Audit Committee, 09 Jan 2007

Meeting date: Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Official Report 179KB pdf

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Post-legislative Scrutiny

I open the first meeting in 2007 of the Scottish Parliament Audit Committee. I welcome committee members; the Auditor General for Scotland and his team from Audit Scotland; members of the Irish Committee of Public Accounts, who are visiting the Parliament today; and members of the media and the public. We have quite a busy agenda today. We have received no apologies. I remind members to switch off mobile phones and pagers so that they do not interrupt the public address system.

We have two relatively small items before we move to item 3 and our inquiry into the relocation of Scottish Executive departments. We are joined today by Ross Finnie MSP, the Minister for Environment and Rural Development, who will give evidence on item 3.

Item 1 regards post-legislative scrutiny which, as members will be aware, we have discussed previously. We have before us a paper that summarises the meeting I had with the convener of the Finance Committee, Wendy Alexander, about that committee's interest in post-legislative scrutiny. I draw members' attention to paragraph 11 in particular. Members will realise that the Finance Committee no longer proposes to hold a seminar on post-legislative financial scrutiny prior to dissolution, but it will continue with its intention to have two informal seminars—one on the budget process and one on financial memoranda and scrutiny of legislation's financial implications.

The paper reflects the approach that the committee wanted to be taken. We will therefore address the issues in our legacy paper. Do members have any comments?

I have one. Although I accept that we can come back to this matter in the legacy paper, I am concerned that post-legislative scrutiny, which I feel strongly about, is much wider than just the financial considerations. While the Finance Committee might, understandably, be particularly concerned with the financial side, it is important that this committee makes it clear that there are much wider questions about implementation, such as having the skills, the capacity and the people in place to implement policy. With that caveat, I am happy to agree to the paper on the basis that we can touch on that issue in our legacy paper.

It is apt that we should address the issue then. I share Susan Deacon's views about the scope of post-legislative scrutiny—her points are well made. We will return to the issue when we discuss the committee's legacy paper at a later date.