Official Report 271KB pdf
For our last item this morning, we need to consider a paper that has been produced and circulated by the clerks on the referral of public petitions to subject committees. The aim of the paper is to build on the ad hoc procedures that currently exist and to agree good practice that is visible to the petitioner. The paper is also intended to reinforce the transparent approach employed by the committee in deciding what action to take on public petitions. Do members have comments?
Until I read the paper, I did not appreciate that petitions could be referred from one subject committee to another. I thought that the Public Petitions Committee was the referring body and I had not realised that other committees could bounce petitions from their court into somebody else's. I presume that we would be informed if that happened, but I ask the clerks how often we have referred a petition to a committee and then found that another committee has been asked to deal with it instead.
We do not have any figures for that as such. I should perhaps clarify that the matter arose during a discussion with subject committee clerks. We have suggested in the paper that subject committees should discuss the issue before petitions are referred on.
My follow-up question refers to the second bullet point in the section entitled "Good Practice Recommendations", which says:
The Health Committee has agreed such a procedure and we have been advised of it. Obviously, how to deal with the matter is up to the subject committees, but we could make recommendations on that basis.
It might be better to recommend that committees that have a lot of petitions referred to them should have a standard format, because that would allow them to have a bit more flexibility.
I have repeatedly raised my concern about members suggesting that we should send a particular petition to a particular committee, because once we do so the matter is out of our control. Your proposal would at least allow us to find out what has been happening if we need to step back in again. I am more than happy for the clerks to see how that suggestion would fit into the paper and then to bring the amended paper back for the committee's consideration.
The suggestion is helpful. I also wonder whether some guidance on the matter could be prepared for inclusion in the current guidelines for petitioners. Members of the Public Petitions Committee regularly receive e-mails from people who apparently do not understand the process and seem to think that, because we have taken a particular action, there is an onus on us to take further action. I am thinking in particular of Mr Minogue; I do not know about other members, but he constantly sends me e-mails. That is a classic example of a case in which a petition was referred to one of the justice committees, the petitioner did not accept the outcome of the committee's deliberations and now he keeps coming back to us on the matter. We need some clarity and transparency in the process to allow petitioners to understand what goes on, which is why I especially welcome the paper. I also support Mike Watson's suggestion.
The clerks have quite rightly pointed out that we need to work to certain timescales. Mike, are you happy for your suggestion to be added to the paper so that we can sign it off and get it before the Conveners Group as quickly as possible?
Yes, certainly.
The clerk has presumably discussed with the Conveners Group or other clerks their willingness to keep us informed of forward work programmes. After all, there is rather a presumption that they will be happy to do so.
As I indicated to Mike Watson, the paper arose out of discussions with all the subject committee clerks.
Some committees do these things and some do not. Jim Johnston has helpfully tried to get some structure into the process of considering petitions and to make it less ad hoc. As Helen Eadie pointed out, such an approach might allow petitioners to understand better what happens to a petition once it is referred to a subject committee. At that point, we lose some control over the matter because we essentially decide that a particular committee should consider it. The proposal in the paper will allow us to structure the process and enable those who come to the Public Petitions Committee to find out what sort of passage a petition should take.
The Health Committee receives a lot of referrals from the Public Petitions Committee and, during discussions in the past couple of weeks, it decided to take evidence in north-east Scotland on PE609, on eating disorders. I do not know how awareness is fed back to the Public Petitions Committee from a subject committee that is taking forward a piece of work. There might be scope for the committee clerks to inform the clerk of the Public Petitions Committee that an important piece of work has been taken forward. The fact that the Health Committee is proceeding with that inquiry is good news. It discussed other petitions yesterday, including petitions on autism and epilepsy, and it continues to make some progress with them. When a committee makes an achievement, it would be heartening for us and the petitioner to see a public statement to that effect.
That is exactly the purpose of the paper. If a committee came back to us in that way, we could close the petition, or our dealings with it, knowing that the committee had taken action on it. It would be on the record that we had concluded the petition at that point. That is the purpose of introducing a formalised structure.
It might be interesting for us to see, even in diagrammatic form, where petitions have gone. It would be useful to have a graph showing that a certain amount of petitions have gone to the Health Committee, a certain amount to the Local Government and Transport Committee and so on, if that is easy to achieve.
Perhaps the Scottish Parliament information centre would have a look at that.
John Scott makes a serious point. The information need not be in the form of a diagram; it could be just a list of the petitions on which the Parliament has made concrete progress in the past year. Perhaps that comes out anyway in the annual report—perhaps that is the place for that information.
We can certainly look into that matter for you.
We will not put any more pressure on. The matter will be looked into—we will leave it at that. Are members happy with the amendment that Mike Watson suggested? We will send the redrafted paper to the Conveners Group and take the matter forward from there.
I thank members for their attendance and participation.
Meeting closed at 12:12.
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