Equal Opportunities Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, December 13, 2012

Official Report 442KB pdf

---

Work Programme

Agenda item 3 is consideration of our work programme. The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee has written to each of the Parliament’s committees about its inquiry into post-legislative scrutiny. As you will have seen, a number of questions are asked in the paper before us. We can respond by saying that we are very happy and have no comments, or we can provide comments on post-legislative scrutiny. I am keen to hear the committee’s views on the paper.

I am quite happy with the proposals as set out in the paper. However, although I think that it is a useful tool to use committees for scrutiny, this committee in particular is subjected to a slight curtailing of our time, in that we continuously have to meet earlier than other committees and run through options of meeting at lunch time. That means that various other things are not appropriate, so I do not believe that we could take on the issue as a committee.

Given our work programme, I am sure that we will have a number of bills to deal with. Therefore, I am quite concerned about timetabling.

I am also concerned about post-legislative scrutiny being a box-ticking exercise, in the same way that budget scrutiny is for other committees. It might involve our ticking the box, saying that we had looked at a piece of legislation and carrying on. Those are my concerns, but I am relaxed about what is proposed.

I agree with that. As much as it would be good to be able to do post-legislative scrutiny, it would be difficult to do it justice, given our timetable. There is no point in doing it if we could not do it justice. However, in principle, I think that it is a good thing for legislation to come back to committees for consideration.

In a way, some of the things that we are doing are post-legislative scrutiny. For example, in our work on youth homelessness, we are looking at a particular part of an issue that has arisen largely as a result of the homelessness provisions.

It would be helpful to have a list of all the bills that have come to the Equal Opportunities Committee over the years. The Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee did a similar exercise in response to the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee’s request. The list that was produced threw up fairly obvious gaps in the committee’s post-legislative scrutiny, as well as pieces of legislation in relation to which post-legislative scrutiny really would be a box-ticking exercise. For example, there might not be such a great need for post-legislative scrutiny of the Scottish Register of Tartans Act 2008, given the other demands on that committee’s time.

The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee asks about the barriers to undertaking post-legislative scrutiny. It seems to me that the most obvious barrier is time. That barrier would affect this committee and one or two others, in particular, if we were expected to look at practically all legislation. We would need to be choosy, at least to start with—perhaps we could work on a pilot basis, initially.

When legislation is passed, someone should say when it will be reviewed—in three years, five years, six months or whatever—but it is clear that some legislation would not need to be reviewed.

Given our work programme and the time constraints that we face, I think that we should say no.

In principle, it would be good to do post-legislative scrutiny—the convener is absolutely right about that—but given our schedule and our work programme, I do not think that it would be feasible. Marco Biagi is correct. Much of what we do is post-legislative scrutiny anyway, so I would say that we do not have the time.

Perhaps we could reflect on the issue in the context of our workload. For example, our work on young people and homelessness has involved looking at elements—albeit only small elements—of the local government legislation on finance, care and housing. I know that that is different from being proactive in examining a specific piece of legislation but, as has been said, post-legislative scrutiny is a key, on-going role of the committee. However, the time constraints must be recognised.

Would the committee be content for us to reply by saying that, in principle, we agree, but we are concerned about the time constraints that having to conduct post-legislative scrutiny would put on committees?

Members indicated agreement.

Siobhan McMahon’s point about a box-ticking exercise is reasonable, too. We do not want procedures to be set out that result in automatic post-legislative scrutiny of every bill, when committees might well decide that that would not be useful. In those circumstances, we might end up with post-legislative scrutiny taking up five minutes at the start of a meeting. I am not sure that our approving a report non-controversially would add anything to the value of how we operate or to the reputation of committees. We need to be careful that we do not fall into that trap.

We could include the Official Report of the discussion in our response. Are members happy to do that?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you very much.

I suspend the meeting until the witnesses arrive for agenda item 4.

09:24 Meeting suspended.

09:59 On resuming—