Official Report 355KB pdf
The next item is oral evidence as part of the committee’s review of cross-party groups. This will be a round-table discussion, which will enable us to explore the issues that were outlined in the discussion paper, which everyone should have received. Members and witnesses have had an opportunity to consider the paper. I propose to take us through the issues in the paper in the order in which they are set out. It might not be possible to do that, as we may well stray across issues. The first issue concerns the number of cross-party groups.
I represent the Cowdenbeath constituency and am a member of two committees of the Parliament.
I am from Psoriasis Scotland, which is a small charity.
I am the MSP for Cunninghame South, which includes Irvine, Kilwinning and Stevenston.
I am the policy director of OneKind. I am also the secretary of the cross-party group on animal welfare. I can speak about that group today, but not for it.
I am an MSP for Glasgow and am a member of seven cross-party groups.
I am a convener, deputy convener and member of several cross-party groups.
I am the MSP for Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders.
I am the policy officer for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations.
I am an MSP for South Scotland.
I represent the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights. Our organisation provides secretariat services for the cross-party group on racial equality in Scotland but, like Libby Anderson, I am here today to represent my organisation, not that group.
I am a committee member of the Association for Scottish Public Affairs, which is the representative body for the public affairs sector.
I am a Central Scotland MSP. I am on two cross-party groups, and I am the vice-convener of the Scottish Parliament and Business Exchange.
I am the MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch. I am on six, or seven—I have lost count—cross-party groups. I was on many more, but I have cut them back. I am the convener of two groups and the vice-convener of another.
One of my comments is the first one quoted in the discussion paper, so I suppose that I should volunteer and plunge in, rather than have you press people into service.
I agree with much of that. Many of the cross-party groups are health related, and sometimes their interests overlap and they are looking for the same clinicians to attend. Various people have already given an opinion on that, so, perhaps, as Libby Anderson says, there could be a chart or something that could be worked out on a computer so that meetings do not clash. A diary would help a lot, because it is proving difficult to get the doctors along who are wanted.
Given that Janice Johnson is with a health group, has she considered whether there is any merit in having fewer health groups, with a slot for each interest within it, such as heart, strokes, psoriasis, diabetes? Would that work?
I suppose that if there is a common issue, then, yes, all the people could get together and deal with it, but what the issue is would need to be decided.
There is obviously a problem with the number of cross-party groups, given that there is a limited number of MSPs. Libby Anderson is right in saying that the groups are a victim of their own success. They have been successful, but the more successful they become, the less time the MSPs have to come along to them. At the moment, a minimum of two MSPs need to attend. I know that that happens in practice, but often both MSPs will not attend for the whole of the meeting. We need to look at that issue as well.
I am grateful for Libby Anderson’s introductory remarks on some of the issues around CPGs. When I started attending CPGs as a new member, I had expectations about what that would involve for me as an MSP. I feel sometimes that there is a revolving door of MSPs coming in and out of CPG meetings. I am not pointing a finger at other MSPs—I have had to do that myself. Not only does it disrupt the meeting—even if someone comes in quietly, everyone stops to see who has joined the meeting, or they have to be introduced—it means that the quality of the input from the MSPs who attend is curtailed. I am well aware that MSPs do not seek to do that. They find themselves forced to do it because of the number of causes that are important to them. There is a conflict when different CPGs that an MSP belongs to meet at the same time. We need to do something about the diary management side of things.
The committee approved another CPG today, on aviation, which brings the number of CPGs to 80. That is a high number. I would not like to say anything that would stop the formation of a good and worthwhile CPG. However, there is a case for looking at the CPGs that exist and reflecting on how often they have met, how many MSPs have attended and what they have achieved. It may well be that a CPG that was started with the best of intentions has fallen by the wayside and members would be quite happy to disband. If we were to do that on a voluntary basis, that might cut down the number.
One of the issues with having so many CPGs is how many of them, including ones that I am involved with, really live up to the spirit of what a CPG is intended to be and how many of them are parliamentarian-led forums. If 20-plus stakeholders who are interested in a particular topic or theme come along to a CPG and one or two MSPs listen to what they have to say, how meaningful is what the MSPs take away—especially if those MSPs are involved in several CPGs?
