Justice 1 Committee, 12 Apr 2005

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Official Report 149KB pdf

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Protection of Children and Prevention of Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill

Good afternoon. Welcome to the 10th meeting of the Justice 1 Committee in 2005. We have received apologies from Bruce McFee, but otherwise we have a full attendance. As usual, I ask everybody to switch off their mobile phones.

Item 1 is the Protection of Children and Prevention of Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill. I invite members to comment on the record, if they so wish, on the correspondence from the Deputy Minister for Justice, which is the late paper that was circulated to members. Members will be aware that we had hoped to have the Deputy Minister for Justice before the committee to talk about the amendments to the bill. I agreed to postpone the session as the amendments are not ready for consideration. Members have before them an explanation for that in the minister's letter. If members wish to comment, I invite them to do so.

I suspect that I speak very much as we all feel. Given the difficulties that are involved and the time that it is taking for the Executive and its officials to bring forward the amendments, it will be difficult for us to understand the amendments and confirm to ourselves whether they are satisfactory in the couple of days—perhaps a week if we are very lucky—that the timetable appears to suggest that we will have. The Executive must think carefully about the implications of that for its likelihood of success in having the amendments accepted at stage 2. I certainly would not be comfortable with supporting an amendment at stage 2 that I am not fully satisfied with, given that there are clearly difficulties. Ministers and officials ought to note that point. The committee has long been promised the details and it is difficult to expect us to understand what is clearly a complex issue in such a short space of time.

I agree. We have been promised the amendments and were aware of them as early as stage 1, but to date nothing has been forthcoming. Other members of the committee and I have a grave concern that if the amendments are complex, we should have sufficient time properly to look into the various issues that surround them, on the basis that we are here to make good law as opposed to doing what is expedient. That is worth recording and conveying to the minister.

Okay. I anticipated the feelings of the committee and wrote to the Minister for Parliamentary Business to make the point that the issue for us is time. We want to ensure that we are able to do a job by having enough time to consider changes to the bill. As other members have stated, the difficulty for us is that although we can shift things about, we will have only a short space of time at stage 2 in which to consider the amendments.

Initially, when we were advised in December that the Executive would make amendments to the bill, members thought that those would be reasonably straightforward because they were related to European Union obligations, but now they appear to be more complex. From the letter that the minister has sent to the committee, it seems that the issue centres on the question of setting the age at 18 when we have a general age of criminality of 16.

One of the lessons that the Parliament must learn from this—it relates to the meeting that we have just had with the Justice 2 Committee—is that although some of the provisions will be set in tablets of stone and we will not be able to alter the basis of the framework decision, it is important for us to get in earlier on such issues. I would like to have seen the Parliament not being tied to a specific age. That ties our hands in relation to principles that we have already determined in the bill. The lesson that needs to be learned is that we must engage at another level in relation to decisions that we are expected to enforce. If there are no other comments, we can do nothing other than leave that on the record. We have asked the bill team whether we can see the amendments as soon as possible.