Procedures Committee, 14 Nov 2006

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Official Report 153KB pdf

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Scottish Commission for Public Audit

Agenda item 3 is the Scottish Commission for Public Audit. The recommendations are on page 4 of the paper, but the issue is gone into in some detail on the previous pages.

It is suggested that we give the SCPA as much status as possible. The proposal is that we should change chapter 16 of the standing orders to require that a substantially verbatim report of the commission's proceedings is published. Such reports would appear in the same form as the substantially verbatim reports of our committee meetings, but they would have a different cover because meetings of the SCPA are not technically parliamentary proceedings. The SCPA would then have a proper record to which anyone could have access. It is proposed that the minutes of SCPA meetings—the minutes are different from the substantially verbatim report—should also be published and that SCPA meetings should be broadcast in the same way that our meetings are.

I ask the clerk to explain the recommendation

"to amend Rule 16.5 so that Rule 16.2 (Journal) no longer applies to committees".

Can we be reminded of what that is?

In the course of considering issues that are before the committee, we sometimes discover minor flaws in the rules that we probably would not have spotted otherwise. It appears that such a flaw exists in relation to the journal. At the moment, the rules appear to apply the requirements of the journal to committee proceedings, so we might want to take the opportunity to correct that. It seems fairly clear that the reference is just an oversight from a session 1 Procedures Committee inquiry.

Why should we remove the reference to the journal?

The original purpose of the journal was to provide the authoritative record of chamber business. That is what the journal has always been intended for and that is what is provided in those parts of the journal that have been published. The journal was never intended to cover committee proceedings in the same way. Indeed, when the session 1 Procedures Committee changed the rules on the journal, it said clearly that the journal was not intended to cover committees. There was simply an oversight in respect of one rule, which on the face of it appears to apply the journal to committees. Although the issue is unrelated to the SCPA as such, it is connected to chapter 16 so it would seem appropriate to make that correction at the same time.

So the practical effect of making the correction would be zilch.

Yes.

So the proposal is simply to complete a task that was undertaken by the session 1 Procedures Committee.

Yes.

Not for the first time.

There seems to be a technical problem with including the full agendas of SCPA meetings in the Business Bulletin in the same way that other committee agendas are included—

Where are the archive records of committee business kept? They impact on legislation, so where are stage 2 proceedings archived if not with the journal?

As far as bills are concerned, hard-copy volumes are produced that bring together all the official documents relating to the passage of a particular bill.

So committee proceedings are journaled.

The separate document that is produced for each bill is not part of the journal. Other committee proceedings are not archived in the same way as the chamber proceedings are archived. The journal is the archive version of the minutes of proceedings, not of the Official Report. That is separate.

Two documents are produced for each meeting of a committee and the Parliament. The minutes are a concise account of the decisions taken and the Official Report is the transcript of what was said. The official report has its own process for producing an archive version over time and effectively that is what goes on the website.

The minutes of proceedings are probably more obscure to most people, but the minute is the official record of decisions taken, division results and so forth. That is archived in the form of the journal, and it covers meetings of the Parliament.

In other words, a stage 2 amendment would not be journaled?

Yes.

I am not convinced that all this is as simple and straightforward as it seems, but never mind. It sounds like one of those things that just appear in a paper, but we have never really had time to think about it or to consider its implications.

If it would help, I would be happy to bring further information to a future meeting to explain the context and background.

It seems bizarre that we would not keep a journal of the minutes of proceedings of committee meetings at which decisions were made.

Especially stage 2 decisions.

Yes, particularly in relation to decisions that are taken at stage 2, but I am thinking also about subordinate legislation and other policy issues of the Parliament. Where do we keep a record of the committees' decisions on subordinate legislation?

Committees are required to produce minutes of proceedings; as you know, the minutes are circulated with the committee papers. They are produced at the time as individual documents. All that the journal adds is that all the documents are collected together in a single place, and there is a further process for checking in the longer term. We do not do that for committee business in the same way that we do for the chamber.

