Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, 09 Sep 2008

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Official Report 85KB pdf

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Subordinate Legislation

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Public Appointments and Public Bodies etc (Scotland) Act 2003 (Amendment of Specified Authorities) Order 2008 (Draft)

Item 3 is consideration of subordinate legislation on public appointments. Members who have been on the committee for some time will recall our consideration of a report from the Commissioner for Public Appointments in Scotland on appointments to the national park authorities. The Minister for Environment and the commissioner disagreed about the apparent incompatibility of the Public Appointments and Public Bodies etc (Scotland) Act 2003 and the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000 in relation to local-authority-nominated members of the boards of the Cairngorms National Park Authority and the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Authority. The committee invited the commissioner and the minister to reach a solution. Copies of the correspondence are attached to committee paper SPPA/S3/08/15/1.

The minister's proposed solution was to remove local authority nominations to national park authority boards from schedule 2 to the 2003 act, thereby removing such appointments from the remit of the Commissioner for Public Appointments in Scotland. At our meeting on 15 January we agreed by division to support the minister's approach. We also agreed that when the instrument that would give effect to the approach was laid before the Parliament we would contribute our views. A draft order has now been laid and a copy has been provided to members. The lead committee for consideration of the draft order is the Local Government and Communities Committee, which will take evidence from the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth on Wednesday 24 September.

I invite members' comments on the draft order. Do members think that we should write to the convener of the Local Government and Communities Committee, to draw that committee's attention to our comments? We could inform the committee's deliberations by providing it with copies of the correspondence between this committee, the minister and the commissioner.

Your suggestion that we forward our correspondence to the Local Government and Communities Committee is helpful. If we do so we will help that committee to understand where we were coming from in our discussions.

That is fine by me.

Do we agree to make no comment and to pass copies of correspondence and our deliberations on the matter to the Local Government and Communities Committee?

Members indicated agreement.

That concludes the public part of the meeting.

Meeting continued in private until 17:11.