Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: Thursday, December 6, 2012
Official Report
271KB pdf
Guidance on Correcting Inaccuracies
Agenda item 3 is consideration of the guidance on correcting inaccuracies. The Presiding Officer has written to the committee, inviting us
“to look ... at the current process”
for correcting inaccuracies
“in terms of transparency and general understanding”.
A letter from Liz Smith MSP that we have also received has been attached to members’ papers.
Because the issue is, as I see it, mainly about publicising corrections rather than about the existence of a corrections mechanism itself, I think that we need to look at the publication mechanism for corrections. However, we should also examine the guidance itself in order to decide whether we are happy with it as it stands or feel that it could be simplified and consolidated in some way. Perhaps its current two-section format is not as clear as it might be.
Do members have any comments on the clerk’s paper with regard to how we should proceed?
I understand that the mechanism itself is relatively new. When was it brought in? What is the scale of its use and who has used it? As far as I can see, there is an element of redundancy in that the guidance itself is almost repeated.
I am quite happy with the suggestions in the paper, and I think that there should be a mechanism for making corrections. If the argument is that it is not always obvious that a correction has been made and that corrections therefore need to be publicised, one might ask who will benefit from publication of corrections. Will it be members, the public or merely the media? Some interesting suggestions have been made that we might be able to consider if we take the convener’s advice and look at the issue at a future meeting.
In answer to your questions, I can inform the committee that the corrections procedure came into force only in October 2011, which means that it has been in force for just over a year. It was first used in February 2012 and only half a dozen corrections have been included in the Official Report in the past year. I understand that the latest correction will be made today. Although the procedure has not been used much so far, of course that situation might change.
Thank you, convener. It is appropriate that the committee do some work on the issue. We should come back to the issue at a later meeting and it should be considered in the way that you have described.
Liz Smith makes some important points in her letter, including the key point to which we must have regard, which is about where a substantive change is made without Parliament’s attention being focused on it. The case in point was:
“revising a figure of 18,000 jobs in the renewables sector to 11,000.”
Liz Smith is right to have raised that. The fact that it is not an isolated case is also very important.
Where there are minor errors, I would have thought that Parliament would accept minor corrections—for example if a word needs to be altered. However, if a change would substantively change the message, that needs to be flagged up to Parliament in a very formal way. We should do some work on this and come back to Parliament with our recommendations.
All the corrections so far have been done properly and according to procedure. The members who raised issues—including the one that Helen Eadie referred to—have been written to and the Presiding Officer has been written to. The corrections have all followed the procedure, but we need to look at the procedure to try to sharpen it up a bit.
I welcome your comments, convener, and I welcome the clerk’s paper. I take on board the comments that Helen Eadie made and I welcome them, as well. Only six corrections have been made in the past year. There should be a mechanism for members if they inadvertently cite a wrong figure in the chamber or to a committee; they should be able to make corrections so that everyone can see them.
We will ask the clerks to come back to us with a paper on the guidance so that we can see whether we can consolidate that guidance in some way and make its two sections into one. That would be very helpful. The clerks could also make suggestions on how we could publicise corrections, over and above what is in the guidance. There needs to be mechanism whereby a correction does not appear only in the Official Report, but also appears elsewhere.
Do members agree that the committee should ask the clerks for that paper for our next meeting and that we will hold that meeting in private, so that we can knock around the form of words and all the rest of it, and get it right?
Members indicated agreement.