I will feed in my experience as an MSP over the years. I tried repeatedly to set up a cross-party group on Remploy, but nobody would join that cross-party group. I do not think that that was down to the badness of any MSP; it was just a reflection of the sheer number of commitments that they had to other issues. Over the years, there has never been a debate in the Parliament in which MSPs have not stood up and voiced support for Remploy workers. I took the view that, in that circumstance, I had to be creative and find another way. Some may question it, but I set up the friends of Remploy in the Parliament, which was about Remploy people coming to the Parliament and interacting with me on the issues that troubled them. Over the years, the stakeholders and I have built up a presence in the Parliament that has never gone away.
The SCVO would be concerned about limiting the number of cross-party groups in the Parliament. Cross-party groups are often a voice for the smallest charities in Scotland, which can come into the Parliament, engage and feel that they are part of the parliamentary and legislative process. However, we need to think about a cultural shift in cross-party groups, and people need to temper their expectations. There are not going to be 50 MSPs at every cross-party group—that is just not possible.
I agree with what David McColgan says about not wanting to restrict the number of cross-party groups and with what Paul Wheelhouse says about a more natural management of how they work. ASPA would support that. ASPA has 54 members from every type of organisation that you can imagine, including commercial consultancies, sole traders, charities and organisations such as mine, which is a representative body for the third sector.
I have slight concerns. As a member for the past year, I believe that there are too many cross-party groups and that some of them do not meet the criteria that Claire Munro has just laid out but have existed for a while and are surviving. I have a slight concern that organisations think that the only way in which they can engage with the Parliament is by being part of a cross-party group. However, I have had lots of engagement with small organisations that I did not previously even know existed. That has happened not through cross-party groups, but through meeting groups here in the Parliament and in my constituency. That is similar to Helen Eadie’s experience with Remploy.
One of the first things in my mind is about the acceptable number of cross-party groups. If we continue as at present, the number will grow and grow. When will somebody call a halt and say that we have reached saturation point and there is no space in the booking system for more groups? Margaret Mitchell made a good suggestion about monitoring the number of inactive groups. Is it possible to monitor the groups annually, which would naturally reduce the number of inactive groups? We would need a set criterion, which would be if a group did not have X amount of meetings in a year.
A few points have come out of those comments. One was about the short visits that MSPs pay to cross-party groups if they have more than one group on or if they have other events, given that, when the cross-party groups meet, various other sponsored events take place in the Parliament. What do our guests think about the value of an MSP showing face for perhaps 20 minutes, coming in halfway through a presentation, and then leaving to go to another group? Is that valuable? What are your views on that process? A lot of MSPs attend out of courtesy and do their best to get to maybe three or four different things in one evening. How valuable do you find that?
Obviously, it is not ideal. We would love you all to stay for an hour, an hour and a half or however long the meetings run. However, when I was engaged with the cross-party group on sport, our thinking was always to address the key issue in the first 20 to 25 minutes of the meeting. We recognised that many MSPs would come along for the first 25 minutes but might have to leave—for example, some MSPs had to nip away to attend parents evenings. We accept that your lives are not lived around Holyrood and that you sometimes have things to do outside. We always tried to engage with the issue and get the interesting stuff out there at the earliest point, and we encouraged MSPs to contact us at a later date if they wanted to follow up on anything that they had heard. For example, when we had a presentation on the Commonwealth games sports legacy, we had about 10 MSPs for the first half hour and their number dwindled after that. However, MSPs got back to us after the event to say, “That was a really interesting presentation. How can we follow it up?”
As Bob Doris said, the question is what the purpose of the MSPs at such events is. It is wrong for groups to think that they need an attendance of MSPs in double figures—somebody at a meeting even told me that they had expected 47 MSPs to be there and that it was a waste of time because they were not. That is totally unrealistic and misunderstands the value of cross-party groups and what they can do. There could be two MSPs in attendance, who would look at the issue and undertake to ask a parliamentary question on it, consider a members’ business debate on it or feed in evidence on it to a committee in the Parliament. There are umpteen different ways in which two or three committed MSPs could take issues forward.
I support what Margaret Mitchell has just said. It is not the numbers but the quality and engagement that count. Going back to your question, convener, we very much appreciate MSPs coming to the meetings even for 20 minutes. I am always conscious of the fact—and I remind our group members of it—that these are MSP groups and the rest of us are just decorations. We are quite useful and informative, but we are there to service and to interest and engage the MSPs in the issues that they need information on. The MSPs who attend must have a commitment to and an interest in the issue, and they must want to do something about it.
