Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill
Item 2 concerns the Antisocial Behaviour etc (Scotland) Bill. I thought that it was appropriate to raise this item briefly before we get into the main part of our business this morning.
Members may be aware that we published our report on the bill on Friday, after a great deal of hard work across the committee, so it is very much to be regretted and deprecated that the report was leaked the day before to at least one newspaper, and leaked in a way that entirely misrepresented the findings of the committee.
I raised the matter with the Presiding Officer as a point of order in the chamber. My major concern was that there was an attempt to skew the debate. If someone had simply put into the public domain what the committee had found, that would be one thing, but to try to shape the discussion around the report by saying that it says things that it does not say creates a broader problem for committees in having their voice heard in such debates.
I have asked the clerks what procedures or options are open to us on this matter. Steve Farrell will outline what is available to the committee.
Essentially, the committee must have evidence that there was a leak of the report. Members might want to take a view on whether that was the case, given the material that was produced in the press. The other issue is for members to try to identify the member who leaked the information. That part of the process might be more difficult. If the committee can identify a member who leaked the information, the committee can complain to the standards commissioner, who will then investigate the complaint. However, the commissioner cannot investigate a complaint if we cannot identify a member, unless instructed to do so by the Standards Committee, which is another route that the committee can consider if it cannot identify a member.
It might be worth while for me to prepare a paper for the committee to consider at the next meeting, if the committee agrees.
Are there any comments?
I have been here before. I suspect that, as in the past, we will not end up with evidence of any material weight. Certainly, the detail in the newspaper report to which you referred is highly suggestive of the fact that it was drawn from our report, because it was specific in certain regards.
Like you, I regret that such a disclosure was made and I will give my reasons why. It is tempting for individual members to disclose to their own advantage but, for Opposition members in particular, that runs counter to what is advantageous in the long term, because once the Opposition takes its advantage in doing that sort of thing, it licenses Executive members to do it, and they are in greater numbers and will always find it easier to set the agenda if they wish to do so.
At the end of the day, it is clear to me that it is not advantageous to anyone ever to release something that we have agreed is embargoed. It prejudices our ability to do our work and, in our private sessions, to be honest with each other about our views, to make the necessary compromises, to see what scope there is to reach agreement, and to flush out the areas where agreement genuinely is not possible.
Like others, I was contacted by journalists who asked me about the contents of the report. That happens every time there is a report of any interest. My tactics in dealing with that are simply to say, "You ought to be able to do your preliminary work by examining the evidence that the committee has considered and by reading the Official Report, and not by referring to the content of the report, because that is not proper." It might be useful for us to consider asking the Standards Committee whether it is time to produce more detailed guidance for committee members on how to deal with the press and with the period between the completion of a report and its publication, because people might benefit from that. I direct that remark not at anyone in this committee, but at all members of the Parliament.
At the end of the day, I suspect that if we expend effort on this matter, it probably will not lead anywhere, although I am not advocating that we do not expend effort if other members feel that we should do so. Like the convener, I regret that the leak happened, because it is not helpful. We will have an excellent debate this afternoon, which will be a bit shorter than we planned. That is the place for us to rehearse the arguments for the different positions that we hold.
I agree with most of what Stewart Stevenson has said. The leaking of reports seems to be happening with monotonous regularity. It has happened not only to this committee but to other committees in this session of Parliament and in the previous session. Like Stewart Stevenson, this is not the first committee on which I have served in which the situation has arisen.
We need to put down a marker, because almost every time there is a contentious stage 1 report we read about it in the press before the public gets the opportunity to read the full report. Clearly, that is not how things should be. We must also be careful about what we say. There is a difference between people making an intelligent guess about what a report will say—based on what people said in public session—and some of the detail that has been contained in reports on leaks in the past and on this occasion.
To anyone reading the article that appeared in the press last Thursday, it is pretty clear that the information probably came from someone on this committee, because it was pretty detailed. The way in which votes were taken or who is likely to have dissented could not necessarily have been known in advance, so we all need to look to ourselves as individuals. I hope that we can put down some sort of marker, otherwise the issue will continue like a running sore, perhaps not in this committee, but certainly in other committees. If the clerk prepares a paper so that we can make a decision at our next meeting, that will be a good way forward.
Even if there is little chance of succeeding in finding the culprit who leaked the information, I do not think that that is reason enough not to go forward. The convener has put out a strong signal that to leak information is against the procedures of the Parliament. I welcome what Stewart Stevenson said and I agree that a bit more guidance might be helpful to both old and new members. However, I do not think that there is any reason to do nothing. We have a new commissioner for standards and, as such events are happening with monotonous regularity, the more investigations he carries out and the more experience he has, the closer he will get to finding the culprit.
The day must come when this Parliament takes disciplinary action, such as barring members from asking questions or barring them from the chamber. That has to happen once to change a situation in which leaks occur with such regularity. I would support a measure by which we can send out a clear signal that such behaviour is not acceptable.
The code of conduct is quite clear about how we should carry out our business. On reading the report, my impression was that it was not naive chuntering; it was not as if somebody had been over-zealous in blethering to a journalist. There were two things that particularly annoyed me. One was that the report contained heavy criticism of the Executive. Well, part of our job is to reflect the criticisms that come to us in evidence, but that does not mean that we endorse such criticism, and the report wilfully misrepresented the role of the committee in that regard.
The second thing that annoyed me was that the report suggested that some members voted in committee not on the basis of what they thought or believed. That is tiresome; as Scott Barrie said, it is a running sore. The implication is that people can dismiss some things that happen because members do things because they are forced to or are somehow driven to do them. That is disrespectful to committee members who make a judgment in whatever way when they vote. The article deliberately tried to undermine the committee's report by impugning some committee members' motives when they voted. That is very much to be regretted.
It would be helpful if we had a brief paper to talk to. I am not sure whether we are capable of identifying the person ourselves and naming names, but there might be a process whereby we can go through the case in committee before we go to the Standards Committee. If that is agreed, we can deal with the issue at our next meeting. Is that agreed?
Members indicated agreement.