Justice and Home Affairs Committee,

Meeting date: Wednesday, May 10, 2000

Official Report 287KB pdf

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Scottish Parliament Justice and Home Affairs Committee Wednesday 10 May 2000 (Morning)

[The Convener opened the meeting at 09:34]

Although not all committee members are present yet, we will start—at least all the parties are represented in the room. I have received apologies from Gordon Jackson and Michael Matheson. The Local Government Committee has been sending members to other committees to keep an eye on the budget process, so Donald Gorrie might appear at some point.

A new member of the clerking team, Alison Taylor, has been appointed. She is the acting senior assistant clerk in place of Shelagh McKinlay. Alison was previously the assistant clerk to the Equal Opportunities Committee. We welcome her and hope that she enjoys her time with the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.

A forward programme is contained in the papers for the meeting. All members should have a copy. Two new bills were sent to us last Thursday afternoon. Strictly speaking, they are not formally bills yet, but drafts. We are allowed to talk about them and send them out to people, but they have not been introduced yet. Both bills have to be turned around in the same short time scale. That causes us some difficulties. As members will see from the forward programme, the difficulties in timetabling our work are becoming marked. There is little agenda space for anything. Because of that, I have to say, reluctantly, that it is unlikely that we will be able to do more work on domestic violence this side of the recess. We need to have a discussion about that.

That is disappointing news. I spent yesterday afternoon doing work on a draft bill with Lesley Irvine from Women's Aid. I could be ready to present something quite soon.

As members will realise when they look at the forward programme, the difficulty is that, effectively, the committee now deals only with legislation—and not legislation of our own making. It is impossible to see where we can fit in any detailed consideration of domestic violence.

I have raised this before, but I would like it on the record that I do not regard this as a good turn of events. The purpose of this committee is not solely to examine the Executive's legislation; there is supposed to be a balance. I read that only 14 per cent of our time—if we are lucky—is being spent on business other than Executive business. I share Maureen's concerns. The issue is hugely important to women and it is important that the Parliament deal with it. I would like the serious point to be made to the Parliamentary Bureau and the Executive that we want this on our agenda.

The Parliamentary Bureau will say that we are in charge of our own agenda. Because of the work load that has been imposed on us, it is now almost impossible to fit any other items on to the agenda.

The problem is that the Executive and ministers are pulling legislation off the hat rack like there is no tomorrow. The fact that this session of Parliament has another three years to run means that legislation should be well thought out and planned in. No planning at all is coming from the Executive: it is simply reacting to every other issue.

We must remember that this committee does not have a revising committee sitting above it and that it is supposed to take evidence and consider carefully the requirements of bills. Thereafter, we are expected to scrutinise bills in some detail. What the Executive is asking of us is totally unrealistic. A stand must be taken at some point. I recognise the pressures that you are under, convener, but if the Parliament is to mean anything, the committee should surely have a say in the matters that it feels are important—albeit recognising a planned approach to legislative change.

I have been invited to attend the Parliamentary Bureau meeting next Tuesday afternoon specifically to talk about the next stage of the Abolition of Poindings and Warrant Sales Bill. A decision has not yet been made on which will be the lead committee for that bill at stage 2, but I will tell the bureau—as I have just told the committee on the issue of domestic violence—that if the bureau were to refer that bill to us at stage 2 it would be impossible for us to deal with it this side of the summer recess.

There is no solution to the problem at the moment. The only solution is the nuclear option—of the committee refusing point blank to deal with any matter that is referred to it. I have tried to highlight, in many quarters, that the committee is getting close to using the nuclear option, although I hope that I will not have to detonate very soon. I live in hope that we will find a solution. As I have said before, discussions continue; unfortunately, they appear to be progressing at the normal, bureaucratic speed of this Parliament—which is to say not very fast at all.

The committee had a meeting at which our programme was discussed—at which point we determined that Monday 15 May and Monday 22 May were days on which members were already totally committed to affairs in their constituencies. On that basis, we decided that we would not meet on those days.

That is not true, Phil. I undertook to go away and find out what the options were. It would have been possible to shift one of those Monday meetings to the following Tuesday, but if we had done that we would have lost an hour: we would have been able to have only a two-hour meeting on the Tuesday. Given our work load, we cannot afford not to use up all the available time.

Pressure is being put on committees to meet in Glasgow and Stirling on Mondays between the beginning of June and the summer recess. As yet, we have no precise dates. I do not know whether members are inclined to consult their diaries about Mondays in June at three weeks' notice. Are there any dates that would be manageable?

Would those be extra meetings?

No, they would be alternative meetings. I know already that I cannot attend a meeting on 12 June.

Nor can I.

I ask members to indicate whether they would be free on Mondays in June and in the first week of July. There may be no free dates, but we should at least consider that proposal, as we have a bit of notice.

I referred to a second bill—the draft judicial appointments etc bill—which also appeared last Thursday on the same basis as the draft investigation of regulatory powers bill. The bill has not been officially introduced, but we will be allowed to talk about it. We must try to identify witnesses who can give evidence on it and have issued a provisional invitation to Professor Gane of the University of Aberdeen, who is an authority on some of the issues that are raised by the draft bill. We will invite the Executive and the Law Society of Scotland, but we must identify other potential witnesses. If members have any suggestions for witnesses for that bill, they should communicate them to me and the clerk over the next couple of days.

How do committee members feel about that other bill? My initial take on it is that it is not hugely contentious, as it is designed to fix defects. The defects have been hugely contentious, but the attempt to fix them should not be. Do members have any views on that? We are trying to get an idea of how much work we will have to do on it at stage 1.

I have not considered the judicial appointments issues in much detail, but I believe that the bail issues could be fairly contentious and I imagine that those are the issues on which our attention will be concentrated.

Okay. That might help us to decide on potential witnesses. If nobody else has any comments, we will move on to item 1 on the agenda. These days, it takes us a long time to get to the first item on our agenda.