Scottish Executive (Scrutiny)
The second item on the agenda is pre and post-council scrutiny. As members know, the committee's scrutiny role is important. One of our aims is to consider council agendas before each meeting and to get feedback from the Executive on what it believes the priorities to be. As ever, our options are to note the information that has been provided by the Executive, to ask for more information or to invite ministers to appear before the committee. I hope that members have had a chance to read the briefing paper and I invite comments on it. Is everyone happy with the recommendations?
When I read the paper, I was concerned to find out that the Executive was not responding to our letters on pre and post-council scrutiny. I am not sure whether the correspondence that has been placed in front of us is the Executive's last-minute response. Our input is important. On post-council scrutiny, the briefing paper states:
"There are no post-Council reports to cover this meeting."
I do not know whether that refers solely to the agriculture council or whether it also refers to the agriculture and fisheries council on 13 and 14 October and to the employment, social policy, health and consumer affairs council. I wonder whether we can have more details on that.
I note that our staff have been placed in the position of having to anticipate what the agenda for the agriculture and fisheries council might be. The points that they have raised are relevant and bang on target, but we need to consider the matter seriously because we are heading for Christmas and the usual December decision-making council is approaching. We have to get in early. Is there an update on when we will have a copy of the agenda?
The discussion that we are having now is the pre-council discussion. When the council has taken place, I hope that we will have some post-council scrutiny. There are several councils this month and, as members can see, the environment council is on 27 October. Information on that was due yesterday but we do not seem to have received it.
I should mention the correspondence that we have had in connection with this agenda item since members received their papers. There has been a flurry of responses from the Executive in the past couple of hours, not only on this agenda item but on other items. Following our requests from previous meetings, we have had responses from Malcolm Chisholm and Ross Finnie. There might be others, as a range of responses has arrived in the past hour or two. That does not give the committee much time to digest the information so that we can have a proper discussion.
We would all express some unhappiness over that situation. If we are properly to carry out pre-council scrutiny, we need to have the information from the Executive—otherwise, we cannot do the job. We all appreciate the fact that the responses arrived before the meeting, but we have not had time to read them properly. If we are to carry out our role as an early-warning system and to fulfil our duties properly, I suggest that we need to receive the information at least 24 hours before meetings.
To be fair, we should recognise that we are working to a very tight time scale. By the time we have had our committee meeting and sent out the letters, it is the end of the week. Technically, the Executive has about five working days to get information back to us and at our last meeting we asked for a large volume of information. I would rather have thorough answers—it looks as if we have received some substantial information—than letters that do not tell us anything. The detail in what we have received is good.
At our last meeting, I requested some information on things such as sugar and tobacco. From my perspective, I did not necessarily have to receive that information in time for the meeting on 13 October. The discussion will be on-going over several months and it is more important for us to receive the information and digest it than to receive information quickly that is not particularly meaningful. That varies according to the subject matter.
Some decisions will be taken at certain meetings and in those cases it is important for the clerks to be in dialogue with Executive officials. In the last session, we had a grid showing the dates on which we expected to receive information. We had an agreement that if any particularly urgent agenda items were coming up, the clerks would have informal discussions with Executive officials. I do not know whether such discussions have taken place on the items that we have requested. It would be helpful if Stephen Imrie would update us on that point.
We will come back to that in a moment.
I am certainly not happy that this load of correspondence has suddenly arrived on the desk today. If we are to give it our attention today, which we ought to do, we should have a suspension of 10 to 15 minutes so that we can study it. I do not want to skim through it with one eye while listening to the convener with one ear—that would be unsatisfactory. We should get the correspondence 24 hours in advance.
Obviously, I am new to the committee, but I have concerns about the health section of the report. There is a detailed response on cancer screening programmes, but I am still concerned about the colorectal cancer screening pilot and the fact that it will take about five years to plan. I do not know whether that period includes both the planning and implementation of the pilot or whether it will be implemented at the end of the five years. I would like clarification of that point because we will be out of kilter with the EU on the issue.
