Rural Affairs and Environment Committee, 19 Dec 2007

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Official Report 140KB pdf

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Petition

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Sewage Sludge (PE749)

The next item is petition PE749, which came before the Public Petitions Committee and was referred to us. It has been hanging around for quite a while. We finally got a progress update from Scottish Water on its sewage sludge strategy, and we have now had a response from the petitioner, who is no longer the original petitioner. He was invited to comment and he did so. I think that his comments have been handed round.

Scottish Water has still not published its final sewage sludge strategy, and I am not sure that we can progress the matter until it does. I must put it on the record that I am not at all happy with the extremely dilatory way in which Scottish Water has dealt with the issue, which has extended over a vast period of time with nothing other than what I would call holding letters in between. That is not an appropriate way for an organisation such as Scottish Water to respond to parliamentary requests. Unhappily, I am in the position of having to say that we must continue consideration of the petition until we get further detail from Scottish Water. Is the committee agreed?

I am perfectly happy with that, convener, but we should put a marker down for Scottish Water that the situation cannot be allowed to continue and that we will come back to the matter and, if necessary, bring representatives of Scottish Water before the committee to discuss how it will be resolved.

Once the committee has dealt with the petition, we will need to discuss the handling of the matter and consider whether we want to take further action.