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The next item is a short discussion on the legacy paper. Before I open the discussion for members' comments, I will mention some of the things that are included in the paper. The first is moving towards the introduction of a statutory instruments bill, which will be a weighty topic. The second is the review of chapter 10 of the standing orders, which, I gather, will go to the Procedures Committee.
The matters in the legacy paper and the amount of day-to-day business that is likely to come through the committee will potentially be a very large amount of work. Can we get some guidance from the clerks on the potential volume of work involved in the three things that you have mentioned, the priority that they would give to each and some guidance as to how we should proceed?
The clerk is more than happy to do that. I will go a little further and ask the clerk to give us a paper—perhaps a very short one at the moment—outlining how we could dovetail the work in the legacy paper with our business. I do not know whether we want to do it over four years, but I ask for guidance on how we could make progress on all the different elements of the legacy paper and whether we will have to bid for extra resources at some point. I am aware that the legacy paper says that we would have difficulty doing the extra work without additional resources.
Paragraphs 20 to 24 of the paper, which are about the new international conference on delegated legislation and regulatory reform, talk about the possibility of the third conference being held in the Scottish Parliament. I presume that that too would add to the committee's and the Parliament's work load and has resource implications, not the least of which are the financial implications. Do any members—particularly those who were members of the Parliament in the first session—have any views on whether that is a reasonable idea?
My experience was on the Local Government Committee, and we did quite a few seminars and conferences. It is a process of bidding for resources, which is fairly standard. I do not foresee a problem, apart from the resource implications. Does Alasdair Rankin have anything else to say?
That needs to be considered. I know from previous conferences in the series that much of the cost is recovered through conference fee charges, for example. Organisers of similar conferences have also used professional conference organisers, which takes a lot of the burden off members and officials.
On the basis that the resources are not a problem, should we bid for the third international conference on delegated legislation and regulatory reform?
I suggest that, in the short paper that the clerk is going to develop, he gives us a time frame for when he thinks that that conference would most usefully come into our work, and then we will get into the bidding process. We are fairly agreed, I think, that if we get far enough down the road, we should do that.
I am not against that.
I have a comment on the section in paragraphs 7 and 8 on the legal briefing and meeting in public. Paragraph 8 contains the nugget that members have agreed that we should not have the oral briefing in public because there is not much to be gained from that. I am not quite sure what that throwaway line means, but it prompts the thought that, rather than automatically follow the previous committee's practices, we should ask for the relevant guidance on public and private sessions to be put before the committee so that we can decide for ourselves on the basis of that guidance.
Yes.
Meeting closed at 09:50.
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Deputy Convener