Local Government and Communities Committee, 20 Jun 2007

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Official Report 132KB pdf

---

Work Programme

Item 5 on the agenda is consideration of the committee's approach to developing a work programme. Papers on the subject have been made available to the committee. I invite comments and questions from members.

An away day would be useful, but we will need some information to inform it. In particular, we need to know what the Executive's programme in the area is. Where does ministerial responsibility for the range of issues for which the committee is responsible lie? We need to know what the Executive's priorities are, not so that we may mirror its programme exactly but to allow us to engage with the ministerial team to help shape what it is proposing to do. First, we must ask for clarity on the identity of the responsible minister and how the responsibilities of the committee have been divided up. Secondly, although there is no legislative programme, there may be legislative implications that the Executive wants to share with us. We should seek an indication of what it is planning, what issues it will address and what its priorities are. That will inform how we scrutinise the Executive's work and indicate what space we will have to do other work.

My comments are in a similar vein. It is extremely important that the committee should meet again next week, if possible, to give us the opportunity to invite the cabinet secretary to attend to give us a brief outline of the Government's plans. Although the Government has made announcements in a few areas by means of parliamentary statements, there has not yet been a full statement of the Government's legislative or policy priorities. Although it is for the committee to consider its own work plan and to initiate its own inquiries, we also have the role of scrutinising the Government's work and holding it to account. It is difficult for us to do that without hearing from the Government whether it plans to bring forward a legislative programme and what that programme might include.

We should create space on next week's committee meeting agenda for the cabinet secretary to attend, so that the Executive may outline before the recess the Government's priorities and plans. We cannot wait until September—that is too long. The Government must give us more information on its plans. In previous sessions, committees would have met several times by now and would have been able to consider a four-year programme for government; it is only right that we should be able to look ahead in this session, too. It is important that the cabinet secretary should appear before the committee next week, as I wish to hear from him about the Government's approach to the important issues that we face.

We will come back to Jim Tolson's proposal.

From which cabinet secretary would Jim Tolson like to hear? Johann Lamont's comments were more appropriate, as we have to get a grip of ministers' cross-cutting remits and to work out which ministers will be responsible for which issues. I am not sure that we should invite a specific minister to appear before us at this stage, but there is a raft of issues that we need to address. I want to ensure that we meet weekly, because the burden of work is such that, if we start to meet fortnightly, we may end up with a huge backlog. We should start as we mean to go on.

There are a huge number of issues that we need to discuss, and we must identify the ministers with whom we want to interact.

Many of the issues are covered in the papers. They include fuel poverty, child poverty, debt, planning, all aspects of housing policy—including affordable housing—homelessness, business rates, the voluntary sector, the abolition of the council tax, petitions, the private landlord registration scheme, scrutiny of the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, the free school meals pilot, the community regeneration fund, the warm deal budget and drug and alcohol misuse. Those are just some of the subjects, but I am sure that members have others that they would like us to consider. We want to be as proactive as possible; we do not want to be completely reactive to proposed legislation, as has happened in previous committees. We want to set out our stall. The suggestion of having an away day is excellent and I hope that we can formalise our full programme during that day.

My apologies for missing the start of the meeting and your assumption of office, convener. In future, I will not be disrespectful and will turn up on time, but I was meeting the Presiding Officer. I congratulate you and the deputy convener.

I will follow up a couple of the points that have been made. On planning, I would welcome clarity on the division of responsibility between this committee and the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee, particularly in relation to parliamentary engagement in the development of the national planning framework. That is one of the hangovers from the Planning etc (Scotland) Bill and the work that Johann Lamont did when she was the Scottish Executive minister responsible for that bill. It is not clear where the division of responsibility lies. I assume that the subordinate legislation that will be rolled out under the Planning etc (Scotland) Act 2006 and which will complete that legislative process will come to this committee. However, I am not entirely sure whether our role in planning is simply to complete the building of that framework and structure, leaving others—for instance, the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee—to comment on substantive proposals, such as those that might be in the national planning framework. Alternatively, we may have a substantive role in those matters. I would like clarity on the respective roles of this committee and the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee. That is an exemplar of some of the wider issues that Johann Lamont, Bob Doris and Kenny Gibson have raised.

