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I welcome members, public and press to this morning's meeting. I ask people to turn off their phones so that they do not beep during the meeting. I have received apologies from Karen Gillon; I do not know whether there are any other apologies.
I apologise for the fact that I will leave at about 11 o'clock to go to another meeting.
Under agenda item 1, I ask members whether they agree to discuss in private—just for today—item 3, which deals with options for our consideration of the United Kingdom Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill. The reason for holding the discussion in private is that we are likely to consider potential witnesses. Does anyone have a problem with that? I do not think that the discussion will be lengthy. The clerks have agreed to put our decisions on the website so that people are made aware of them.
I am relaxed about considering witnesses in private, but the general issue is quite important from the public's point of view. If we were to decide in private to do nothing about the bill, the reasons for our decision would not be made public. If we assume that we will take some action in relation to the bill, it is fine to hold the preliminary discussion in private, but that is not guaranteed.
I am sorry; I should have said that I had a discussion with the clerks during which we hummed and hawed about whether to discuss the issue in public or in private. I was relaxed about that. However, my recommendation will be that we should take evidence on the bill, even though it appears to be uncontentious; I want us to invite witnesses to check that it is indeed uncontentious. That will be the nature of our discussion; provided that you are happy with the suggestion, we will consider in private which witnesses we should invite.
On that basis, I am happy with your suggestion. I assume that the rest of the committee agrees with you. We have a duty to scrutinise Sewel motions in committee.
It will be the first Sewel motion that we have dealt with. As we have not dealt with one before, I wanted to check out what the process would be.
I am happy to take item 3 in private so that we can concentrate on the selection of witnesses.
That is fine. For the record, we will try to inform people of our decisions as soon as possible. We will return to the issue later.
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