Just before I move on to item 3, which we have agreed to take in private as it is to consider our draft stage 1 report on the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill, I draw to members' attention an article that appeared in The Herald on 2 February, which they might have read. The article purports to be a leak of our draft report, which members had hardly seen until Monday afternoon. It is a pretty inaccurate leak, because it states, for instance:
I did not see the article, but I noticed last week that there was an article in The Scotsman purporting to be a leak of another committee report. It is a bit strange that we can have a leak of a report that has not been completed. My experience with leaks is that we have referred them to the Standards Committee, which comes back and says that journalists will not tell it who their sources are so there is nothing that it can do to take the matter further. It is clearly a problem across the committees.
I agree with Michael Matheson that we have been unable to take action, because unless we can identify the source there is little that we can do, other than become frustrated at continual attempts to out parliamentary reports before they are published. If we got the same coverage for the report that we got for the leak, I might not mind so much. Members can consider the matter and come back to me; they do not have to make a decision today.
When I was the convener of the Health and Community Care Committee, we had a series of leaks. It was very annoying and although we tried to take action on a couple of occasions, the problem was trying to find the evidence and then doing something about it. The big hurdle is finding out who has leaked the report—whether a committee member or anybody else. I am in the dark as to what the sanction is for a committee member who is found to have leaked a draft report, but it should be severe. Drafting reports is an on-going process, and we hold meetings in private to allow members to discuss and tease out issues. We change our minds occasionally as we go through the process. It is unfortunate to have reports leaked before they are published.
If a member of the Parliament has revealed the content of a report before it has been published, that constitutes a breach of section 9.4 of the code of conduct for members of the Scottish Parliament. That is an issue for the Standards Committee. We have to consider the possibility that there has been no leak, but perhaps issues have been picked up on in conversations with members of the press who have then tried to piece information together. The article is a clever attempt to suggest that the journalist has seen the report, but, without giving too much away, I would not regard it as a direct leak. I am not suggesting that any member of the committee has divulged directly the contents of the report. That would have been difficult, given that they saw the draft report, which we are going to discuss later, only on Monday afternoon.
Given that there seems to be a similar problem across the committees—the Justice 2 Committee's report to the Communities Committee was leaked last week—I suggest raising the matter in the Conveners Group to see whether conveners of other committees think that there is a need to consider the issue and possibly have the Standards Committee consider how it can address the problem more effectively.
I would be happy to bring the matter to the attention of the Conveners Group or the Presiding Officer, even if we are not asking them to take specific action on the purported leak. I am happy at least to make other conveners aware of the matter, as they probably share our frustrations. Is that agreed?
We now move into private session for the purposes of discussing our draft stage 1 report on the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill.
Meeting continued in private until 13:59.