Public Petitions Committee, 28 Jun 2005
Meeting date: Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Official Report
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Scottish Parliament Public Petitions Committee Tuesday 28 June 2005
[The Convener opened the meeting at 10:04]
Good morning and welcome to the 12th meeting in 2005 of the Public Petitions Committee. I have received apologies from Campbell Martin, John Farquhar Munro and Sandra White. Rob Gibson is here as a committee substitute for Sandra White; I welcome him to the committee.
At the start of last week's meeting, we had a discussion about calling people to give evidence to the committee. I remind committee members that criteria were set when we discussed the matter on 31 March 2004. It is not practical to invite all petitioners, so there is a need to select the petitions on which it would be most useful to hear from petitioners. The criteria for that are based on a number of factors, including the newness of the petition and the interest in it.
Members will have noticed from the e-mail traffic and some letters that have been written recently that there is disappointment that petitioners are not being called to give evidence on certain issues. The last consideration in deciding which petitioners should be called to give oral evidence is whether a lot of MSPs are interested in it and want to grandstand or get a press release out. I believe that a petition that comes with one name is as important as one that comes with 20,000 names. What is important is the issue, not the scale of the support shown by local communities or whomever else. We must focus on the issue. I hope that members will bear that in mind.
It is sometimes a tough choice for me to decide which petitioners to ask to give oral evidence, but I try to make the decision on as fair a basis as possible and to give organisations that might not otherwise come before the committee the opportunity to do so. We have conducted audits of the types of organisations that have come to the committee. We must bear in mind a whole host of considerations. For every organisation that is called, one or two may not be called. We must be as fair and honest with people as we can be. Considerations such as the petitioner who shouts the loudest or who gains the most support from MSPs who can shout on their behalf are not the best criteria on which to select who should come to give oral evidence. We must focus on the issue.
As I said, the committee has discussed the matter previously. We agreed our approach and I hope that we can move forward on that basis and that members do not continually come to the committee looking to have a debate about why one petition was chosen over another as suitable for oral evidence giving. The decision is often difficult.
Members may raise issues with me before meetings, but once we are at a committee meeting I hope that they will have understood the explanations of why a petitioner was given the opportunity to give oral evidence. That often comes down to the fact that their petition is new and we have never discussed the matter before; conversely, someone else's petition, although it is new to them, might not raise a new issue for the committee, as the subject might be one that we have already looked into. I do not see why petitioners who are raising issues that have already been considered should take up the time of petitioners who are raising other issues with us. I hope that that clarifies the matter for the members who have concerns about the selection process.