Procedures Committee,

Meeting date: Tuesday, May 29, 2001

Official Report 286KB pdf

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Committee Agendas

We are joined for this item by Elizabeth Watson, whose paper we are considering. She will take us through her report and make it clear to the committee what we are invited to do with the three suggestions.

The paper draws together three of the issues that the committee agreed to consider as part of the committee operations inquiry. All of them relate to the setting of agendas and planning of business in the committees.

Paragraph 2 sets out the issues that the directorate is addressing in the paper. The first issue is the respective roles of the committee and convener in business planning and setting agendas. The second issue is how an agenda can be changed once it is published. The third issue is what provision there can be for emergency business and whether there should be an ability to raise matters without notice in a committee meeting.

The paper attempts to take the committee through the current arrangements that exist in each of those situations, and makes a number of recommendations. I would like to help the committee through it by dealing with any questions that arise. The paper represents the views of the clerking and reporting directorate, rather than my own views. However, the decisions are obviously for the committee to make, and it is not appropriate for me to press any particular line against another. Rather, it is for me to help the committee through the issues that arise.

In the first situation, we have tried to analyse the respective roles of the committee and the convener in business planning. The current provisions set out two distinct roles, but possibly not all that clearly. One of those roles might be called forward planning and the other involves setting agendas on a week-to-week basis—a task that the standing orders give at present to the conveners. The forward planning is the bigger picture. Committees are planning six or nine months ahead, or even two years ahead in some cases, the issues that they will address and the inquiries that they will handle. On a week-to-week basis, it is for the convener to notify the clerk of the agenda. Not only does that advance the committee's forward plan, but it programmes in the other things that may be referred to committees, such as subordinate legislation, bills and matters from the European Committee. The question that arises is whether the balance is correct.

The next section of the paper deals with changes to an agenda.

Can we take it section by section?

Of course.

I feel that what you set out for business planning and agenda setting was generally pretty acceptable as a statement of how it works and should work. Because I have no overview of the situation, I am not aware of how all the committees are working, but I was aware of some early difficulties and friction on a couple of committees. However, having heard nothing in the past year, I assumed that things were now working reasonably well. Do you, Elizabeth, or any members know whether that is an area of continuing difficulty, or have the committees got it all worked out now?

It is fine.

Can we therefore agree to the first section of the paper?

I have no evidence about this, but I would just like to clarify something. If a member of a committee is very keen that a committee should discuss something, but the convener's view and the consensus of the other members is that it is a load of rubbish, does the individual member have the right to get that matter on to a future agenda?

There is no right for a member to have something put on an agenda, but members can feed into the discussions on the forward work programme. If the committee agrees to take up a suggestion, that is another matter, and it becomes part of the work programme. The week-to-week agenda setting is at the discretion of the convener.

I just wondered whether such a situation had arisen. I know that there were some stushies early on, but I have not heard of any since then. I assume that, in the example that I gave, the member could reasonably get an item on an agenda that would allow him to say, "We should be examining X." He might be thoroughly defeated in a vote and the issue would disappear, but I should have thought that he had the right to get it on the agenda.

I do not think that that sort of thing would usually appear on the public agenda. The member could raise it at one of the regular housekeeping sessions when the forward work programme was being discussed. If the committee thought that it was a fair suggestion, it would agree to include it. If it did not, the member in question would just have to accept that. We are not in the game where somebody wants an item on the agenda for the Official Report. If that were to happen, that might have to be covered in the redrafting of rule 12.3.1 of the standing orders, which the conclusion of Elizabeth Watson's report indicates might be appropriate to clarify matters. We could try to build that point in there if we had to, but I would rather that committees worked out such things by practical good relationships and commonsense working, rather than formalising everything down to the finest detail.

Obviously, we do not want to be utterly prescriptive about what committees are doing if there is not a problem. However, I would like clarification as to whether forthcoming business has to appear on a committee agenda on a regular basis. If so, how regularly should that happen? That would allow any member to raise the issue of what might be considered in forthcoming business. Can you clarify when committees have to discuss forthcoming business?

Standing orders do not prescribe that the forward work programme must appear on an agenda. In practice, committees discuss their forward work programmes either as part of their formal agenda or as part of what might loosely be called housekeeping.

Would it be useful to insist that the item appear at least biannually on a committee's formal agenda?

The recommendation is that

"conveners should be urged to programme regular reviews of the committee's work programme".

I should have thought that committees would want to fine-tune their programme regularly, especially in private session when a degree of informality obtains.

I accept that that is much the best way of dealing with the issue. However, there needs to be an opportunity for formal discussion of the work programme, so that it can be recorded that a member feels aggrieved and wanted to address a particular issue. If everything is done informally, they cannot show whoever asked them to raise the issue when they did that. We do not want to be too prescriptive, but we should recommend that forthcoming business be part of a committee's formal agenda at some point.

