Rural Affairs Committee, 14 Mar 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 14, 2000

Official Report 211KB pdf

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Petitions

Petitions PE96 and PE99 refer to sea-cage fish farming, and petition PE97 refers to agricultural support. I understand that those petitions have been circulated for information and will not be discussed at this meeting.

The petition that is on the agenda for this meeting is PE98, on the subject of rural post offices. All members should have the paperwork in front of them. The nature of this petition is clear: it relates to the items that were reported in The Express in early February. It begins:

"I, the undersigned, declare that according to the Daily Express 5/2/00".

We have all seen the paper. It is in front of us. I invite comment on the subject that the petition covers before we decide what we want to do.

We all acknowledge the importance of rural post offices, and Parliament has debated the issue recently.

The first thought that I had when I read this paper was that I had to question the Public Petitions Committee. It seems extraordinary that a note of this sort, reflecting on a newspaper article that was written by a single individual with an urban address—although, as a representative of Aberdeen, I would not regard that as a disqualification—should be regarded as a petition to the Parliament, to be referred to us to spend time on.

If a petition was submitted to the Parliament from a significant number of users of rural post offices, we would expect it to be referred. However, this seems an extraordinary way in which to interpret the remit of the public petitions process.

Am I not right in thinking that Irene McGugan was heavily involved in the original article? Were you not quoted in that article, Irene?

No.

I am sure that several members of the Parliament were quoted.

We need to put in place some kind of quality check on what is referred to us by the Public Petitions Committee. This petition would fail such a quality check on several counts.

Would it be helpful for you, as convener, to convey those remarks to the convener of the Public Petitions Committee?

That view is definitely widely held in this committee.

We discussed the issue of rural post offices recently and agreed that it should be covered in our wider inquiry. Anyone who wants to add a comment on the subject of rural post offices may do so now, but we have discussed it recently.

Is it the committee's view that the nature of this petition is questionable, and that it seems simply to take a newspaper article and present it back to us, supposedly in the form of a petition? The way in which the public petitions system is being interpreted and used by certain individuals causes me concern.

When is a petition a petition, and when is it a letter from someone? Members of this committee will have been involved in gathering signatures for petitions. I do not believe that a letter from someone could be regarded as a petition. It does not give the weight to an issue that would be given by a petition from people in a community who feel very strongly about it. At the moment, a person can write a letter that will be given the same weight as a petition.

That is probably an issue for the Public Petitions Committee, and perhaps I should suggest in my reply that that committee should interpret the contents of a petition.

As this petition has been presented to the Rural Affairs Committee, could we ask one of the clerks to write back to the petitioner, quoting the motion that the Parliament debated, to inform him that we consider the matter to have been dealt with by the full Parliament six days ago?

Our reaction to the petition must be that the matter has been on the Parliament's agenda and on that of this committee recently. We are right to say that it is one of our priorities and that we have been working on it already.

I remind the committee that the Parliament's standing orders say:

"A petition may be brought by an individual person, a body corporate or an unincorporated association".

Therefore, the number of people signing a petition is not critical to its validity, although that does not address its quality.

The Public Petitions Committee may wish to consider amending the standing orders.

Or, as Cathy Peattie suggested, it may wish to clarify the definition of petition.

That might be worth doing, but we will respond to the Public Petitions Committee in the way that we have described.

The covering note says that the Public Petitions Committee felt that some of the issues raised—although only one issue is raised—could be examined in the course of the committee's inquiry into the impact of changing employment and so on. As we would not conduct much of an inquiry if we did not take that sort of issue into account, I do not think that that is a reason for us to discuss this petition in detail.

We are satisfied that we have dealt with that petition.