Our submission talked very much about what would indicate a healthy group, which is why we recommended a quorum of three MSPs. However, I should have added the caveat that, at the moment, a group needs a representative from all the parties. We feel that, with the change in parliamentary arithmetic, it is no longer necessary for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens to put somebody forward for all the groups. If the group is a good long-term prospect, it should be able to attract three MSPs.
I broadly agree with what Libby Anderson said and I agree with Claire Munro that we appreciate the impact of even one or two MSPs being a member of a CPG. MSPs’ involvement with groups is the most interesting aspect. It would certainly be good to get the number of CPGs down by removing those that are ineffective. However, if they are ineffective, they cannot be taking up much of MSPs’ time in the first place. MSPs are not attending them, so removing ineffective CPGs will not necessarily reduce individual MSPs’ workload from attending various CPGs.
It is probably fair to say, though, that some MSPs are members of CPGs but rarely attend, if ever.
Absolutely.
If we avoid the suggestion of limiting the number of CPGs and other suggestions that people are clearly not in favour of, should there be an expectation that an MSP who signs up to a CPG will actually attend, even if they do so for only 20 minutes of a meeting? That can at least help to build up their understanding of issues, even if they are unable to participate in questions and answers afterwards. If they see an initial presentation, that can add to their knowledge base.
We will touch on the collection of data, reporting and scrutiny later.
Part of me agrees with what Paul Wheelhouse said, but another part says that we should not prevent MSPs from joining CPGs, because that would mean that they would not receive information through the minutes about the interaction and engagement with stakeholders. When they know that an MSP member of a CPG has received that information, stakeholders feel that they can approach them about it. There are therefore two sides to the argument about MSPs’ membership of CPGs.
If the Parliament website was kept up to date with CPG minutes, MSPs would have access to that information and all the CPG papers. That might be one way of dealing with the problem; at the same time, we would know that MSPs who signed up to a group have committed to participating actively in it.
Well under half of CPGs seem to publish minutes on the website at the moment, although I agree that if they all did that, CPG information would be much more accessible.
That is a good point.
Margaret Burgess raised an issue to do with the number of health cross-party groups. In recognition of that very issue, we set up the cross-party group on arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions, which embraces a range of health conditions, such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis. Janice Johnson and I had a discussion about a possible conflict with her group, which deals with psoriatic arthritis, and we have tried to avoid that.
At a recent meeting, Dr Carman gave us some information about the caucus system that operates in America. If I recollect correctly, he said that, when they tightened up the criteria for formal groups, there was an explosion of caucuses, which are informal groups—there is no control over, for example, who can be involved in those groups, what they can do, what they do in relation to lobbyists and how they are funded, because they are not in any way part of the regulated system.
I am not sure about informal groups, but one of the strengths of the current cross-party group system, in line with the founding principles of the Parliament, is that it is quite open and welcoming. Some people are a member of a cross-party group because they are an expert in the field or whatever, but others come to cross-party groups only once—because, for example, they work in the field of osteoporosis and want to attend a meeting that deals with a specific topic. Anecdotally, I understand that there has been an issue with people who are not members of the group not being allowed to attend. It would be good if people who were not members were able to attend on a one-off basis. I know some people who are not at all interested in politics but who, funnily enough, attend some of the health cross-party groups. If the groups continue to be formal cross-party groups, the level of accessibility to such people can be preserved, as you will still have some control over them.
Just to be clear, when I talked about other ways of engaging, I was not suggesting for a minute that there would be subversive groups or groups that set up informally in competition with existing groups; I was simply saying that the fact that certain cross-party groups do not meet regularly or are not well attended does not mean that people who are on those groups cannot engage with parliamentarians. In other words, if the members of a group do not have the support or the wherewithal to ensure that their group is active—which, as someone said, might mean that the group disappears—the topic area does not necessarily have to be inactive, because the members of the group can still engage with politicians.
Can I just clarify a point? My understanding was that two MSPs had to be present before the minutes could be put on the website. Is that right?
Yes. Two MSPs need to be there, but as I understand it there is nothing to say for how long. Two MSPs would need to be there, one of whom would be the chair, but if the second one decided to leave after a short while, nothing in the rules at the moment would prevent that. I believe that the meeting would still be quorate.
It might be good to tease out whether the groups that do not publish their minutes do not do so because they have difficulties with the quorum or are just not bothering.
