European and External Relations Committee, 02 Mar 2004
Meeting date: Tuesday, March 2, 2004
Official Report
288KB pdf
Visit to the Catalan Parliament
We have one more item on the agenda. We agreed to discuss the NORPEC visits in public session and we must briefly talk about the travel arrangements.
I reiterate what I said at the start of the meeting. Currently, NORPEC has two members: the Scottish Parliament and the Catalan Parliament. When NORPEC was established, we agreed that we would seek to involve Parliaments that had similar powers to ours, by which I mean primary legislative powers. The clerks are passing members papers about the trip and in a second or two I will ask Stephen Imrie to discuss the travel arrangements.
We plan to meet our counterparts from the Catalan Parliament's committee of the European Union in Barcelona to discuss future NORPEC membership, future subjects for debate and a conference that we will host in Edinburgh, to which new members of NORPEC will be invited. The clerks have produced an outline programme for that conference, but at some stage we must finalise the arrangements. I have views on the programme, but we do not have to discuss it today. Members should feel free to feed back comments to the clerks during the next few weeks.
I have just a few points to bring to the attention of the five members of the committee who make up the delegation. My colleague Nick Hawthorne has distributed the briefing pack and air tickets. If, after members have had a chance to look through the briefing pack, they have questions to raise, Nick Hawthorne or I would be happy to answer them.
The documents that I want to bring to members' attention in particular include the itinerary. It is fairly self-explanatory: most members arrive in Barcelona at the same time, which is the early afternoon of Monday 8 March. There is a formal dinner with the Catalan committee on that evening, which is billed as a get-to-know-you session. The Catalan committee is new, following the recent elections, and the dinner provides a useful opportunity to meet its members on a slightly more informal basis before the business of the next day.
The Scottish Parliament delegation is being formally welcomed to the Catalan Parliament by the newly installed president of the Parliament, Ernest Benach. That is significant: I believe that we are the first international delegation to visit the Catalan Parliament following the elections. Clearly, the Catalan Parliament sees its relationship with Scotland as important.
Various briefing papers in the pack cover the meeting between members of the two committees. I bring some key areas to members' attention, the first of which is the discussion on the working procedures and arrangements of the network. As the convener identified, it is important to note that the network is of similarly powered and minded committees. In the discussions that took place on NORPEC in November of last year, it was decided that the network should not involve absolutely every regional or local administration across the EU, but should be targeted at similarly powered and minded members.
There is also a paper on potential new members. I draw attention in particular to the fact that those new members were selected on a cross-party basis from countries whose Governments are made up of socialist, conservative, nationalist or other parties—the strategy was for the potential new members of the network to come from different countries of the EU and to cover different shades of political opinion.
I will not touch on the paper on the Edinburgh conference or on the ideas for our long-term work programme. All the paperwork in the briefing pack is prospective and tentative. It is up for discussion in Barcelona with members' Catalan counterparts. Indeed, that is the purpose of the meeting. As I said, Nick Hawthorne or I would be happy to answer any questions that members might have. I hope that the trip is productive and useful.
There are also copies of correspondence between the Presiding Officer and representatives of various other regional and sub-national Parliaments in Europe, including those of the Basques, the Flemish and some of the German Länder. Clearly, they are prime candidates, but that is up for discussion.
I have not read the papers yet and am new to the committee, so I am probably largely unaware of the detail of what has gone before. However, I believe that, if the discussions are to be just general and there is not to be what could be called a committee line, that is fine. On our return, I hope that we will have the opportunity to hold an open discussion—and not a short and constrained report-back session at committee—for the benefit of committee members who are not going to Barcelona. It is important that we do that, particularly in view of the conference that we are to host this November.
That is a fair comment. We should have a discussion at a future meeting, especially on the conference that we are to host in Scotland. That will be a key event for the European and External Relations Committee.
As members have no other comments, I thank them for their attendance. This has been a productive afternoon. I will see you all again in two weeks' time.
Meeting closed at 16:33.