Rural Affairs and Environment Committee, 09 Sep 2008

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Official Report 382KB pdf

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Flood Management Legislation

Item 4 is a brief item on flood management legislation. Committee members will be aware that flood management legislation will be introduced in the very near future and that the committee is likely to be the lead committee on the bill—in fact, I would be astonished if we were not. Members have a paper that outlines a number of practical matters that the committee can agree on in advance of the bill's introduction. I hope that members have read the paper.

There are three specific proposals. The first is that the clerks should prepare to issue a call for written evidence following the bill's introduction, so that we are ready to go the minute that it is introduced. The second proposal is that the committee should delegate to me the responsibility for arranging for the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body to pay witness expenses that are incurred during our scrutiny of the bill. The third proposal is that the committee should consider drafts of its report on the bill in private. Are those three proposals agreed by the committee?

I have two comments on framing the call for written evidence—I agree that it should be done. First, it would be helpful if we could ask those who are providing such evidence to comment on whether the bill adequately reflects the findings of our flooding and flood management inquiry. We would be asking them specifically to say whether they felt that the recommendations that emerged from that extensive inquiry were reflected in the bill.

Secondly, given our timetable constraints, it might be helpful to make it explicit that, because we will not take oral evidence from as wide a range of bodies as we have in the past, it will be in the interests of organisations to ensure that their written evidence is relatively comprehensive. We will be selective in taking oral evidence.

Yes. Those are important points. A third point is that we are likely to limit the time that is available for organisations to submit written evidence to us. Normally, it would be about 12 weeks; however, we feel that we should be able to reduce that.

I agree with Des McNulty. We should also make it explicit that we take as read the evidence that organisations previously submitted to our inquiry. We do not need to see that again and we should focus on the kind of issues that Des McNulty suggests.

That is important. We should ask people not simply to resubmit the submissions that they made to our inquiry, because we already have those.

We should also pick up on Des McNulty's comment about the differences between what is covered in the legislation and the issues covered in our inquiry. Going into the inquiry we knew that there would be some differences; for example, we looked at civil contingencies, which, as we know, will not be covered in the proposed flood management legislation. Other parts of our inquiry might well not be encompassed by the bill, and it will be interesting to see what those are.

Do members agree to those points and to the proposals in the paper?

Members indicated agreement.