That is a good point.
One of the strengths of cross-party groups, which I think has been picked up by Claire Munro and others, is that by their nature—because they are regulated and are in Parliament—they are open to scrutiny. That gives a degree of transparency and integrity to the process of engagement between parliamentarians and external bodies, whether charities, business groups or others.
Is it possible to state that cross-party groups must meet X times a year? When they reapply, the application form could ask how many meetings they had in the previous year. Failure to achieve the required number would be a way of naturally disbanding the group.
A number of submissions mentioned that—views varied between two, three and four meetings a year. Some groups meet monthly and others much less frequently. That is not surprising, because groups meet for different purposes. A combination of the suggestions—for example a minimum of two meetings a year—might help us to keep the numbers low. I do not know whether committee members feel that that would be sufficient.
I do not know how much of a problem this is, but we have party-political group meetings at different times in the week. If a CPG meets on a Tuesday evening, the Conservative group might be affected. If it meets on a Wednesday lunch time, the Scottish National Party group is affected. I do not know when the Labour group meetings are—
Tuesday.
I am a member of the CPG on skills, which always seems to meet on a Wednesday lunch time, and I can rarely, if ever, attend it. I wonder whether there is an issue there. I suppose that there is a responsibility on the team organising the CPG to change things around, at least occasionally. I am not saying that they should avoid those times but they should try to share out the available times on a reasonable basis so that MSPs can attend. It is possible to get slips from group meetings but MSPs cannot do that for every cross-party group, and they have a responsibility to attend their group meetings, too.
To pick up on what Paul Wheelhouse said, the cross-party group on sport held meetings at breakfast time, lunch time and in the evening from Tuesday to Thursday and did not notice that the time of the meeting had any effect on the number of MSPs who turned up. MSPs turned up because the agenda was relevant. That is the point that I was trying to make earlier. It is a case of ensuring that the agenda is relevant to the Parliament and to the sector that runs the group.
I have something to add on accountability. To qualify what I said previously about minutes, there is a technical issue, in that minutes cannot be published until they have been approved at the next meeting, so they might not be available for three months. That means that the group’s members will have received them, but the public will not be able to see them because they will not have been posted. One way of getting round that would be to publish them as draft minutes. That might help people to know that there was activity going on.
We received more than 40 submissions, which is really good. An issue that a number of them raised was that of whether there should be a standard format for the annual report, requiring a minimum range of information, such as the number of MSPs who attended each meeting and so on. I am not talking about anything too onerous—just a pro forma that each group would have to fill in. At the moment, some groups comply with the rules and produce annual reports, whereas others do not. I do not think that the rules lay down any sanction against those groups that do not produce annual reports. Would it be a good thing if all the groups had to complete a short pro forma?
That reminds me of a time when the international development group provided one of the best annual reports; I do not know whether it was Des McNulty who did that or whether it was the secretariat who acted on the group’s behalf. I have not looked at some of the more recent annual reports, but rather than apply sanctions, we could offer a distinction or merit award to the group that provided the best report. There are two ways of changing people’s behaviour—the carrot and the stick. I just plant that thought in the convener’s mind.
You are obviously much nicer than I am—you are the carrot and I am the stick.
It is just a thought.
In that regard, I wonder whether the destination of the annual reports and what happens to them might be relevant.
I have gone on to the internet to see what the all-party groups at Westminster are doing and have found some of their reports really helpful. I am not saying—especially not in front of my SNP colleagues—that Westminster does everything right, but those groups have carried out some really good work that can allow parliamentarians to get another political angle on a matter. The sort of annual report that Claire Munro has suggested, which would set out a number of comprehensive recommendations and suggestions, would give good pointers to parliamentarians who were keen on an issue but who found themselves unable to get to the cross-party group meetings; indeed, it might generate a whole range of parliamentary questions, motions and all the rest of it.
I wonder how chuffed ministers would be at the prospect of all those reports landing on their desks.
I support Margaret Mitchell’s comments. Over the course of the year since I joined the cross-party group on sport as one of its vice-conveners, three ministers have come before us: Shona Robison; John Swinney, who talked about the role of sport in preventative spend; and, at our last meeting, Derek Mackay, who talked about local government issues. In response to David McColgan, I say that I believe that that has helped to boost attendance.