I take on board Kenny Gibson's point, but just because there is more than one minister with responsibility to the committee does not mean that we should decide at this stage which one will have the greatest priority. We should hear from both the ministers or, if there is a cabinet secretary and two ministers, let us have them all. We must start to get a picture of how the Cabinet and the Government intend to proceed in relation to the committee. Next week, we should at least have an opportunity to discuss with the relevant ministers—either together or separately—which areas they intend to cover and what proposals they intend to make. If it is necessary to invite more than one cabinet secretary or a cabinet secretary and some ministers, we should consider that possibility.

If we are not clear about which minister has responsibility, I do not see the point in inviting them all along. We should make representations to the Executive to find that out, so that when the minister comes to the committee we can have productive discussions. If the matter is unclear, the convener should make representations to the Executive to ask who has responsibility for what. We can then put into our work plan for the coming period which minister we will bring to the committee to question on Executive policy and why we will do so. However, to have two, three or four ministers here next week would be an exercise in itself, rather than anything productive. The convener should approach the Executive to ask for clear remits and for information on who has responsibility for what.

Are we saying that the clerks have not yet been told who has ministerial responsibility? We may not know, but it is reasonable to assume that the ministers know where the responsibility lies. Their first priority should be to be clear about which committees they will work with—it may not be only one committee if they have a cross-cutting agenda. If the ministers have not provided that information to the clerks, we should seek it as a matter of urgency. I accept that an initial get-together would be a useful exercise and I imagine that no minister could resist coming before the committee at an early stage to talk about their initial priorities, so that would be welcome next week.

David McLetchie mentioned planning, which was the responsibility of the Communities Committee in the second session. I would argue strongly that the Local Government and Communities Committee is the logical place for planning to sit because, although planning relates to infrastructure, there is a critical issue around community engagement and communities shaping the development of planning. There is an understanding of the equation around planning. Apart from anything else, I do not know what I would do if I was no longer involved in consideration of planning, so it would be good if the committee had responsibility for it. We must get clarity from the Executive on that. Of course, that would not prevent us from speaking to the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee about issues that it had concerns about.

We should get a timetable from the Executive that lists the statutory instruments that are on the stocks and ready to go. Members may wish to consider what was done in the past. Both when I was the convener of the Communities Committee and when I was the Deputy Minister for Communities, it was the committee's practice to invite a minister to the away day so that members had an opportunity to engage with them more informally and to find out what they were considering. The minister could bring their officials with them, if they chose to. That could be the first session at our away day. Following that discussion and our formal discussions in committee, we could use the second half of the away day to examine the Executive's proposals. Once we have the information that we have asked the Executive for, we will be able to shape our priorities. As Kenny Gibson outlined, one danger might be that we think that we cannot do anything because our remit is so overwhelming and covers so much. We must be well informed if we are to progress our priorities.

I have no axe to grind about asking the ministers to come along; I just think that such an invitation is somewhat premature. My concern is that I do not want us to be in a position whereby we follow the priorities of the ministerial agenda. We should set out our priorities. We will obviously have to work on whatever legislative proposals are made, but we should set out our stall and get the ministers and the Executive to follow suit; it should not necessarily be the other way round.

I appreciate Kenny Gibson outlining the main details of the committee's role and responsibilities and how the ministerial portfolios might relate to them, but it is crucial for members of the committee and, through us, members of the public to have the chance to find out what the ministers are thinking and what their plans are. We should not leave that until as late as September. I hope that the ministers and the cabinet secretary know what their plans are, but if they do not, they should not be able to hide the fact by delaying until September. That is why I want to bring them before us next week and to make them answerable on their positions and their roles and how they want to advance government in Scotland.

We have clear agreement that we need an away day to influence our work programme over the next year.

A common thread of our discussion is that there is not a very good understanding of what the Executive has on the stocks and what it will require us to do. It has been well established that committees have to work to the Executive's agenda. If we are to develop our agenda, we will have to check on our capacity, our time and everything else and will need to discuss with the cabinet secretary or the appropriate ministers what we will be required to do so that we can decide what it would be realistic for us to do in the remaining time.

