Official Report 499KB pdf
Item 2 is consideration of our draft annual report for the parliamentary year 11 May 2011 to 12 May 2012. The draft report, which has been circulated, follows the standard format and includes a brief synopsis of the work that the committee has carried out over the past 12 months. Do any members have any comments?
On inquiries and reports, would it be possible to include the short inquiry that we had last June on the energy price increases? We agreed that that would be a one-off inquiry in response to Scottish Power’s announcement that it was going to raise fuel prices.
We can make that change. Do members agree with the other change proposed by Mr Wilson?
Should we comment on the renewable energy targets inquiry that we have started?
My sense is that we are reporting on completed work, which is why the energy inquiry is not mentioned. I think that that is the standard approach taken by committees.
I pose the question because we have undertaken a lot of the evidence sessions in the period that the report covers.
Ordinarily, as the convener said, the committee reports on the work that has been carried out within a given year—in this case, from May 2011 to May 2012. However, it does not have to be completed work. We could not mention any final report, because it has not been produced yet. However, with the committee’s agreement the report could certainly say that a major inquiry is under way in this parliamentary year and will be reported on in due course.
I am happy with that.
On that point, convener, would it be worth indicating how many evidence sessions we have had over the period covered by the annual report? To say that we are engaged in an inquiry does not reflect the time that we have spent on the inquiry to date. We have had roughly 10 evidence sessions so far—they have taken up a large chunk of the year since January. It would be good to try to reflect that more accurately instead of just listing the inquiries that we have held and the reports that we have produced. Almost a quarter of our time has been spent on the inquiry.
I am sure that we can refer to the time that we have spent on the inquiry so far, although the annual report is intended to be a brief synopsis of the work that the committee has done.
We made recommendations on the business gateway service. I thought that we also said that we would review how ready it was. Did we not say that we would have a quick session with business gateway before the contracts were issued?
We might have indicated that.
I do not think that we have to refer to that in the annual report.
Okay.
You may well be right, but the report is intended to be a brief overview of the work that we have done, so I do not want to get into a big debate about whether every aspect of what we agreed should appear in it.
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