Standards Committee, 29 Oct 1999

Meeting date: Friday, October 29, 1999

Official Report 77KB pdf

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Further Procedure

We will now move on to the second part, which is consideration of further procedure.

Do members agree that we should make public Malcolm Duncan's report on the material supplied by Jack McConnell?

Yes.

As to further procedure after we make the report ready this afternoon, we should meet next week. Do members agree that we should instruct the clerks to produce a draft report for our consideration next week and publish it as soon as possible?

It is my understanding that there will be a draft report, which the committee will consider, and that the final report will go to the Parliament, which will take a view on it, as we are a committee of the Parliament and we report back to the Parliament. Is that right?

That is correct.

Are there any other comments before I sum up?

No.

We are agreed that Mr Duncan's report on Mr McConnell's evidence will be made available publicly later, in the same way as we have done with the reports on the written materials submitted by others.

I will now summarise the committee's position on the investigation.

A substantial amount of written and oral evidence has been placed before the committee, including the report by our adviser, Mr Malcolm Duncan, who has carefully studied the written material supplied by Mr McConnell. That includes a printout of the diary held electronically by Mr McConnell's private office; annotated hard copies taken from the electronic system from which Mr McConnell worked; Christina Marshall's current notebook; constituency desk diaries for 1999 and 2000; and a substantial folder of notes, papers, copy invitations and correspondence prepared by officials.

Mr Duncan studied all those documents in the light of a lengthy list of Beattie Media clients. As we all know, last Monday, we received Mr Duncan's report, and all members found that there was no case to answer against Jackie Baillie, Henry McLeish and Kenny MacAskill. In relation to Mr McConnell, the committee decided that the investigation should continue and that more evidence should be considered. Having heard the evidence given under oath by Christina Marshall and Jack McConnell on Wednesday, and after considering the extra written material, we conclude that there is no evidence of any breach, by Mr McConnell, of any code that covers the conduct of MSPs.

The committee is tasked with establishing and maintaining the high standards of conduct expected of members of the Scottish Parliament. I want to record our thanks to the officials for all their hard work, and special thanks to our adviser, Mr Malcolm Duncan.

Before I close the meeting, the committee must agree whether our meeting to consider the draft report should be held in private. I would like to ensure that all members agree on that.

It has certainly been the practice of other committees, such as the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, to meet in private session to prepare a report for Parliament.

Yes. We have concluded all the evidence in public, we are publishing all the evidence and I think that it is right and proper that we go into private session to consider the draft—it is only a draft—report. Once we have considered the draft report, we should publish the final version as soon as possible.

There is a presumption that the report will be so well prepared that we will not have to change much of the spelling and so on, in which case it will be published very quickly.

Yes, the officials have done a good job in producing all the materials. It is our job to consider the report.

Before we move on, I would like to say that, before we were catapulted into the inquiry, we were considering the code of conduct for MSPs; we had just reached the issue of lobby companies. That part of our normal work has been suspended, but will you confirm that, as soon as practicable, we will return to the code of conduct and that we will begin with an investigation into lobby companies?

Yes, I think that the committee agreed that this investigation was so important that we should devote all our attention to it. I thank all the members of the committee, as well as the officials, for clearing their diaries over the past 24 days to allow the investigation to move swiftly.

It is my intention that we meet soon—towards the end of next week—in order to consider the report in careful detail. We will publish the report and then return immediately to our normal work routine. We should start where we left off, which was an examination of lobbying companies. Perhaps this investigation will have informed our views on how to proceed with that.

Meeting closed at 15:03.