I am not into EU jargon, so I would welcome clarification at some stage—perhaps the clerk can give it to me after the meeting—of the agreement to
"increase the synchronisation of Social Protection Process with that of the Broad Economic Guidelines".
I would love to know what that means in plain and simple English, which is clearly something for which the EU will not win an award in the immediate future.
It sounds better in Dutch.
Given that members have been landed with all the paperwork just before the meeting, they should approach me if they want any specific items to be on the agenda for the meeting in early November. We can then discuss any items that cause concern in greater detail. I would be more than happy to do that if members approach me when they have read the correspondence.
I listened carefully to Irene Oldfather and I appreciate the pressures that are placed on ministers to respond effectively and fully. However, I assume that we work on the basis that letters or e-mails from the committee are sent the day after a meeting. It seems to me that a 14-day gap is not excessive. I believe that, according to the codes of conduct, parliamentary questions and letters from individual members to ministers are supposed to be answered within 10 days.
As someone who reads the committee papers carefully, I find it annoying to walk in and find myself in a situation where I have to respond very quickly, as Keith Raffan said, with one eye on the correspondence and one ear listening to the discussion. It is not unfair to re-emphasise the point, which is made in one of the papers, that we expect to receive correspondence at the latest on the Monday before our meeting, so that we can read it at night if we cannot sleep.
I will ensure that the matter is the subject of continuing discussion with the Executive, as Irene Oldfather suggests. Some agenda items will be more important than others and will be more urgent because of the time scale. That issue will become more important, especially if the early-warning system that is proposed under the draft constitution is implemented. Time will be of the essence because the turnaround period for Parliaments to make inputs will be only six weeks.
I have been on the other side of the desk at the Executive and I think that it has done pretty well to provide such a large amount of information within the time scale. I agree with Keith Raffan and Margaret Ewing that it is difficult for committee members to digest the replies that have just appeared on the table, but we must be realistic in our expectations of what we can get out of fairly thinly staffed departments. Quite a scatter of questions went in two weeks ago and the Executive has done well to reply to them all within the time scale.
It is incumbent on us to be clearer when we need to receive a reply within two weeks. For example, in the last session, I thought that it would be helpful for the committee to have further information on the action plan to promote language learning and linguistic diversity. I did not think that that information had to be provided within five or six days; I just thought that at some point the committee might consider and digest the plan to see whether there was anything that we could learn from it. In refining the committee's procedures, we need to prioritise the matters on which we need a reply within two weeks.
In addition, it would be helpful to have clarification of when the Executive receives our letters and the time scale that it has in which to reply. If the Executive does not receive a letter until a Wednesday or a Thursday, it has only six or seven working days in which to provide a substantial amount of information. We need to be able to do our job properly, but in refining the process we should be more careful. Certainly, when I asked for information on sugar and tobacco, I wanted the committee to have that information but not necessarily to discuss it at today's meeting.
There are many points that we can take on board. The fact that the Executive has now replied shows, at least, that it can be done. We just need to receive the replies a little earlier.
In future, can we make category A and category B requests?
I will ask the clerks to take that on board. I reiterate that members should raise concerns prior to our next meeting, so that I can ensure that those matters are included on the agenda. We can discuss any of them in further detail—I do not want them to be left to one side simply because the responses reached the committee late.
Margaret Ewing referred to fishing. The fishing negotiations will start later this month and continue until the vital negotiations that will take place in December, when the Commission might press for recovery plans to be put in place for the next few years, not just for next year. Those negotiations have a heightened importance. As Margaret Ewing has raised the matter, I ask the clerks to find out from the Rural Development Committee whether there are plans to invite the minister responsible for fisheries to give evidence in the run-up to those negotiations. This committee has a duty to keep a close eye on the situation, given the minister's stated objective that he wants to be better prepared for the December negotiations.
The Rural Development Committee is now called the Environment and Rural Development Committee.
Yes, it is. We must ensure that fishing is on that committee's agenda.