Enterprise and Culture Committee, 15 Mar 2005

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Official Report 175KB pdf

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Business in the Parliament 2005

Agenda item 2 is consideration of an update paper on the organisation of the business in the Parliament conference 2005. Members may remember that we had a previous update and discussion on the conference, as a result of which, I hope, some progress has been made. I hope that members will agree that the committee's views on how the agenda for the event should be structured have been taken into consideration. I have asked for a regular update on progress, because I want to be sure that the committee is satisfied that things are moving in the right direction.

I think that Susan Deacon is looking to comment.

I merely twitched and smiled simultaneously.

Remembering that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, I think that it would be dangerous for us to continue to delve into the detail of the event at this stage. I appreciate the convener's having arranged for us to receive a regular update, but I believe that we should resist the temptation to revisit much of what we discussed before.

That said, frankly, I want to see matters moving forward. I appreciate all the work that has been done in discussing our concerns and providing a further paper, but the arrangements seem to be teetering along terribly slowly. According to paragraph 7 of the clerk's paper—paper EC/S2/05/08/6—things are only at the stage of

"Planning of tender for the appointment of external event managers."

This far out from the event, we should not still be dealing with the tendering process. We should be getting the event out to the event managers who, frankly, should be allowed to get on with organising it.

On the details, I have all sorts of thoughts but I will break my rule in one respect. I refer members to the unnumbered paragraphs on page 2, from the second bullet point on that page to halfway down page 3. I wonder about the level of detail about who will invite whom to what. The paper suggests that the First Minister will invite the chief executives of the big six companies that have headquarters in Scotland and that MSPs will each invite a local businessperson. My anxiety is about whether that will put together the desired range and balance of Scottish businesses. It seems that we will now go to the two extremes instead of having a host of people from in-between. Again, I think that professional events managers could deal with that stuff as part of the marketing and promotion of the event.

I will now return to my earlier self-denying ordinance, which I failed to fulfil.

I am in agreement with Susan Deacon. It was probably wrong to invite only one half of the equation—the half that comprises the Parliament and the Executive—to determine what businesses might like to talk about, because it is inevitable that the internal viewpoint will be reflected in the external document. Neither side may get what it wants out of the event. If it is not too late, I suggest that we get professional external independent advice on how to organise the event.

I understand that the event organisers will be concerned purely with the mechanics of the event, such as sending out invitations to those whom they are told to invite. However, perhaps we need people with a wider professional remit. We should perhaps recommend to the team that is working on the event that they should think about having one contract for the physical organisation of the event and another for the provision of advice from an appropriate body on how the event should be put together. If all that can be rolled into one contract, that will be all the better.

One reason why I circulated the paper is precisely because those points needed to be highlighted. We need a bit more imagination in the organisation of the event, on issues such as who participates and what the event is trying to achieve. We have made some progress in comparison with what we had before, but I totally agree with the points that Christine May and Susan Deacon have made.

My only observation is that, although we have managed to get seven ministers to commit themselves to attend the event, we seem not to have identified anybody from the business community as yet. I would have thought that people from the business community are just as busy as ministers. Most of them will already be thinking about what they are doing in the autumn. If we want to get dates in those people's diaries, they should have been invited already.

The people from the business community who participated in the previous event have already been notified and I think that some other potential key players have also been notified. To be fair, the team that is organising the event has not slackened on that side of things.

I apologise for returning to the issue, but I promise that this is an overarching point. I am still concerned—I remember going on about this in the earlier discussion—that the fundamental point about the aims and objectives, or outcomes, of the event is unclear. We have a huge amount of detail about the input and about how people will be asked which topics they want to flag up for discussion, but we have little on the outcomes that people want from the event. Those are two very different things. I am still not sure that that point has been grasped.

That reinforces the point that we need some expertise not only in organising the mechanics of the event, but in pulling it together. That is the main thing that we will ask Stephen Imrie to take back to the working party of officials. I intend to update the committee on progress from time to time, because I believe that it is important that the committee is clear what progress is being made. If members have specific suggestions, they can feed them into the process via Stephen Imrie. The more practical suggestions that we have, the better it will be.

Today's meeting has been fairly short because we completed consideration of the Further and Higher Education (Scotland) Bill much earlier in the month than had been expected. That means that members have a week off next week.

Do we have no committee meeting next week?

Our next meeting will be on 12 April. I hope that everybody has a thoroughly enjoyable Easter recess. Thank you.

Meeting closed at 15:16.