Can you see a way of reworking rule 12.3.1 to incorporate the right of a member to have his or her request for an item to be examined rejected on the record, for the comfort and protection of that member?

We would seek advice from the legal office on changes to the wording of standing orders. That would form part of the process of clarifying the respective roles of the committee and the convener in forward planning and agenda setting. If the Procedures Committee would like standing orders to make it clear that committees should decide formally on a forward work programme, that could be accommodated.

It would be nonsensical for the item to appear on every agenda, but if it appeared on a committee's agenda at some point, every member would have the opportunity to discuss it.

We could resolve the issue by having committees' discussions of their work programmes appear in the Official Report. That would allow people to see what matters had been raised, by whom, when and with what results.

That would be another way of dealing with the issue.

I sympathise with what Brian Adam has said. Is there a happy medium between being prescriptive and the recommendation that is made in the paper? I am not aware of problems relating to our forward work programme on the committees of which I am a member. If a member wants to state on the record that they raised a particular issue, there are various ways in which they can do that—through points of order, for example.

Brian Adam's point is that sometimes a member feels that he or she must put something on the agenda or must be seen to do that. If a committee decides not to conduct an inquiry into, say, fish farming, the member who has raised the issue must be able to demonstrate that he tried to have it included in the committee's work programme.

The solution to the problem is not convoluted standing orders. We should ask whether, now that the official report is fully staffed and resourced, we should not place all the issues that we have been discussing on the public agenda of committees. The same point was made earlier with reference to the Parliamentary Bureau. Why should the general public not see what reasons were advanced for decisions about what work we do, how we allocate time or which subjects we debate? The committee may want to discuss the issue more fully, away from the general issue of separating out the work programme from the convener's day-to-day or week-to-week handling of business.

We need to deal with the question of how we are seen to raise and dispatch issues. I sometimes wonder whether committees have not retreated too far from the public agenda. In this committee, we always discuss our work programme on the record. We are about to consider a draft committee report—if we ever get there, we will do it on the record, rather than in the privacy in which most other committees choose to wrap up such matters. There are issues here of transparency and openness. The particular difficulty that Brian Adam has highlighted may not have been a factor in our early decision to take matters off the public record—in effect, to ease the strain on the official report.

Is this something that we can deal with in the CSG report inquiry?

Yes. It raises issues of transparency and accountability. Members of the public have spoken to me about matters that they would like to have included on committees' agendas. I was not able to deal with their queries satisfactorily because I could not show them in the Official Report what had been said on the issue or that a colleague had raised it in private session. Doubts are raised about the system when discussions take place in private or without proper scrutiny.

Do we agree that Brian Adam has made a valid point, which we will consider in the context of our CSG report inquiry? As part of that, we can address the broader question of what should be included in committee agendas, and whether we have struck the right balance between what is discussed privately and what appears in the public domain.

Members indicated agreement.

The second last bullet point in the summary of recommendations states:

"Conveners should, however, in exceptional circumstances be given the power to include emergency business in the day's agenda".

We have not yet reached that item. We are still dealing with the first set of issues.

We now move to paragraphs 9 and 10 of the paper, on changes to committees' published agendas.

Changes to the published agenda and the taking of emergency business are linked issues, but they can be separated in the way set out in the paper.

The arrangements in the current standing orders for changing an agenda differ, depending on whether that happens on the day of the meeting or prior to that. Paragraphs 9 and 10 are concerned with changes other than on the day of meeting. Again, the general principle is that the convener sets the week-to-week agenda of a committee. The convener has the power to change an agenda within the time scale set out in the paper. However, committees might want to have regard to the need to give due and proper notice. Any proposed changes to the standing orders must take into account the fact that the committees are trying to conform to the CSG principles of openness and accessibility. Perhaps conveners should be invited to use the power to change agendas sparingly, so that proper notice can be given.

The third and fourth indented bullet points in your summary of recommendations are relevant. If we agreed the substance of the recommendations, you would presumably consider any changes to standing orders that might be required and provide revised guidance to committee conveners clarifying the circumstances in which business should be changed and how that might be justified.

The committee seems content with those recommendations, which brings us to the issue of emergency business. That is dealt with in paragraphs 11 to 16 of the paper and in the fifth indented bullet point.

On the day of a meeting, a committee's agenda moves to a different section of the business bulletin. That is significant under the Parliament's current standing orders, because the agenda becomes part of the daily business list. At present, it is very difficult to change an agenda on the day of a committee meeting. For that to happen, standing orders require the agreement of the Parliament on a motion of the Parliamentary Bureau. That is a problem because committees and the Parliament do not meet at the same time. We need, therefore, to consider how rule 5.5.3 operates in relation to committees. A change to the agenda might be required to deal with a detail such as the identity of a witness changing.

At present, because of the inflexibility and difficulty in changing a committee agenda on the day of the meeting, there is no provision for emergency business. It is appropriate to balance the need for openness and accessibility and the ability of committee members to prepare to take items, with the need to act with urgency on the day of the meeting for an individual item.

