Social Inclusion, Housing and Voluntary Sector Committee, 06 Oct 1999

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 6, 1999

Official Report 148KB pdf

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Action Points

I have been asked by members to raise again the issue of ministers making statements publicly without bringing them to the attention of the committee. Again, we request—insist, as I was told to say last time—that ministers, as a matter of courtesy and of routine, send us copies of all statements that are relevant to this committee.

I suggest that if this continues to fall on deaf ears, we should write to the First Minister, as it is an important issue.

Can we give the Parliamentary Bureau one more shot? I am expecting a response to my earlier letter. I will write again following this meeting. If we do not get an appropriate response we will come back to the matter.

Yes.

When we met the minister, she agreed that she would not do this. In fact, both Wendy and Frank agreed in the chamber that they would not make announcements without informing us first. So, where are we at?

We need to pursue this.

I am totally in favour of the idea that we should be consulted before announcements. However, the responsibility then falls on this committee not to rush into the press to pre-empt ministerial announcements. SNP announcements in advance of those of ministers will kibosh the whole thing.

I am assuming that we will be responsible.

The usual procedure is that early warning is given a couple of hours before the press hears an announcement. It might be enough to get press releases at the same time as the press did, even if they were then embargoed for a couple of hours. We will never be in the position in which ministers give us all advance warning of a day or more.

That is the new politics.

A rapid response before the minister even speaks.

I missed the previous meeting—I hope my apologies were tendered—so I am out of kilter on where the committee is on this. I understood from the discussions that we had before the ministers came that we were rightly annoyed that an announcement had been made just hours before they came before the committee.

As we are independent of the Executive, do we have the right to demand early warning? Will we always be looking for notice of ministers' announcements? We are here to scrutinise the Executive, but if we receive information before it becomes public, we become part of that establishment.

I hope that that will not happen. We are only asking for notice of a couple of hours. It is only for information.

The same courtesy has been offered to Opposition spokespeople on various matters from an early stage.

Ministers will not bring us into discussions or decision making, so we will remain independent.

An example of what we want to happen occurred before the emergency debate on the Beattie Media affair: Donald's statement was made available to Alex Salmond a couple of hours before Donald made the statement to the Parliament. It is a fair request.

That is the type of thing that we are looking for.

We should bear in mind that the ministerial statement is press embargoed. The press will not use that story and break the embargo. They may well have got the Opposition quotes lined up, but that obviates the problem that John anticipates.

Can I run through this quickly, because we are running over time. I am sure that members will keep me right if I get anything wrong. I want to go through the draft timetable. We are meeting on the morning of 25 October to consider issues of housing finance. On 27 October, following our informal briefing on the drugs inquiry and some feedback from the ad hoc anti-poverty group, we will finalise the programme. On 27 October, we will have a much more detailed programme, because we will be able to feed more into it.

Martin is updating the timetable; we will have a report from the sub-group under the heading of social inclusion.

Yes. We must bear in mind that that will be an interim report; the ad hoc group can bring us only an update.

I have been asked by the committee to liaise with Roseanna Cunningham, the convener of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, about making a contribution to the proposed warrant sales legislation. The committee is keen to express its views on that.

I am summarising our decisions. Have I missed anything out?

Alex Neil and Keith Raffan will represent the committee at the meeting of the European Committee on 19 October to discuss objective 3.

We agreed to meet for a briefing session on the Friday or Monday of the last week of each month. I do not think that that has been built into the timetable until the end of November, but I am expecting that it will not happen until the end of December.

That will all be finalised.

I remind members that particular issues about timetabling or concerns that matters have fallen off the agenda should be brought to the briefing session on 25 October. We will then prepare the formal timetable for 27 October. That will help matters.

In the private session, the committee charged you, convener, with reviewing the issue of public and private sessions. I think that that should be recorded.

Thank you, Alex.

We have private sessions mainly to address housekeeping issues and to speed up the formal session. The general feeling is that that works well. However, we do not wish to give the impression that those sessions are in any way exclusive, or that we are hiding issues.

We need to think through the differences between private meetings, informal meetings and public meetings. The view of the committee is that we should meet in public as much as possible. I will seek clarification on that and make a recommendation to the committee at the next meeting, which will probably be on 27 October.

Meeting closed at 11:48.