Education, Culture and Sport Committee, 27 Jun 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 27, 2000

Official Report 247KB pdf

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Committee Business

Item 4 is an update on committee business. Does anyone want to raise any issues?

My voice has not been heard on this committee for a while.

Who are you again?

Exactly. If you have forgotten me, I must try harder.

As the committee restructuring takes place, I suspect that there will be reductions and changes in membership. Gillian Baxendine has informed me that we are getting responses to the film inquiry. I hope to examine those after the closing date, which is this Friday. I have had a couple of meetings and will have more over the summer. I will bring you a report in the autumn as promised, whether or not I am a member of the committee.

Good. We look forward to that.

Karen Gillon was doing an investigation into sport in schools, how are we getting on with that and what is the time scale?

I will ask Gillian Baxendine to update us.

Karen Gillon has undertaken to bring a report back to the first meeting after the recess.

I will raise one other issue. I am not sure whether this is the right place to do so, but I am not sure where else to raise it. It has become apparent over the past few weeks of this inquiry that we are not giving witnesses enough time. I know that we have a tight work schedule, but at times we have been quite discourteous because we have had to push along the questioning. This is too important a matter on which to ask witnesses to come along and to give them an hour and a quarter out of a three-hour meeting. If it runs over, we feel under pressure and put them under pressure. We should give due consideration to courtesy to witnesses.

That is an on-going issue. Given the work load, we need to keep moving the discussion along. However, I appreciate your comment that we run out of time with many of our witnesses. I hope that they do not think that we are being discourteous; it is purely pressure of time. We will continue to review this as we invite witnesses to the committee.

It would help if we kept questions brief.

I agree; members could keep questions briefer so that the answers could be longer, but far be it from me to cut members off when they are in the middle of asking a question. We are all aware of time constraints.

I will raise one further matter. Members may have noticed that we have an additional face at the table. I introduce Martin Verity, who is a clerk team leader and will take over from Gillian Baxendine when she goes on maternity leave in August. It is a face you will get to know much more over the coming months.