Plenary, 08 Oct 2003

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 8, 2003

Official Report 383KB pdf

---

Point of Order

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. You will be aware of previous rulings about the release to the media of information that should properly be made available to the Parliament first. You will also be aware that the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill was introduced to the Parliament yesterday, which meant that no member was able to read a copy of it until it was published today. The first that members knew or, indeed, possibly could have known, about the detail of the bill was through what they read and heard in the media this morning. Is that in order?

I am grateful to the member for giving me advance notice of her point of order as that enabled me to make some investigations.

The member is correct in saying that the bill was introduced yesterday, but was not published and available until this morning. It has been the Executive's stated practice not to issue any publicity relating to a bill until the day of publication, when it is widely available for members and others. In this case, however, the objectives of the bill were the subject of wide consultation before introduction and I have been assured by the Executive that the matters raised in today's media reports have been in the public domain for some considerable time. That being the case, I regard the query as closed.