The production of annual reports might not be such a huge issue to groups with an external secretariat, because they would see it as an opportunity to summarise the work done over the year. However—and this might be a consideration for elected members—if the cross-party group convener’s parliamentary assistant is the group’s note-taker, will the onerous task of producing the annual report fall on them?
We have heard a lot of information and views. The clerks have been scribbling all the way through and have taken plenty of notes, as have I. We have ranged over a number of the issues, which interlink. We have touched on things such as reporting and scrutiny. What other issues arise? The minimum number of meetings has been mentioned and there seems to be general agreement that two meetings per year would be a reasonable minimum number.
I support that option. The AGMs should be staggered in a natural way that coincides with the year ending for the cross-party groups.
That seems to be the general consensus. Are there any further points?
There is still a question about the amount of money. There is a £500 threshold and one of the submissions that we received stated that that was
I was not terribly sure whether all the written submissions had answered the same questions that I had. It seemed to me that that is only a threshold for registration—it is the point at which groups have to declare interests, as do elected members. As far as I understand it, the group can have as large a budget as it wants.
The level of budgets varies hugely. Some groups have zero—nothing at all. Some groups have a higher amount—I am trying to think of the highest. Is it £10,000?
It is £22,000.
That is a huge budget, compared with those of an awful lot of other groups. There is justification for a number of budgets. Some groups have to produce materials in different forms, such as braille, which adds cost and expenses. However, it is concerning when big money goes into groups and you wonder what it is being used for. We need to be careful about groups’ purposes.
Could we tease out what is involved in that £500 threshold? Much of the administration will be electronic now, and therefore should not add too much cost. There might be a cost in providing tea and coffee. Thereafter, any major costs would come from an event, unless something such as a report or booklet was commissioned. It would be good to have more clarity and openness about what the money was being used for, especially with regard to any potential lobbying. The Parliament has never had a problem with that—we are open and accessible—but it would be helpful to clarify that aspect.
It might be useful to include that in a pro forma annual report—a wee note of expenditure, how much had been spent and on what. It need not be anything too complicated, but it would be reasonable to suggest that that information goes into an annual report.
Are we merging—
We are sort of flowing across. We have scooted through reporting and scrutiny, and we will come to expectations in a minute.
We are still on issue 3.
Yes. Are you okay with that?
That is fine.
It looks as though we have nothing more to discuss on reporting, scrutiny and so on. Let us move on to expectations. What do people expect from cross-party groups? I suspect that there are a variety of expectations.
I should have made my opening remark my last remark. Going back to what I said at the beginning, it would be good for the Parliament to engage with people at an early stage when they are setting up a cross-party group, to make them understand what is involved in a cross-party group, that there are 80 other groups and that they will not get 47 MSPs turning up at any group meeting—that is just not possible.
You are suggesting that there should be some initial help at least from the committee clerks.
The paper contains a suggestion by the Scotch Whisky Association that there should be an “initial ‘CPG set-up meeting’”, which is similar to what David McColgan suggested. I can see the value in that, but it would be better to have a piece of written guidance that is user friendly and clear about the purpose of cross-party groups and how they operate. The initial set-up meeting might be helpful to the people who are involved at the early stages, but those who come along later in the day are the ones with whom we often have the biggest problems in explaining the purpose of the groups.
That is a very good point. When I was looking through the submissions, I found that the views on the purpose of cross-party groups varied enormously. The committee needs to address the purpose of groups in its guidance and must try to come up with something that is fairly clearly defined so that people will know exactly what to expect. Some folk come to groups expecting the groups to accede to their wish to write to a minister about a particular point. Groups do that, but there needs to be consensus in the group that the issue needs to be addressed in that way. People come with personal issues and broader issues, and they can all be relevant.
There is one little issue. Obviously, Holyrood is in Edinburgh. Would it be possible to use videolinks sometimes, as people who are really interested in a subject might have to travel a long distance to get here? Has that issue ever been considered? Is the use of videolinks feasible?
The use of parliamentary facilities is part of the question. I think that, currently, the use of videolinks would probably not be allowed for cross-party groups. People have to travel here; indeed, I know that people in one or two groups of which I am a member travel a fair distance to meetings. If they do that and the meeting lasts for an hour, they will wonder why they spent four hours getting to it. Perhaps they will have to stay overnight or take four hours to get back home late at night. As a Highland MSP, I understand their views. Perhaps videoconferencing would be useful for such folk, so perhaps we need to consider the use of videoconferencing facilities. The approach works in certain circumstances. It works with small numbers, but I am not convinced that it works with bigger numbers. There are all sorts of practical difficulties with them.
