Standards and Public Appointments Committee, 27 Feb 2007

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Official Report 154KB pdf

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Annual Report

Item 3 is the annual report. We have a duty to publish an annual report; members have a draft of the annual report before them. Obviously, some of the statistics are not included in the draft, because we have not quite finished meeting as a committee yet, although that will happen shortly. We will obviously drop in the statistics prior to publication.

I noted one minor mistake, in that I have not attended, in May 2007, a seminar in Belgrade—that happened in 2006.

You are amazing, convener.

In addition, I should point out that the committee will not have powers to meet until 6 May, of course—paragraph 11 should refer to 2 April 2007. With those two minor corrections, are members content to accept the draft annual report?

The draft annual report does not mention the individual cases that we have dealt with. Should it do that—perhaps anonymously?

We have not done that in the past. Case reports are all published in detail anyway. It has not been suggested in the past that details of individual cases, or even the number of cases, should be referred to in our annual report.

Okay.

Do members want the annual report to refer to cases?

The information would appear in the commissioner's report, would it not?

Yes. He says how many cases he has investigated.

I would not have a problem with the information being included in our annual report. It is public knowledge as it is in the commissioner's report.

Can we not just make reference in the annual report to the commissioner's report?

If that suggestion is acceptable, I suggest—as I did in relation to the other reports that we have discussed today—that any minor changes in wording to accommodate that point be left to me and the clerks to agree.

Members indicated agreement.

We now move to agenda item 4, which is the continuation from our previous meeting of our discussion of a complaint. We agreed that, as is our practice in relation to such matters, we would deal with the item in private. Therefore, I ask members of the public, the media and the official report to leave the meeting. If the committee reaches agreement on our next action on the complaint, the meeting will resume in public later.

Meeting continued in private.

Meeting suspended.

Meeting continued in public.