Justice and Home Affairs Committee, 26 Oct 1999
Meeting date: Tuesday, October 26, 1999
Official Report
235KB pdf
Scottish Parliament Justice and Home Affairs Committee Tuesday 26 October 1999 (Morning)
[The Convener opened the meeting at 09:47]
I have received apologies from Trish Marwick, who is unable to be here this morning. I welcome Brian Monteith and Sylvia Jackson, who are attending today's meeting. They are not members of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, but as MSPs they are entitled to be here. I understand that they both have a particular constituency interest in one of the items on the agenda. Lyndsay McIntosh has informed us that she may be late.
I want to say a few words about today's meeting. We have a detailed agenda. The first part of the meeting will be an ordinary meeting of the committee, taking forward items that we are investigating. There will be a report from the reporter on domestic violence, the European document will be discussed and there will be further discussion of the petition from the Carbeth hutters. We will also take evidence on that petition.
The fourth item on the agenda—Scottish prisons—will be taken only if the item on the Carbeth hutters does not run until 11.30. Item four is a provisional item to ensure that the committee does not have to adjourn for 15 or 20 minutes after the evidence on the Carbeth hutters has finished. The committee has been discussing prisons since the beginning of September and it seems reasonable to hold a brief discussion about the most recent announcements.
Item five on the agenda is a debate on a motion in my name to annul the amendment regulations considered at our previous meeting. As committee members will recall, we decided on that course of action because of concerns about some of the contents of the statutory instrument. The debate may last for up to 90 minutes, although I hope that it will take far less time than that.
The Deputy Minister for Justice, Angus MacKay, is expected to attend. Under rule 10.4.2 of standing orders, he has a right to participate, although if there is a division he cannot vote. That is also the case for the two visiting members, should they still be in attendance at that stage in the proceedings. The minister is not appearing as a witness to be questioned and I ask committee members to remember that.
After debating the legal aid regulations, we will consider our report to Parliament on our conclusions. We must do that by the end of the 40-day period that applies to the regulations as a whole. That means that the report would need to be published before the next meeting of the committee, which is why the final item on the agenda is a consideration of the draft report circulated in advance of today's meeting.
I propose that item six, the consideration of the draft report, be taken in private. It has long been recognised—as far back as the consultative steering group—that considering draft committee reports is something that it is appropriate for committees to do in private. The Presiding Officer recently endorsed that. If committee members have any concerns, I point out that it would be extremely difficult to discuss in public the terms of a document that is not available to the public and cannot be made public until after the committee has made a decision on it. In those circumstances, it would not be appropriate to make public an expression of the committee's views until the whole committee had endorsed the document.
Before we continue, I ask members for formal agreement to take item six in private. Are we agreed?
Yes