Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Official Report 332KB pdf

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Cross-party Groups

Members also have a paper that deals with cross-party groups, which is fairly straightforward. The problem is that the rules on cross-party groups state that they must contain at least one member from each party that is represented on the Parliamentary Bureau, which obviously includes the Liberal Democrats. Given that they have only five MSPs and there are more than 60 cross-party groups, they are struggling to have representation on all the groups.

The rules do allow for a waiver, and in previous sessions of Parliament when a number of smaller parties were represented on the bureau, it was agreed that cross-party groups should only need to get MSPs from the four largest parties. The suggestion is that we should require them to have members from the three largest parties, and allow them to function on that basis. Do members have any comments?

I agree with the proposal. I attended a meeting about setting up a cross-party group on credit unions, so I declare an interest. I think that we would all support such a group in the Parliament, but we had to disband at that time because we did not have a representative from the Liberal party. We have to appreciate that there are only five of them, and they cannot spread themselves that widely. The recommendation is sensible, as it will allow cross-party groups to be registered without putting too much pressure on small parties whose members cannot possibly attend all the groups.

I whole-heartedly agree. I have nothing to add except that I, too, attended a meeting about a cross-party group the other week and it was extremely difficult to get the membership along. We did it in the end, but it was difficult to achieve. I welcome the suggestion.

I echo those comments. I was at the inaugural meeting of the diabetes group at lunchtime today, and the same situation arose. I had forgotten that the matter was on the agenda for this meeting—in fact, I had not seen the papers, because somehow they did not get to me until lunch time. We took a provisional decision that we would go ahead without the Lib Dem group, in the hope that what has been proposed would actually happen.

I record my agreement with the proposal. It is an entirely sensible move.

I record my agreement as well.

So we are agreed that we will only require cross-party groups to have members from the three largest parties. Thank you.

That ends the public part of the meeting. I thank any members of the public and the media for their attendance.

15:51 Meeting continued in private until 16:07.