Social Justice Committee, 19 Sep 2001

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 19, 2001

Official Report 237KB pdf

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Work Programme

Agenda item 8 is consideration of the committee's work programme. This item can be dispatched in a disciplined fashion if members stop talking. We are still in a public meeting.

I seek members' comments on and agreement to the paper outlining dates for reconnaissance visits to eight regions as part of the committee's inquiry into the voluntary sector. We will want to consider where we will visit in each region, which members will go and what will be the specific dates of the visits.

It would be useful to decide on specific places that we want to visit within the identified regions and to think about the days on which we should make the visits. I will ask the clerks to draw up a list of places, dates and times and then ask members to make their bids. It would be reasonable to seek a party balance in the groups that go on the visits, although a problem in that regard should not prohibit us from visiting. That said, the model worked quite well for the Local Government Committee when it made visits.

Although the Local Government Committee prohibited members from visiting their own areas, that prohibition might not apply so much to visits for an inquiry on the voluntary sector. For example, in a local government inquiry, a member could be accused of a predisposition towards a particular council.

Do all the visits have to take place in one day? For example, will a visit to the Highlands and Islands take up a Monday and a Tuesday?

The visits are all on Mondays.

Not necessarily.

How do you know that they are all on Mondays?

Because I have looked. The paper says "Week commencing" and the dates all start on a Monday.

That is because the week commences on a Monday. [Laughter.]

Earth calling Lyndsay.

All the weeks commence on a Monday. It's so bloody stupid.

I remind members that we are still in public session and that our words are being recorded—for posterity.

It would help if we concentrated our minds a little. I suspect that the visit to the Highlands and Islands might require an overnight stay. There is an argument to opt for Mondays, Tuesdays or Fridays during the weeks marked "Week commencing", and I am happy to hear comments on that. How many meetings could the clerks accommodate at the same time?

There are three of us, so it would be three a day.

So if we opted for three visits in a particular week, all the visits could all take place on the same day.

Do members have any specific suggestions about where we should go in the north of Scotland and in the Highlands and Islands?

On the Friday of the first week—week commencing 22 October—I will be on an island anyway. It would be terribly helpful if the rest of you just came over.

I do not think that that is helpful, to be honest.

A Monday or a Tuesday would be much more convenient for me than would a Friday. I tend to hold surgeries that are advertised several months ahead on Fridays.

Can we agree that the visits should take place on Mondays or Tuesdays?

I would prefer them to take place on Mondays. Tuesdays are a problem for me, because I have a Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body meeting on Tuesday mornings.

We could suggest Mondays and Tuesday afternoons.

That would depend on the week. For example, the Friday of the week commencing 22 October would suit me, but the Monday would suit me better in the week commencing 19 November. It depends what is in our diaries.

We will ask the clerks to consider visits being held preferably on Mondays. Members can accommodate that in their diaries. If it looks like a visit cannot be attended by any member, we can revisit the matter.

It has been suggested that we should visit the north of Scotland.

Does the north of Scotland include the Dundee and Aberdeen areas?

We are talking about parliamentary regions.

Are you suggesting that we visit Dundee?

Dundee would probably be better from a social inclusion perspective. Then again, if there was a visit to Dundee in June, perhaps we should consider going to Aberdeen instead. I am not sure—we could consider going to a smaller town.

The islands are generally very neglected.

There are no islands in the north-east.

There are islands in the Highlands and Islands. We are dealing with the north of Scotland.

Sorry—I have just noticed that "North of Scotland" and "Highlands and Islands" are listed separately.

We need a rural perspective on this because—

What about Arbroath? I think—

Could we try to have one member speaking at a time? I do not want to have to chair the meeting too harshly, but we are getting into a guddle again.

I was saying that we should maintain an interest in the rural aspect, which is sometimes overlooked. There might be some relevance in examining the voluntary sector in some areas of rural Aberdeenshire, for example.

One thing that the committee dealt with during evidence taking for the Housing (Scotland) Bill, the Mortgage Rights (Scotland) Bill and the Family Homes and Homelessness (Scotland) Bill was the difficulty of accessing debt advice and citizens advice. It would be good to find out whether there is something of that sort that works in rural areas in the Highlands. The Executive will be looking to make improvements in that regard. If we were able to find out about that, it would help us in our voluntary sector inquiry and give us an insight into debt management and advice agencies in rural areas.

Are you referring to citizens advice bureaux and so on?

Yes.

I understand that CVSs will be facilitating these visits for us. Given that, and bearing in mind Robert Brown's point about ensuring that we maintain a rural dimension, we should perhaps not just go for big cities' CVSs. If we approached the Inverness CVS, for example, it would have links to lots of rural organisations, representatives of which could also be invited along on the day of our visit. That would give us a city perspective—Inverness is now a city—and the rural perspective.

I will go through the other areas and, if members have specific suggestions, we can ask the clerks to pursue those. If there is no specific suggestion, the clerks can speak to the local organisations and get advice about how to best achieve a spread. There is a balance to be struck.

What about the South of Scotland?

I am sorry to disagree convener, but we could go round the table making bids for different organisations. Looking round the table, I see that we are pretty representative of the central belt. We might not know the contacts outside that area. I suggest that we leave the programme to you and the clerk. If there were strong objections to that programme, we could—

While there are a number of towns that we might want to consider visiting, the voluntary network or initiatives in those areas might not be particularly exciting. We should consider what kind of innovative ideas and experiences we are looking for and where they are located before we decide on the programme. Otherwise we might pluck areas out of thin air.

We also want to examine the core themes throughout the sector. We could ask what is being done that is exciting and innovative, but perhaps we should also ask about the commonality of problems. When we go on the visits, I am keen for us to hold substantial meetings, rather than merely tour an interesting project. That is the balance that we must strike.

Members should feed in specific suggestions, which might be a better way of dealing with the programme than finalising it now. We are trying to seek a balance, and the points that I made deal with that issue. If members agree, the clerks and I will consider the programme further, but members should feel free to feed in as many suggestions as possible. For example, the Inverness suggestion was good.

We want to get a flavour of the themes—not the problems facing the voluntary sector but the different types of voluntary sector organisations that exist. For example, quite a lot of groups are involved in empowering disabled people of one sort or another. We have examined some drug projects already, and Cathie Craigie's suggestion about debt advice projects was good. We could probably think of one or two other areas, but we should include a debt advice organisation in order to get different perspectives on the cross-linking problem areas.

In that case, do members agree with the outline programme for the visits and with the proposal that I should submit a paper to the conveners liaison group to seek approval for travel?

Members indicated agreement.

Do members agree that the clerks should consider which are the best places for us to conduct the meetings? The clerks will then give us that information, so that we can bid for dates that suit us with the proviso that, if there is no balance or if there are gaps, we will revisit the issue to see whether the gaps can be filled.

Members indicated agreement.

Sorry, convener. Are the provisional dates 22 October, 5 November and 19 November? Are we looking at Mondays?

Yes.

So are those the likely dates?

Yes.

Should we inform the clerks when we know for sure that we cannot attend meetings on specific Mondays?

Yes.

Meeting continued in private until 12:24.