Scottish Water (Business Charges) (PE686)
The third item on the agenda is consideration of PE686 from Rob Willox, on behalf of Bo'ness means Business. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to review urgently the charges levied by Scottish Water on Scottish businesses. Members have a paper from the clerk and a copy of the petition. As members can see from the paper, we need to decide whether to accept the referral of the petition from the Public Petitions Committee. The suggestion is that, as we are currently investigating Scottish Water, we subsume the petition into our investigation. That seems to be a sensible approach. We should, however, make it clear to the petitioner that we will not necessarily look at all the matters that he raises in his petition, some of which are specific and geographic. If we subsume consideration of the petition into our general review, we will deal with matters that come under that heading. Is that agreed?
I add that, given some of the figures in the petition, we must note that people of my generation also suffer from those tremendous leaps in charges. As that is part of our remit, we could look into that side of things as well.
We will refer the petition to the reporters and they will incorporate as many elements of it as they can. However, that must not take away from the coherence of what the reporters are trying to do. We will hear from them next week.
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