I do not know, given diary commitments, whether the cabinet secretary will be available to attend next week's meeting at short notice, but I do not think that it would be unreasonable for the committee to ask her or one of her ministers to come along, if they are available. Nor would it be unreasonable to ask the Executive to provide a paper to aid our discussion with the cabinet secretary.

With members' agreement, we could follow up on the practice that has been established for away days over the past few years and give ministers the opportunity to spend some time with the committee and have an informal discussion, under Chatham house rules, about their and our priorities for the coming year.

I do not know whether there is broad agreement on that summary but, if there is, and if there are no strong feelings to the contrary, we could ask the clerks to proceed on that basis.

My only concern is about diary commitments. I imagine that every committee will seek a similar approach from ministers. The committees do not mirror the portfolios of the ministers and cabinet secretaries exactly. If only one minister is available to the committee, would you wish that minister to focus on his or her own remit or to cover all the issues that the committee faces?

We need to have an initial discussion with an appropriate minister so that they can outline to the committee what their priorities will be. That will impinge on the committee's time. We need to have a paper and we need the opportunity to speak to the relevant minister.

I am surprised to hear that the committee clerks have not already been furnished with that information about remits. Speaking from my past experience both as a committee member and as a minister, I know that requests and demands from committees were always given priority in the Executive. It was in extremis that a minister was requested to come before a committee but did not do so. I hope that that message will go back to the ministerial team. I appreciate that there can be diary issues, but there would need to be a conflict with attendance at another committee or with something that it was almost impossible to get out of for a minister not to attend.

We need to make it clear that that is the relationship that we expect with ministers. We would have expected their remits to have been furnished to the clerks already. If they have not been, and if there is some difficulty with diary engagements, we would at least like a written report to come before us at the next meeting, indicating exactly how ministers see their responsibilities being divided up. They must have thought about it, as their relationship with the committees is a critical part of any piece of work that they will do.

If only one minister is available, it will be important to speak to them about their own responsibilities, but they will surely also have a sense of the wider responsibilities of the ministerial team. We will be mindful of the fact that they will not have direct responsibility for other areas. If, for instance, we see the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, we would not expect to interrogate her about John Swinney's responsibilities. Nevertheless, it would be entirely reasonable to expect her to respond to her own broad brief.

This is the beginning of a process to help to inform us in deciding how to divide up our time. That is entirely reasonable. I say again that I am surprised that basic information has not been provided to the committee clerks.

It is important to set the correct tone. I agree with much of what Johann Lamont has said. However, we are not yet at the stage of demanding that ministers come before us. We are asking them to—

We have been doing it for eight years.

Apologies—as a new boy, I will say what my impression of things is. My impression is that we should ask ministers to come along, which is a courteous thing to do, rather than making demands. This is our first meeting. I agree that there seems to be a need for more clarity over who has responsibility for what. It would be nice to have some written material on that. It would be ideal if a minister could come along next week, but they will have diary commitments. If we see a minister, that would be a positive thing. We should get the tone right at our first meeting. Let us ask the ministers to come along rather than use words such as "demand". That would not be helpful.

The conversation is going round in circles a wee bit. We cannot speculate about what is or is not in the minister's diary. As the convener said, an invitation should go to ministers. Whoever comes along should be briefed on all the relevant portfolios and they should be able to talk about them. Beyond that, we are manufacturing differences that do not exist. As I see it, and as the convener summed it up, this is the direction in which we seem to be heading. An invitation of the kind that we have discussed would seem sensible.

I merely sought clarification that that would be the case. If we ask for three or four ministers or cabinet secretaries to come along and only one or two are available, we would like them to be able to speak to the full agenda that the committee faces. If that is going to be the case and if we are so minded, we should proceed on that basis.

Convener—

Michael, I am on the spot here. Unless you are desperate to speak, I believe that we have agreement to invite one of the ministers to the committee and to ask for a paper that would outline their position and aid us in that discussion. Our away day will include a slot for the minister and her officials. If the committee and the ministerial team are to be considered successful, they will have to work together. It is not about inviting the ministers to come and be interrogated; they are accountable to the committee and we need to hold them to account. The common view of members seems to be that that is the way ahead. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.