I hear what you say, convener, and accept some of your qualifications, but I like Janice Johnson’s proposition. We could be creative and look at how we engage with other Parliaments in other countries and learn from other all-party groups in them. I am not speaking about only the Westminster Parliament, but about Parliaments much more widely across Europe. There are Parliaments whose size is similar to that of the Scottish Parliament, and we could perhaps learn a lot from one another. I see the matter not only in a Scottish context, but in a wider European context.
In principle, I do not have anything against videoconferencing, but in practical terms, when I have been involved in it before, an information technology person has required to be there virtually all the time to arrange and set up the videoconference. If three cross-party groups all want to have a videoconference on one night and people are in various areas, that is logistically quite difficult to organise. Videoconferencing is all right for one small meeting that involves six people if it is known where the sixth person is and where the connection is to, but we need to think about the implications of extending it more widely. We need to think about not only the cost implications, but the logistics involved in having an IT person always available to make the connection. There also needs to be organisation when the connection breaks down, as it always does.
I will not comment on IT, videoconferencing or Skype; rather, I want to go back to managing the expectations of non-MSP members of cross-party groups, as outlined in our briefing paper. I have a slight issue with the phraseology that is used, because I want non-MSP members to have high expectations of cross-party groups. The issue is ensuring that people have the correct knowledge of the purposes of cross-party groups and, once they have that, raising their expectations of what cross-party groups can do.
The issue of remote access via videoconference is interesting, but I share Margaret Burgess’s concern about the resource implications and issues around out-of-hours working for people such as our broadcasting colleagues with regard to changing contracts and so on. Even if external financing was available, that would change the nature of cross-party groups, and they would become much more elitist in the sense that organisations would have to be able to afford to fund them.
On the issue of videoconferencing, at the end of the last parliamentary session the cross-party group on sport met outwith the Parliament at a sports venue so that MSPs could discuss topical issues. I am not sure about whether we are going to start condoning cross-party groups travelling the country and holding meetings; I do not think that that is a sensible way to do things. However, thinking differently, perhaps there are other ways to meet rather than just in a committee room, which might alleviate the pressure on the facilities in the Scottish Parliament.
It would be a good idea to make training available at some point in order to give the necessary pointers about what can and cannot be done. High expectations are fantastic, but unrealistic expectations are wrong and a different matter altogether. It is not the first time that members of a cross-party group have assumed that, because it is a parliamentary group, they have powers that are almost quasi-judicial or official. That must be clearly spelled out.
We have discussed a range of points. We have plenty to get our teeth into when we think about how to proceed later this afternoon.
One aspect that we have not touched on is an organisation providing a secretarial service or help. It has been suggested that, on request—and it would only be on request—the committee could dig a little deeper and look at that organisation and its members. For openness and transparency, that would certainly be a good thing to do. That should not be done routinely, but it should be possible if requested, just to ensure that there is no undue influence coming in by the back door.
One thing that has been a bit of an irritation to committee members is that, when we receive applications from cross-party groups, it is sometimes not clear exactly who the secretary is. A name is given, but there is no information about the organisation that they represent or their reason for providing the service. We need to tighten up on that and ensure that no application comes to us that is not absolutely explicit about why a person is offering their services as secretary and whether they are being paid for it. We want to be clear about that to preserve the transparency and integrity of the CPG system.
The new parliamentary regime that will commence in September, with committees meeting in the mornings and plenary sessions in the afternoons, will have an effect. There will probably be more MSPs in Edinburgh to attend group meetings on Tuesday evenings. Lunch time meetings between 12 and 2 will be feasible on a Tuesday and Wednesday, and even on a Thursday.
I have one point in support of that, convener. The proposed cross-party group on postal issues has decided, just in the last week, to meet on a Tuesday evening, precisely because that is the less congested part of the week. The changes are already having an impact.
Yes. The new regime might ease the pressure a little. If we can come up with a number of other proposals that will work together to ease the pressure, that would be great. Cross-party groups are a hugely valuable element of what we do in the Parliament. It is great to get people into the Parliament who can have direct influence. I agree with Bob Doris that we need high expectations but, as Margaret Mitchell said, we do not want unrealistic expectations.
Those are high expectations, convener.
Yes. We move into private for the rest of the meeting.
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