Public Petitions Committee, 04 Dec 2001

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 4, 2001

Official Report 170KB pdf

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Visit to Berlin

The draft report of our visit to Berlin has been circulated to members. We could go through it paragraph by paragraph, although that would take a long time. Do members wish to raise any points on the paper?

Phil Gallie has spoken about the visit and I wondered whether those who went wanted to add anything to what is in the paper, to embroider it at all, or to highlight any points.

The point that I raised last week has been covered. It may be worth mentioning that a minister was being interrogated on our morning visit to the Bundestag.

The report is thorough and excellent, but there are a couple of small annoying points. I know that it is easy for such things to happen in a long report, but paragraph 25 says that the delegation

"also had a helpful session with officials",

and paragraph 32 says—although I will not even try to say the German word—that the delegation

"also visited … the Berlin House of Representatives or Senate".

Paragraph 40 also uses the words "also visited". A little tidying-up of the words is required to demonstrate that we did not do everything in one day. We could start off by saying that, from the airport, we went directly to the petitions committee.

That will be no problem.

I like the report, but I would make those minor changes.

It was a very valuable visit. Going on such visits gets us out of our wee shells and allows us to see what they are doing in Europe. We saw a country that was about 50 years ahead of us in the democratic stakes—Germany obviously had to start from scratch after the war. The petitions committee there seemed to be doing a very good job, and the value of the petitions system's being in-built in Germany—which is possibly the dominant force in Europe, apart from France—was demonstrated. As far as I understood, every Land in Germany has a petitions committee. The public appreciate that. We should also consider the number of staff—about 80 clerks are involved in the work of the Bundestag's directorate of petitions and submissions—although we need to bear in mind that Germany's population is about 85 million.

We were ahead of the Bundestag's committee on one or two points, however. Petitioners come before us, whereas the Germans have always thought that petitioners might not want to do that. They were very interested in what we had to say about that. We are also ahead of its committee as regards e-petitions. We pointed out that we have only one and a half full-time clerks. Indeed, many thanks go to Steve Farrell for arranging our visit and for drawing up the detailed, valuable report on top of all his other work.

I think that we should keep in touch with the people whom we met in Germany. They have been in touch with us since our visit and have been in touch with me about one or two of the subjects of interest to me, such as the cow burner in Carntyne and the protection of children—in a European sense. They are anxious to be friends, and we received a wonderful welcome in Berlin. I thought that the work that we did there was very valuable.

Well done, Dorothy. I was wondering how you were going to get the cow burner in Carntyne back on to the agenda. You manage it every week.

Do you want me to go on to Paterson's dump? [Laughter.]

I agree that the report is excellent. I was at a Scottish Civic Forum meeting on Saturday, at which the theme was "Participation matters". It became clear that the days when democracy was just about representation in Parliaments are over. People now want to participate in political decision making, and I think that petitions committees are one of the key ways in which people may do that in future. The report will help this young committee to grow and develop, as long as we can convince the rest of the Parliament that that is what is required.

Visiting Parliaments such as the Bundestag has enriched our knowledge and experience. Together with the visit here of the European Parliament's Petitions Committee, our visit highlighted how valuable it is to get an insight into what happens in other Parliaments. In time, when the clerks are not overburdened with all the other work that we keep giving them—I know that they are understaffed and under-resourced; I hope that someone is listening to that comment and will attend to that soon—we could consider pursuing further investigations into the work of other Parliaments.

Last week, I was involved in a visit from the Russian State Duma. Delegates had come here with the Britain-Russia Centre, and were telling us about how they deal with petitions. It can only help all of us to copy examples of best practice elsewhere. We do not necessarily have to go to the countries concerned. When visitors come here, we could have them visit the Public Petitions Committee.

That is a fair point. Indeed, we have a visiting delegation from South Africa this morning. The more exchanges we have the better.

I wish to add my congratulations to Steve Farrell. As everyone knows, we are still understaffed, and Steve is basically on his own. He is doing a wonderful job, considering the amount of work that he is getting through. I think that that should be acknowledged by the committee. [Applause.]