Education, Culture and Sport Committee, 06 Dec 2000

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 6, 2000

Official Report 203KB pdf

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Committee Business

I ask members to bear with me for two minutes while I deal with a couple of issues that I should have raised under item 3, the update on committee business.

I have received a copy of a note from Nicola Sturgeon, who has now formally submitted her resignation from the committee. It is appropriate that we record our thanks to Nicola for the work that she did during her time as a member of the committee. We wish her well with her new brief.

The final issue that I would like to raise is rather less pleasant. Over the past couple of days, a number of comments have been made in the press about our report on the Scottish Qualifications Authority. We agreed that, prior to publication of the report on Friday, we would comment on it very little, if at all. I ask members to keep to that agreement. Alex Neil and I have written to the Standards Committee to say that the code of guidance on comments—rather than leaks—concerning committee reports is not as robust as it might be. We need to ensure that members know exactly what is expected of them, and we expect that the Standards Committee will investigate that issue. It would be appreciated if members could keep their counsel until Friday.

I raised this issue specifically at the end our private meeting on Thursday. I have fairly strong views on it, as I do not think that commenting on unpublished reports helps anybody. I also think that we are not helping ourselves. Guidance and conditions are one thing, but there are some technical issues relating to the publication of reports that the Parliament should think about. I understand why a report may be signed off on a Thursday and not published until the following Friday, but that is an almost impossible length of time.

I was concerned by the article that appeared last night in the Edinburgh Evening News. I regard much of what I have seen written about the report—although not all of it—as speculation. Speculation thrives on journalists asking people who are not members of the committee, "What have you heard?" Those people reply that somebody has told them something, and everything follows from that. We should keep the time between finalising reports and publishing them as short as possible. We should also consider a stronger enforceable mechanism for imposing silence on committee members.

I was in England at the weekend and did not arrive back until late on Sunday night to see the papers. From the short piece in The Sunday Times that I read, it seems to me that the most likely route for these stories is individuals talking to other individuals, who talk to other individuals, who may then talk to journalists whom they meet in the street or the pub. I speak from some experience, as a former party chief executive; I am sure that Jack McConnell, as a former party general secretary, would confirm what I have said. The important thing is not that members do not talk to journalists about reports, but that they do not talk to anybody about them. Someone can say to their closest mate, "We had a hard time with that," and eventually that will get into the system.

I do not want to continue this discussion for too long, as we all appreciate the theory behind it. I will allow Ken Macintosh to comment before we wind up.

I agree that this is a difficult problem to stamp out. I was not as concerned about the Edinburgh Evening News article as I was about the article in The Herald, which said that we intended to blame the former Minister for Children and Education when we are explicitly not going to do that.

In open session, Mr Macintosh appears to be making an assertion about the contents of the report. That is not very helpful.

I am concerned about deliberate spin. One can never tell who is responsible for that, and we should not waste our time trying to find out. The Standards Committee should investigate how committees should deal with that. I object to the fact that, by the time our report is published on Friday, journalists will already have ideas in their minds, set there by the people who have spun these articles. Those ideas will set the tone for questions, among other things. We need to know how to respond to articles that are leaked or speculative. We should have a code that allows us to do that. If journalists ask us whether we have seen the article in The Herald, are we allowed to respond to that? Are we allowed to say that it is a load of rubbish? We should be able to deal with such questions.

That is the sort of thing to which Alex Neil and I referred in our letter. At the moment it is unclear whether members should respond to questions of the sort that you have described. As convener, I am asked all the time whether certain things are in the report. If I say that they are not, it is assumed that I mean the opposite. However, we have already commented on the issue. We should consider the practical suggestions that Mike Russell has made.

We must remember that we do not live in a totalitarian state. People are free to write things, often on the basis of speculation that may or may not be true. The best measure of what is true is the report that will appear on Friday. However, no journalist will ever say that their speculation was wrong. We cannot stop a lot of this happening.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing members on Friday.

Meeting closed at 10:55.