Official Report 337KB pdf
Unfortunately, Mike Watson has had to leave the meeting because of prior commitments. He has raised with me the subject of the e-mail that we were all sent at the start of the week about our discussion of the Scottish Agricultural College. At the time of our discussion, we were not clear about decisions that might or might not have been made and what the impact of any such decisions might be. The petitioner paid attention to our debate that morning and sent an e-mail that highlighted some information. If we had had that information at the time, matters would probably have been much clearer. I think that Mike Watson wants us to make that information available to the Environment and Rural Development Committee, which is investigating the issue, to ensure that it does not have the same debate that we had, which was the result of a lack of clarity in the information. We should send the contents of the e-mail to the Environment and Rural Development Committee, if that is okay with members.
There is an issue to which I would like members to give some thought, although we do not necessarily need to have a discussion on it at the moment. At the tail end of last week, I was contacted by a member of the public who sought clarification on the mechanism for lodging a petition. In my view, that person had a legitimate concern. They were concerned that the process of lodging a petition would have identified them individually. They wanted the issue in question to be raised, but did not necessarily want to become involved publicly in consideration of the issue, as the matter was highly personal.
Could the person concerned not raise the matter with their MSP? An MSP can highlight a general issue without revealing a person's identity.
I think that there was an issue with that as well. The petitioner wanted to lodge a petition to highlight their specific concerns about the system in which they were involved and did not have the confidence to go to an MSP about that, as that would have made matters a bit more public than they would have preferred. If any member seeks further clarification, I will speak to them. I cannot put anything on record on the individual case, but I can speak to the committee about how the discussion came about. That might help to get members' thought processes going.
I had the same initial thoughts as Helen Eadie—if the person concerned does not want to raise the issue themselves, they could get their MSP to do it. I am struggling to think how the scenario could be dealt with. I am generally not in favour of any private sessions, as I think that the Parliament should be open and transparent, but I do not know whether the Public Petitions Committee could have a facility to go into private session for the petitioner's benefit. I am not even sure whether that would be all right in the case in question.
As the issue had not occurred to me before, I wanted to seek members' views before taking the matter any further. I raise it as a general issue for members to discuss. Steve Farrell has some views on the subject.
I suggest a fairly simple solution. In the circumstance in which a petitioner makes a request not to be identified publicly for a very sensitive reason, we could reach agreement—through the convener—to ensure that that person's name and address is never made available publicly, either in the committee's discussions or on the website. We would keep the petitioner's details to allow us to contact them directly to let them know the outcome of the committee's considerations and so on, as it is important to maintain that link. If the committee thought that, in certain circumstances, there was no need to identify publicly the individual concerned, the committee could agree not to do so. That seems to be a reasonably straightforward way of dealing with the situation, which would not require a change to our processes or to standing orders.
We do not need to make any decisions now; I just wanted to ask members to give the issue some consideration and to give me some feedback.
Meeting closed at 13:21.
Previous
Current Petitions