Education Committee, 22 Mar 2006

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Official Report 104KB pdf

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Proposed School Meals and Snacks (Scotland) Bill

For item 2, I welcome Frances Curran, who has proposed the school meals and snacks (Scotland) bill; Claire Menzies Smith, who is a senior assistant clerk at the non-Executive bills unit; and Bill Scott, who I believe has worked with Frances Curran on the bill.

I remind everyone that we are not discussing the principles of the bill, or the content of the draft proposal; we are considering only whether consultation on the bill has been sufficient to meet the requirements of standing orders. I invite Frances Curran to make some opening remarks.

I thank the Education Committee for allowing us this time to present our proposal. I have been working on the proposed school meals and snacks (Scotland) bill for a long time. I submitted the initial draft under the previous rules on members' bills and resubmitted it under the new rules. Unfortunately, as the rules had just changed, we did not include the draft proposal with the consultation document, although that document was signed off by NEBU and supported by the Parliament.

Now that I have resubmitted the draft bill, I hope that members will agree that we have carried out extensive consultation. Some 2,000 consultation documents were sent out. The consultation document was posted on the websites of One Plus, the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland and the Poverty Alliance, and I consulted through the Scottish Youth Parliament's education and lifelong learning committee.

We received 517 responses. Members will see from the report that a huge breadth of organisations replied. We were very pleased with the consultation exercise: we tested the policy; tested opposition arguments to the bill; considered any potential difficulties in implementing legislation that were thrown up by those arguments; and submitted all the consultation documents to the Scottish Parliament information centre. Our analysis was submitted to SPICe and is available online. We have a file of all those who responded to the consultation, should committee members wish further information on that.

Thank you. I draw members' attention to the additional paper that has been submitted. The paper contains details of the consultation mailing list, the organisations that responded, individuals who responded and individuals not on the mailing list who responded. Do members have any questions?

The consultation is comprehensive and the range of interests and involvement is wide. I am particularly interested in the full response list to the consultation—for our purposes, it is unfortunate that it was submitted only today.

Should the bill proceed, one of the issues will be about milk. I remember when one of my colleagues, Michael Matheson, proposed free milk for schoolchildren, the British Medical Association had concerns about obesity and other matters. I cannot see the BMA on the list, but was it consulted?

A consultation document was sent to the BMA, but it did not respond.

Right. We know that it has an historical concern about milk.

About three other health bodies responded to the consultation.

I notice that there are quite a few dieticians on the list and that a range of medical interests is represented. The BMA's view on milk is an obvious issue, but perhaps it is for the committee to take evidence on that.

Absolutely. I hope that the committee will ask for evidence from the BMA.

As I mentioned, it is not for us to determine whether the bill should proceed; all that we are doing is asking whether we are content that there has been sufficient consultation so that the proposed bill can be submitted without further consultation. Are members content with that?

Members indicated agreement.

I thank Frances Curran and her team for coming this morning.