Equal Opportunities Committee, 12 Sep 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 12, 2000

Official Report 89KB pdf

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Legislation

Before the recess, members expressed concern that we were not always up to date with legislation and consultations that were being produced, and did not always have enough time to give those matters the consideration that we wanted to give them. We have now a list of bills in progress. Are there any comments?

I mean no disrespect to the bills that are included on that list, but it will have to be updated tomorrow. Our timing is slightly unfortunate in that regard.

We have the information that members asked for prior to the recess. Members wanted that information for the first meeting after the recess.

I am not saying that some of those bills should not be considered—we should certainly consider the Transport (Scotland) Bill and, doubtless, some others. The next time we meet, the list will be at least as long as it is now, and we should put this item on the agenda again.

I want to put down a marker: I think that we have a problem, given that we did not undertake an inquiry last year, as we must also still do all the many pieces of work that we did last year. Perhaps we should bear that in mind when we timetable our inquiry. Our meetings should not deal only with the inquiry, as we also have all that other work to do.

When we consider legislation at our next meeting, we will have to make some decisions about how many times we should meet and how we should divide up the work among committee members. We can explore a variety of options at our next meeting.

We must look at the Transport (Scotland) Bill, about which Capability Scotland has raised many concerns. We may need to clarify whether any of the subject committees will also be looking at, for example, the disability aspects of the Transport (Scotland) Bill, because we do not want to duplicate effort. Also, we do not want to call in organisations to give evidence if they are being called to other committees, because that is a waste of their time, unless we hold joint meetings. For the next meeting it would be useful to look into the intentions of the subject committees with regard to the bills that we want to look at, so that we have an overall picture.

I wrote to the convener of the Transport and the Environment Committee a while ago, asking the committee to consider the equal opportunities aspects of the Transport (Scotland) Bill. We could try to find out the information that has been asked for and once we know what legislation is coming up next year, I can write again to the subject committee conveners to find out their intentions.