Public Petitions Committee, 19 Apr 2006

Meeting date: Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Official Report 240KB pdf

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Public Petitions (Administrative Procedures)

We turn to our final agenda item. Members will be aware that the committee's consideration of petitions can be a lengthy process. We have a proposal that is intended partly to alleviate that situation. In an attempt to reduce the time between each substantive consideration of a petition, the committee is invited to consider whether, at the same time as agreeing to write to various organisations for their views on a petition, we should also decide whether the responses should be forwarded to the petitioners for their views before the petition is brought back to the committee. Members should be aware that that would mean responses being made public before the committee had an opportunity to consider them.

I will give some background to the proposal. In the past few meetings, we have received many responses from organisations and then decided to send them to the petitioner and wait for their response. In some cases, that has caused delays of a couple of months. I spoke to the clerks about the issue and we felt that we could save a bit of time in dealing with petitions—sometimes time is of the essence—if, immediately we receive responses, they are sent to the petitioners so that we can consider their response at the same time as the original responses. The downside is that petitioners may put something into the public domain that we have not had sight of, because we had not received it in our briefings. Personally, I think that that is a chance worth taking if we can speed up the process overall and help petitioners to make progress.

That is a sensible suggestion. We should adopt a common position in the event of any press contact on letters that are in the public domain but which the committee has not yet considered. We should not comment on them until the committee has considered everything.

We will do that, if members are happy to be bound in that way.

The issue that Jackie Baillie raises is more of a concern than the issue about the information being in the public domain is, as the public have the right to see that information. It would be more of a concern if a member used the information before the committee had seen it and made a decision. I agree with Jackie Baillie.

An issue could even be discussed in the press before we have considered information, but we should take that chance. We can always review the practice if it causes problems for the committee. It would be helpful for the process of petitions if we adopted the procedure. Do members agree to adopt it?

Members indicated agreement.

That concludes our business this morning—we made it before 12 o'clock.

Meeting closed at 11:48.