There is an argument for a convener to be given the power, in exceptional circumstances, to put an emergency item on the agenda. That, perhaps, would be a power to be used very sparingly. In the general run of things, one would expect a committee properly to prepare to debate and discuss an issue. Committees are likely to want to call witnesses, and difficulties would be created if items were put on agendas at short notice. Given that one cannot rule out the possibility of an urgent matter arising at short notice, there is an argument that conveners should have that power.

Elizabeth Watson has made a valid central point that, just as the Parliament can respond to something that happens out of the blue, committees would benefit from having the same ability. In order for us to make progress on the issue, we would need to see a paper that examined all the implications, not least so that the circumstances could be defined in which it would be appropriate for conveners to act in that way.

The paper should also look at changes to standing orders and the disentanglement of the subject from the issue of the business bulletin. We do not want the production of the bulletin to be made unduly difficult, as reprinting bulletins involves time lags and expense. Much fleshing out is required. Do members feel that that is something that we should be moving towards?

I would like to see whether the committee agrees with the principles according to which I approach such issues. All democratic bodies should be as flexible as possible and should respond to what goes on. On the other hand, we should not be bounced into things. A simple rule would be for a convener to be able to add new business if that was agreed unanimously by the committee. However, if that was not the case, the convener could not put the question whether to add the item to a vote. That means that anyone who was unhappy with the item could, in effect, stymie it. That allows for a consensus response to an emergency, but it prevents us from getting bounced into anything. That simple principle could be reflected in a rewriting of the rules, as suggested by the convener.

Can someone give me an example of the exceptional circumstances in which the provision would be needed? I cannot think of any. As Elizabeth Watson said, committees meet for mature and reflective debate. The Parliament already has the power to discuss matters and it is a more political place than are the committees.

In my own experience, when issues have arisen, the convener has agreed to put the issue on the agenda of the next meeting. That has invariably been sufficient, so that the committee can prepare and react accordingly. Committees should not be overreactive. Unless someone can give me an example of where the provision would be necessary, I am against the proposal.

What happens if the Rural Development Committee has dropped foot-and-mouth from its weekly agenda on the basis that the whole thing seems to have faded, and suddenly, there is another big flare-up? Is not that committee entitled to put the issue back on the agenda, so that it can agree to invite the minister to give evidence on the matter the following week? Might not committee members want to react to circumstances of that nature?

If the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee was looking at a particular industry and a major player suddenly went bust, surely the committee would want the flexibility to say, "Let us put the matter on the agenda today, so that we can have a brief discussion. Let us change the programme in order to change the thrust of what we are doing."

The convener's second example is good. When Motorola closed and that also happened to Compaq, the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee ended up discussing those closures informally after the committee meeting had finished. The convener put the issue on the agenda for the following meeting.

That means that the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee dealt with that issue under "Any other business", which is a heading that does not exist. You formalised the discussion in the following week.

We agreed that the convener should put it on the following week's agenda, which he could have done anyway.

Could he really do so, given the absence of a heading of "Emergency business" or "Any other business"? The paper aims to formalise a practice that is evolving in any case of committees working flexibly as events change, without being stampeded into responding to everything that happens—as Donald Gorrie said, without being bounced into things. I see the proposal as an easing of the standing orders, which, if they are followed literally, are perhaps a bit restrictive and unhelpful.

It sounds as if we need another issues paper.

Yes. That is what I suggested.

I do not have a problem with the issue. As Donald Gorrie said, there should be opportunities as needs arise. Before the meeting started, would it be the convener who made the decision to add emergency business to the agenda, and would they have to ask committee members? Perhaps, at the start of the meeting, the convener would put it to the committee that an issue be added to the agenda. I should be happier with that proposal.

Those are niceties, which would have to be teased out in the issues paper. The guidance document should include a provision stating that the first time that an item was put on an agenda, nothing substantive should be done, as it had been put on the agenda for the sake of organising work on it. The committee would therefore handle the issue maturely. All those things would come out in an issues paper, which should cover "Emergency business" and "Any other business". There is a relationship between the two, in that the one is often the trigger for the other.

I am aware that the paper is not in favour of "Any other business", but the only alternative is for the convener to decide that an issue is an emergency and that the committee should therefore deal with it. It would be better if we had the opportunity for a matter to be raised somehow in committee. I return to the point that was made earlier, about how committees get something on the public agenda, showing that the issue has been raised.

The paper is worth while. There is much in it that would repay thorough work and clear thinking, resulting in an issues paper for discussion.

I say to Elizabeth Watson that I might have jumped ahead a bit to take in the issue of "Any other business". Do you have anything to add to what has been said?

Nothing at all.

As members have nothing further to add to what has been discussed so far, are we agreed on having an issues paper?

Members indicated agreement.