European and External Relations Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, March 21, 2013

Official Report 496KB pdf

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European Commission Work Programme

Members have a small report from the Local Government and Regeneration Committee that sets out its EU priorities. Due to an administrative error, that committee’s EU priorities were not included in the European and External Relations Committee’s published report, and we gave a commitment to come back and deal with the matter. With my rush to get out of the meeting, we nearly forgot about them again. I apologise for that.

I refer members to paper 4 and invite them to comment.

I think that we should just note the paper.

Do members agree?

Members indicated agreement.

We will publish the paper with a flourish on the committee’s website and draw it to the attention of the Local Government and Regeneration Committee.

Finally, because of where the recess falls and how the parliamentary sitting time for the committee is structured, our next meeting will be on 18 April, which is after the recess. At that meeting, we will hear evidence from the Minister for Learning, Science and Scotland’s Languages in our languages inquiry. Jenny Goldsmith has provided us all with a huge document to read over the recess, in case members have nothing else to do. That document pulls together all the evidence, and it would be worth while to have perhaps even just a scan through it to get relevant questions for the minister.

I wish you all a restful recess, even if you will be reading a lot.

Will that meeting start at 8.50 or 9 o’clock?

It will start at 8.50.

Could we have a shorter version of the document that has been put together for us for the report?

Our plan was that the document will form the basis of the beginning of the report, so you will get a shortened version of it. The document is simply to give members the evidence itself as a fallback. It will be considerably shortened and focused.

Okay. I close the meeting.

Meeting closed at 10:54.