But the chamber minutes are archived.

It is a written archive.

Yes. I am trying to work out why there is no written archive of the committee minutes. Unless someone is prepared to go through the Scottish Parliament information centre and look through lots of stuff, it is very difficult to find the Official Report from the first session of Parliament, for example. I tried to use the search engine to find FMQs but it did not seem to work very well. When I phoned SPICe, I was told that they had to look at the back archive to find what I was looking for.

I am trying to work out why we do not archive committee minutes. If decisions are made in committee, is a record of that kept somewhere? Is it required to be kept and, if so, for how long?

Those things are all kept. The minutes of proceedings for each committee are produced after each meeting. They are official committee documents, and they are archived in the general sense that the staff are required to ensure that the official documents for each committee for which they are responsible are archived. The documents are sent to the National Archives of Scotland in due course.

On accessibility for the public and members, the website includes the minutes, the Official Report and the circulated papers for all committee meetings that have been held in public. That information is available, but it is held in separate parts for each meeting rather than gathered into single volumes. That is the difference.

Let us move to the final point on page 4 of the paper. The SCPA would like its agendas to appear in full in the Business Bulletin, but there seems to be a technical problem with achieving that rapidly. That could, perhaps, be done in due course, but more rapidly there could be a notice of one or two lines on the forthcoming meetings of the SCPA and a link to its website so that people could find the agenda there. It might be possible to produce a notice of the SCPA's forthcoming meetings rapidly and to move, in due course, to including its agendas in the Business Bulletin. That is what the SCPA would like, although that may take some time.

Why would it take such a long time to change a template on a computer for the production of the Business Bulletin? If we proposed a rule change, why—in this electronic age—would it take so long to change the template?

I am advised that the template that is used to construct the different sections of the bulletin and pull them together is such that the accommodation of a new agenda would require the creation of a new section. That would require the people in the Parliament's business information technology office to undertake a reasonably significant piece of work, which might take some time given how busy they are with other work. That could be done and, if the will is there, it will be done; however, it might take a while.

You go and press a few buttons, Karen.

It is just bizarre.

I think that the will should be there. If we are going to include notice of a forthcoming SPCA meeting, along with notice of all the other meetings, it is only fair to include its agenda so that people can see what the SCPA is doing and what the meeting is about.

Some reprogramming must take place. It is a question of how that is prioritised in the workload of the business information technology office; I do not want to get into how much work it is doing elsewhere.

On a point of clarification, are we going to remove the reference to committees in rule 16.5? The matter was left in mid-air. As I understand it, the session 1 Procedures Committee looked into the matter and made that recommendation but did not change the rule. Is that a fair assessment of what happened? When members considered the rule changes, did they consider that point? If it was not in the rule changes, members who did not read the recommendation probably did not consider it. My concern is that we would be changing something on a belief—probably correct—that the first Procedures Committee said that the rule should be changed, but that members have not had a voice in that, as the matter has not been presented to them. That follows on from the potential implication that Karen Gillon noted.

I have no recollection of the details of the issue. If there is concern about the recommendation, Andrew Mylne can produce a fuller brief on that particular issue. It is a wider issue concerning not just the SPCA.

Can we find out what the timescale is for restructuring the Business Bulletin? The deadline will be when the committee's report has been published and the changes have been debated and agreed in the Parliament—I imagine that the lead-in time will be several weeks. I am not convinced that it will take so much work. We need to decide what we are going to do. If we say that we want the SPCA's agendas to be published, the work will just have to be done. Can we find out the timescale for that? If it is years, it would hardly be worth it.

We will find out.

As Karen Gillon says, there will probably be a time lag of two months between the publication of our report and its discussion and agreement in the chamber and the next SCPA meeting, the agenda for which will be required to appear in the Business Bulletin.

We will get more information on the two points that Bruce McFee and Karen Gillon have raised.