument. I want to ensure that the people you are talking about, who might have been arguing from a narrow perspective, are exposed to some of the other issues and arguments that will come out during the debate. That means including both sides. There is often a tendency to downplay some of the arguments. Arguments that stem from emotions still have to be taken on board by everybody. The people who are making those arguments are our voters, and they are customers of the national health service. We need to make it possible for people to express themselves as openly and widely as possible.
I do not think that anybody is suggesting that that should not be the case. It is a matter of how much people might have to contribute to the debate.
We all have a fair idea about which people from our own areas might be the most capable of contributing to the debate, and about who might find it more difficult. I ask members to give some names, and we will go to them. Not everybody will agree to participate, but I want to ensure that people have the opportunity to be part of the debate. The Kerr review is going around Scotland, and that presumably involves talking to some of those people, too. We must make sure that their views are heard.
I am cautious about using my position as a committee member to put myself in a more privileged position than my colleagues from other parts of Fife, for example. In Fife, there are other Labour and Liberal Democrat constituency members as well as Mid Scotland and Fife list members.
I rely on the common sense of committee members, which I hope would tell them whether they were in any way exploiting their position to choose only from a narrow group of people. I trust that if members identify that some of their colleagues might be more able to contribute names, they will encourage them to do so. Our discussion is in the public domain; we are not having it behind the scenes. All MSPs can read about, understand and find out about what we are proposing. I hope that there will be widespread publicity regarding the public debate.
As part of our inquiry, we went to different parts of Scotland and had meetings with members of the public. When we were putting the report together, we did not take evidence just from the representatives of professional bodies; we took evidence from a wide range of people. I would not want there to be a belief that our report lacked input from people who were not the usual suspects. That was certainly not the case.
No, but when we took evidence, we did not want to go down the road of speaking to people who represented individual campaigns in particular areas. There were good reasons for that; it would not have been appropriate to have done that. We could not have spoken to one group and then not spoken to others. The event that we are talking about is of a different kind; it will be a public debate in the chamber. We must think outside the box when it comes to how we should handle the debate, so that it does not simply become a talking heads event.
It is about workforce planning.
Absolutely; it comes on the back of our report.
Will you ensure that there is a geographical spread? Given that there are 15 health boards, we need to ensure that we get appropriate people from all over Scotland.
Yes. I repeat that I rely on the common sense of every member of the committee—including me—and of the clerks, so that we do not end up with a biased set of participants in the public debate. I remind everyone that the committee has agreed to hold such an event. We will have detailed discussions about its logistics once a proposal has been drawn up.
Meeting continued in private until 16:05.
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