Justice 1 Committee,

Meeting date: Wednesday, May 2, 2001

Official Report 259KB pdf

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Committee Business

Agenda item 4 is the paper on committee business. The paper is private, but I have decided to debate it in public because it raises no issues that cannot be discussed in public. The paper is from the conveners liaison group and concerns the possibility of committees meeting when plenary sessions of the Parliament are taking place. Do members have comments on the paper?

I have not been able to read the paper in detail, but I note that it raises the possibility of committees meeting while Parliament is meeting. I have grave concerns about the implications of that. The paper raises issues about resources, the number of committees that can meet at the same time and the number of official report staff and clerks who are available to support committees.

The decision to have two justice committees should be revisited. Having two committees means that we have a clerking team and that a further meeting takes place each week, which involves official reporters and all the other support that accompanies a meeting. If we need to consider how we can direct resources, we must reflect on whether two justice committees, which gobble up resources as two entities, are required.

I agree with Michael Matheson. I will go further. He said that there is one committee meeting a week. This week and in previous weeks, two committee meetings have taken place. We must look back at some of the comments that were made when the Justice and Home Affairs Committee was split. At that time, the idea was that the new committees would meet once a fortnight. We now meet once a week. I have no objection to that: if there is work to be done, we must do it. The current structures are not benefiting Parliament to the full. Yesterday, when we failed to bring the Justice 1 Committee and Justice 2 Committee together, was an example. It was a fault of the system rather than the fault of individuals.

We have just considered the Convention Rights (Compliance) (Scotland) Bill. I know how hard it is to plough through a bill without support from others within our group. It was easier to scrutinise legislation when there was a larger committee—the Justice and Home Affairs Committee—and it is likely that a better level of scrutiny was applied by that larger committee. Michael Matheson's plea is a valid one, and I support it.

I have never had strong views on having a committee meeting when Parliament is meeting. It is a difficult course to go down, but needs might require it.

For the record, I do not think that the point about the two justice committees is valid. I can understand the argument about having two justice committees and Michael Matheson's point about resources, but the Justice 1 Committee has a work load where we have done X, Y and Z, and we are continuing to do that. The Justice 2 Committee is considering matters such as the Procurator Fiscal Service and international criminal courts. One committee with a lot more members would do only half of that work; it could not cover all those issues. On balance, that would be a bad thing, although I agree that we could examine too many issues.

You could argue, for any committee, that if there were two they would be able to do more work. We must consider the resources that we spend trying to organise meetings between the Justice 1 Committee and Justice 2 Committee.

Let me answer that. I do not want to get into a debate and I am sure that the convener does not want me to do so. First, the budget situation is an exception to the usual process. We will not be arranging joint meetings month in, month out.

I know that you could argue for any committee that two could do more work, but it was pretty much universally accepted that we had an especially heavy work load of legislation. I do not know whether other committees would agree with that, but there was a general view that because we had a heavy work load it was appropriate to have two committees.

I do not know what the Executive's position is on whether we should have committee meetings when Parliament is meeting, but I do not care much.

I will outline my position before we consider what we have been asked to comment on. The fact that there are two justice committees is relevant, but it is not the sole issue. There are pressures on committees' time in general. It would be retrograde if we decided to have committees meeting at the same time as Parliament. That would cause problems in a relatively small Parliament such as this. People would genuinely want to be in two places at one time and obviously could not be.

We need to revisit the recommendation that committees can meet only on Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings. It is ridiculous that we confine our time available for parliamentary meetings to three days out of seven. That is not particularly sensible. A better alternative would be to have Monday afternoons available for committee meetings rather than spill into Wednesday afternoons or Thursday mornings. We need to be more flexible in that direction.

We must go through the points and decide. We do not need to answer the conveners group questions and we can presumably make comments on questions that it has not asked. We can go through the points that are in bold type. What is the committee's feeling on point 18, on page 4, about whether committees should meet at the same time as Parliament?

A committee should only meet while Parliament is meeting when there is a need to deal with, for example, an emergency piece of legislation that we have to get through very quickly or when a major incident occurs and a committee that has a role in considering the issue has to meet to discuss the matter. I would restrict it to what I consider to be an emergency situation as opposed to when there is so much pressure of work that we feel we have to meet.

I tend towards the convener's view that, as a generality, to have committee meetings clashing with meetings of the full Parliament is a retrograde step—although, for other reasons, I am not too keen on the Mondays and Fridays idea either. It does not make sense that, even if there is an emergency, the committee can never meet while the full Parliament is meeting. That is too much of a straitjacket. On occasion, it could be important for the Parliament for the committee to meet to thrash out something that was to go before the full Parliament. That balance strikes me as okay.

I go along with the convener's comments that the size of the Parliament is such that we would not want members to be taken out of the chamber on many occasions. Another factor is that members are sometimes involved in a second committee. Other demands are made upon members. If committees could clash with meetings of the full Parliament, because members are at times required to be in the chamber whether or not they want to be, we could open up all kinds of difficulties. Let us face it, we sit as a Parliament for nine hours in a week. That those nine hours should be sacrosanct seems to me not unacceptable.

Is the general view that there should be no clash with the plenary meeting of the Parliament except in a genuine emergency? There should certainly be no clash just because there happens to be a lot of business.

Members indicated agreement.

Should a limit be imposed on the number of committees that are permitted to meet at the same time as the Parliament? I suggest that that follows from our previous answer.

Members indicated agreement.

We are also invited to consider whether a proposal should be put to the Parliamentary Bureau on whether committees should be permitted to meet at the same time as the full Parliament. Again, it follows that that should be the case, but only in a genuine emergency. Are we agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

I suspect that we will not get much unanimity on whether we should say anything about moving outside the Tuesday-Wednesday envelope. We can already do that. There is no prohibition on our sitting on a Monday or a Friday, or even in an evening, if we so agree. Do we want to say anything else on that?

The committee has had meetings on Mondays.

I remember that we turned up for a meeting that was not even on.

Which makes up for yesterday.

Exactly. The one cancels out the other. You are quite right.

And you got no credit for it?

We get no credit for turning up too often.

Let us move on to the next agenda item.

I want to raise one other thing, convener. In the shambles that occurred yesterday it would have been quite useful if we had had the facility to use substitute members on committees. When we talked about the change in the committee structures, we discussed an agenda item about whether we should be able to have substitutes. I would like it to be possible that we could nominate substitute members.

I understand that the Procedures Committee is looking at that matter.

Would it be appropriate, as you suggested, for us to put in comments at the tail-end of the document? Are we unanimous about the issue of substitute members?

Could we also comment about the need for reflection on the splitting of resources between the Justice 1 Committee and the Justice 2 Committee?

On Michael Matheson's point, there was a slight objection from one of our committee members who has—whether temporarily or permanently, I am not sure—left the room, so I am not sure that we should put that in.

We could say, as we do in committee reports, that some members raised the matter.

The objections are recorded in the Official Report.

I have no objection to saying that some members wanted to raise those matters. We will go along with that.

Meeting continued in private until 12:18.