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The next item on the agenda is consultations.
The consultation on building standards is an obvious area of interest.
If we are to start examining some of the consultations, would it be worth appointing reporters or asking the reporters groups to examine different areas? Building standards would come under the disability reporter, but I do not want to commit her to anything today while she is not here. Do members want to consider the matter and get back to Lee Bridges about it? If we need to appoint reporters, we could discuss that at our next meeting.
I do not see any mention of the consultation on the housing bill, unless I am missing it. That finishes on 29 September and the committee may want to input into that.
That is one of the things that we will have to watch out for—sometimes documents are not formal consultation documents. For example, the housing document says, "This is not formally a consultation, but we would be interested to hear your views." We would have to track every document, rather than just those that are formal consultation documents.
Do members want the housing consultation to be put on our next agenda?
We will probably be out of time to respond formally to the housing consultation. I am sure that we will want to consider housing when the draft bill is published.
If we wish to respond, I think that we would be within the time limit if we put the matter on the next agenda.
Okay.
If members have points that they wish to raise, they should e-mail them to the clerks and we can discuss them. There is just enough time. I am sure that we would still be allowed to respond to the consultation, even if we were a few days late.
It is difficult to tell from the titles of the consultations whether the committee would have concerns about them, and I do not think that any of us would be prepared to plough our way through the documents to see whether we did. I am not necessarily advocating that Lee Bridges do that either, but perhaps there are ways of getting a steer on whether our attention ought to be drawn to equal opportunities issues. We do not want to miss anything. For example, there is a consultation on nutrition policy, and there may be something in that that the committee would be concerned about, but we cannot tell from the title.
I have spoken to the Executive equalities unit, which has a similar problem, because it has to equal opportunities proof Executive work. We are trying to work up a joint system so that we can keep each other informed. It will become easier, but as a temporary measure I can do as you suggest.
There are Executive summaries of consultation documents, and the Scottish Parliament information centre produces reports. If the consultation is on an area that is of interest to members, there is an onus on members to look at those documents. Clerking does not have the resources to go through documents and summarise everything that is going through Parliament. That means that we will miss things until such time as a better system is in place.
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