Sports Facilities (PE1434)
Item 2 is to agree the committee’s approach to PE1434, by Nairn McDonald, which calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to ensure that every school can provide adequate sports facilities and resources for their students and to create a minimum level of available facilities. Members will have received the clerk’s paper, which suggests that, as the issue raised by the petitioner has been covered in some detail in the community sport inquiry, the committee might agree to incorporate its consideration of the petition into that inquiry, to which we are due to return next week. If members agree to that proposal, the committee will be able to return to the petition once the community sport inquiry report has been published to decide on any other action that it might wish to take.
Although I am sympathetic to what the petitioner is trying to achieve and although the petition itself is well meaning and runs along the lines of the evidence that we received about trying to ensure that young people are able to use sporting facilities, it is fundamentally calling for the Scottish Government to ensure that those things happen. Some people might well want the Government to take over education entirely, but the fact is that when it comes to education the Government simply does not have the powers to affect directly what happens in schools. As a result, the petition might be better directed not at the Government, but at the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, where the power lies. I am sympathetic to what it is trying to do, but it is calling on the wrong people to take action and it would be quite catastrophic for us to suggest that we start taking powers away from local government. As a member of the Parliament’s previous Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, I remember that the first couple of visits we made were about reassuring our local government colleagues that the Parliament was not about to take any powers away from local authorities.
I cannot disagree with what Gil Paterson said. However, when we consider our report into support for community sport we might consider the issues that are raised in the petition. We could give consideration to the petition in that way before deciding what to do with it.
I am not sure that during our inquiry into support for community sport we took evidence on the matter that the petitioner raised. The petitioner seems to be asking specifically for the Government to set and enforce a minimum standard on adequate sports facilities in every school in the country. We have not taken evidence on that. We sought to widen the scope of our inquiry on a couple of occasions, but we were a bit nervous about doing that and diluting the focus of the inquiry.
I think that the consensus is that we should not consider the petition as part of the inquiry—I stress “consider”—and I think that many members would probably have reached that conclusion if we had done so. There is a difference between considering something and giving it credence or even accepting it. I accept that, as Bob Doris said, there has been no scrutiny of the area, but I think that throughout the evidence taking in our inquiry all members have accepted that there is a clear responsibility on local government to deliver on some of the issues that have been raised.
I am quite happy to go along with that.
Are members okay with that?
As we agreed, we move into private session for item 3, which is draft budget scrutiny.