Health and Community Care Committee, 09 Feb 2000
Meeting date: Wednesday, February 9, 2000
Official Report
175KB pdf
Research
Welcome to this meeting of the Health and Community Care Committee.
The first item on our agenda is a paper about committee resources for research. As members know, this is a thorny issue. We have access to the resources of the Scottish Parliament information centre, but a pot of money is also available for external research. We can attempt to access that if we have a good idea or worthwhile proposal.
At a previous meeting, Duncan Hamilton suggested that there was a lack of clarity about which areas of community care were handled by Westminster and which were handled by the Scottish Parliament—what was reserved and what was devolved. Yesterday, I spoke to Iain Gray, the Deputy Minister for Community Care, who seemed to think that there was less lack of clarity than we thought.
I do not see the problem.
I suggest that we write to Iain Gray and get a response from the Executive on what it believes to be its remit and what it believes to be Westminster's remit. Iain suggested that employment law and the benefits system would fall into the latter category.
We should be thinking seriously about ways in which we can access research. I ask members to come up with issues that they want to take forward; we can discuss them at a future meeting. In the meantime, I will write to the Executive to get some clarification on the lines between reserved and devolved areas of community care.
It has been brought to my attention that there is another source of funding—social partnership funding. That is not mentioned in the committee's papers, but it amounts to £50,000. The aim is to involve the general public more in our work as committees—to facilitate social partnerships and civic partnership. That means that we should try to get information from people who would not normally participate in our work, by involving them in innovative ways. The Enterprise and Lifelong Committee intends to make use of this funding and has invited business people to the chamber to discuss some of the work that it has been doing.
I ask members to inform the committee clerk of any ideas for research that they think would be useful and any suggestions that they have for social partnership funding. We might be able to make use of that within our community care review and we might be able to do both things at the same time. Is that agreeable to everybody?
Would it be possible for the sub-groups to consider that?
Yes. The external research might be very useful for those groups.