Public Petitions Committee, 29 Feb 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 29, 2000

Official Report 173KB pdf

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Convener's Report

The meeting in the Borders is to take place on Monday 27 March in the Volunteer Hall in Galashiels. The date and venue have been agreed after consultation with the Borders rail link petitioners, who are content with the proposal. The meeting will be at 2 o'clock.

A news release publicising the meeting will be published shortly. It has been suggested that either the clerk or I should write to all MSPs representing the Borders or South of Scotland, informing them of the meeting and indicating that they are welcome to attend. As a matter of courtesy, we could also send such a letter to the local Westminster MP and to the Scottish Borders Council.

Do you want to notify the Borders rail cross-party group, or should I, as convener of the group, do so? I could let the members know. I think that they would like to come.

Thank you, Christine. Other details about that meeting will be available in due course.

The conveners liaison group has approved the paper suggesting the procedures that should be followed when any committee decides to have a petition debated at a meeting of the whole Parliament. That paper now goes to the Parliamentary Bureau for its approval. That is not to say that we will immediately use that power, but it will be there if this committee decides that the Parliament should debate an issue that is raised by a petition.

Probably it is very naughty of me to ask this, as I could read the standing orders, but when the Public Petitions Committee brings a matter to Parliament, how is it presented? Is it the convener who leads the debate?

If this committee decides that there should be a full parliamentary debate in response to a petition, I lodge a motion in the name of the committee and write to the Parliamentary Bureau to say that it is the view of the committee that there should be a debate. The bureau then decides whether a debate should be held. If it is agreed that there should be a debate, I or, if the committee agrees, some other member, will lead the debate.

Is it in the standing orders?

No. We are trying to change standing orders to allow that to happen.

I was just curious.

If the bureau approves the paper, it will be passed to the Procedures Committee, which will then change standing orders.

That is interesting.

For your information, public petitions will now appear on the Scottish Parliament website. New and current petitions will appear first, and will be followed by the remainder. Petitions will be scanned as soon as they are received. Eventually, there will be a complete record on the website of petitions that have been submitted to the Scottish Parliament.

At a meeting that I attended last week some members of the public who access the website asked whether we could ask our information technology staff to examine the portable document format. People who understand IT will know that there are different formats in which one can download material from the internet. PDF presents problems for users at home, so our IT people need to examine that matter.

We will certainly pass those comments on to the appropriate people.

I thought that PDF was the stuff they use on "Changing Rooms" instead of wood.

I am very pleased to note the progress of petition PE14, which was submitted by the Carbeth hutters. I should have raised this matter earlier when we discussed the progress of previous petitions. The Justice and Home Affairs Committee, where the petition was passed, has reported that it should encourage the Scottish Executive to include in legislation additional protection for hutters. That is a nice result.

We move fast on the justice committee.

I want to inform you of the position on the Stobhill petition. The Health and Community Care Committee will publish its full recommendations on the matter on Thursday. You should be able to see them before they are published. Richard Simpson produced the interim report before the previous meeting of the Public Petitions Committee, and people were able to comment on it. At last week's health committee meeting, we discussed Richard's full report and conclusions in the public part of the meeting, and then considered in private session the recommendations that will form the basis of our report.

On behalf of the Health and Community Care Committee, I thank the Public Petitions Committee for forwarding this matter to us, as it has opened a large can of worms. It has been a useful petition in a number of ways, both locally and at the national and strategic level of consultation and accountability in the health service.

We should stop while we are winning.

I thank members for their attendance.

Meeting closed at 15:08.