Procedures Committee, 12 Nov 2002

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Official Report 287KB pdf

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Parliamentary Questions (Recess)

We are slightly late in starting, but we are quorate now. We have a deceptively short agenda this morning. I propose to take item 2 first, because the question that will be answered in that item will affect the final wording of the report that is the subject of item 1. That approach is more logical.

The item of substance in the committee papers is appendix B, which is a paper from Hugh Flinn further to our discussion at the previous meeting. It ought to have been tagged with a little blue sticky thing marked with a "B". The other papers represent the background papers and the papers that were previously circulated, including the Official Report of the discussion. I ask Hugh Flinn of the chamber desk to take us through his brief report, which addresses the specific suggestion made at the previous meeting that we settle for having an intermediate period for answering questions that are lodged at the end of the recess.

The report is a response to the suggestion that we move to a 21-day period for answering questions that are lodged in the last week of the recess. The difficulty with such a proposal relates entirely to the manageability of the volume of answers that we would receive in the third week after recess under that system. As paragraph 6 of the report points out, we would have to deal with three weeks' worth of answers in one week, which would make things difficult for the chamber desk in the Parliament and for the Executive's parliamentary clerk's office. We could easily receive 200 or more answers in a day and I doubt whether we could deal with them in time to ensure that they were on the Parliament's website by the end of the afternoon.

I should point out to members that the middle column of the table in appendix B of the report highlights this summer's actual performance, while the right-hand column demonstrates that under the proposal an additional number of questions and more than 100 additional answers would have been bunched into 18 and 19 September. The table shows the flow of questions and answers during the recess, based on the assumption that 2002 was a typical year.

As Fiona Hyslop made the suggestion, I seek her views on the response to it.

I wanted to think about how we could stagger the process of lodging parliamentary questions over the summer and into the recess and whether we should have a transitional week at the end of the recess. The aim is to ensure that members are given as much opportunity as possible to call the Executive to account and to get timely answers to the political and constituency issues that they are pursuing.

However, if such a suggestion is likely to be counterproductive and means that members will receive holding answers, it would make more sense to have a system that allows MSPs to receive timely answers; does not cause any logistical problems in the third week after the recess, which the table quite clearly shows would happen; and ensures that the Executive has the time to give substantive instead of holding replies. If the trade-off is that we have more chance of receiving substantive replies, I am quite happy to retain last summer's approach and not reduce the 28-day period to 21 days.

I think that that is the sensible conclusion. If we are all happy with that, the decision will be that we leave the 28 days option, which will become the 20 counting days option, for the last week of recesses of more than four days. I am sure that that is clear to Hugh Flinn, if nobody else.

At some stage, will we discuss the content of answers?

Yes, the report does not relate to the content of answers, but that is on our continuing agenda. Indeed, I will have correspondence for members—perhaps even this week—about progress on that matter.