Official Report 189KB pdf
We move on to the final item on our agenda. As I said earlier, the press has perhaps slightly misrepresented this. The intention behind having the bill on the protection of wild mammals on the agenda was simply to allow us to look at its scheduling.
Our understanding is that once the committee has heard Mr Watson introduce his bill, members will wish to consider what sort of consultation they wish to undertake. The broad intention is to hear evidence before the summer recess.
If we have the consultation phase and take evidence before the recess, we will have a stage 1 report available at the end of the recess, which will allow us to move to a stage 1 debate very soon after the recess.
It is important that we do not allow our consideration of the bill to interfere with our other work. I have already announced my concerns about the national parks bill. I am concerned that we will not get the national parks bill through in time. I would not like to think that we are going to rush our work on this bill at the same time.
From what the clerks have told me, I believe that the proposal to have the consultation period, to take evidence very late, but before the summer recess, and to consider the stage 1 report in early September—
So national parks will be put to bed by the recess?
We hope that that will be the case. By taking it this way, we will initiate the bill, go into a consultation phase, and I hope that thereafter the matter will not be demanding on the time of the clerking team or the committee until the period immediately before the summer recess.
So it will not impinge upon the national parks bill?
We hope that the schedule as laid out will allow that to be the case. Are there any other comments?
Just as I do not want us be seen as a rubber-stamping committee for the national parks bill, we must not be seen as doing anything less than a very thorough investigation of this bill, which rightly or wrongly seeks to remove rights that people have enjoyed for a long time. We owe it to those people to be as thorough as we can. I hope that there is no intention of rushing this bill through. Our investigations must be thorough and intense. I hope that we can find time to do that.
It is the broadly held view of this committee that we should make a detailed investigation of all the aspects surrounding the bill.
I agree that there are a number of issues that have to be looked at carefully with regard to this bill. My concern about the timing is not so much with the national parks bill, which should be legislation when we discuss this bill, but the possible interaction of this bill with the fishing inquiry that we intend to do around late summer, because that inquiry is time limited and we have to give our responses to the European Union to feed in to the process. We have no flexibility on that. Does the clerk have any comments on that?
It is hard to comment at this stage. We would need to see how much work is involved in those two pieces of work.
We are setting out today the intention to have a stage 1 report by early September, so that the Parliament can move to a stage 1 debate in early September, or as soon as it can be scheduled. Once that has happened, we will be in a position to consider the scheduling of our progress thereafter.
Meeting closed at 15:52.
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