Welcome to the 12th meeting in 2004 of the Standards Committee. I ask people to switch off their mobile phones. We have apologies from Ken Macintosh, who is fortunate in being on paternity leave. I am sure that the committee will offer him its congratulations. Karen Whitefield, Linda Fabiani and Donald Gorrie are on other parliamentary business today. I welcome Marilyn Livingstone, who is here as a substitute for the first time.
Thank you.
As Linda Fabiani has still not made it to the committee, we will not have to deal with item 1, so we move straight to item 2. The committee has to decide whether to take item 3, on submissions that we have received, in private. Our legal advisers have raised concerns about the content of parts of some of those submissions, which were sent to us in response to our further call for evidence in the consultation on replacing the Scotland Act 1998 (Transitory and Transitional Provisions) (Members' Interests) Order 1999. Some of the content might be regarded as being potentially defamatory, irrelevant or in breach of data protection legislation, so we will have to decide whether we wish to publish the submissions. However, all the submissions have been circulated in full to all committee members and we are not prevented from discussing them—or quoting from them, if we so wish—during our consideration of replacing the members' interests order under item 4. Do members agree to take item 3 in private?
Before we go into private, I point out that, on the last occasion that we met, we dealt in the same way with an item about a submission.
Meeting continued in private.
Meeting continued in public.