Enterprise and Culture Committee, 16 Jan 2007

Meeting date: Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Official Report 250KB pdf

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Scottish Register of Tartans Bill: Stage 1

I welcome Jamie McGrigor MSP, the promoter of the Scottish Register of Tartans Bill, who has joined us to participate in our discussion on agenda item 3.

Members may remember that we agreed not to take any further action until we received a response from the Scottish Executive. We now have a response, by way of a letter from the Deputy Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning—members have a copy in their papers. If I may, I will paraphrase the letter. The minister says that there is something in the proposal, but that the Executive wants more time to consider it in detail to establish whether a register can be established without resort to legislation and how it could bring economic benefit to Scotland. In paraphrasing, I think that I am also quoting exactly what an Executive representative told me about the letter.

The Executive's response is encouraging. From the tone of the letter that we have received from Jamie McGrigor, I take it that he, too, thinks that it is encouraging. In his letter, Jamie McGrigor asks us to delay our stage 1 report until he has had an opportunity to have a meeting with the Executive on its response. I do not see any difficulty with that, but I am in the hands of the committee.

I am enormously encouraged by both Jamie's letter and the Executive's response. After our previous meeting, I took the opportunity to discuss the matter informally with Jamie and other colleagues. There is merit in the proposal. Tartan is something for which Scotland has international recognition. We have registers and cataloguing of all kinds of other things. Jamie's proposal gives us an opportunity to do something that has not been done before. That said, I am not convinced that a piece of legislation is required. With good will on all sides, we should be able to achieve what we want without recourse to legislation. I welcome the discussions that are now to be held between Jamie and ministers on whether there is a way forward that does not require the spending of huge amounts of money on bureaucracy—which is not what we want—in order to create something we want.

You are absolutely right, convener, to suggest that we should await the outcome of Jamie's discussions with the Executive.

Although everything the convener said is completely correct, I have now had a meeting with Allan Wilson. I hoped that the meeting would also include Margaret Curran, but she was detained on other business that day.

Allan Wilson explained what he set out in his letter, which is that the Executive wants to look at the possibilities that a national register would create, by encouraging the profitability of the tartan industry and presenting tartan as a national icon of Scotland. The minister also said that the Executive wants to see whether Scottish Enterprise's textiles team can work with some of the people who have been involved in the discussions to date. He wants to see whether we can come up with a register without, as Christine May said, having to legislate.

In his letter, the minister talks of working with

"public and private sector bodies",

which is key to everything. In doing so, the Executive will probably hit a brick wall. It will discover how difficult it is simply to hand the register to one of the bodies that says it could do it. Of all the registers that are known to me, three out of the four have said that they want to hand over their stuff to a public register. Only one body is standing out against the proposal. In the past, registers have done well so long as tartan is fashionable, but they have withered on the vine when it lapses out of fashion. That is the danger that we face. If a register withers on the vine, we could lose something that is iconic to Scotland simply because the textile industry is not doing well at the time.

I am all for encouraging discussion. I do not care how long this takes. I would like to see some sort of historical record in the shape of a register of tartans. It does not matter to me whether the bill that is introduced to do that has my name on it or the Executive's; what matters to me is that something is done to protect tartan for Scotland rather than for a particular industry. Many different industries can benefit from tartan: it is not owned by the weavers or by any other sector of Scottish industry.

I have already had a meeting with Allan Wilson. He said that he would issue a statement to the Parliament—or to the committee—in which he would say what he is doing and thank me for the work I have done so far. I suspect that there will be no progress until the next session of Parliament—all things being equal and depending on who is in power—because although it is possible that the Executive will finish within the next month or so the piece of work that it has decided to do, the completion of that work will delay matters considerably.

Are you saying that since you wrote your letter to the committee, you have met the minister?

I have had one meeting with him.

Will you have another meeting with him?

No, but yesterday someone in Scottish Enterprise rang me up to ask for the details of some of the people who have been involved in the thought process. I have been told that I and other people will be kept in the loop so that we can hammer out something that might be acceptable.

What I am getting at is whether there is any reason for us to hold up doing our stage 1 report next week or the following week.

What did I ask you to do in my letter?

You asked us to delay completion of our stage 1 report for a month, but I assume that because you have met Allan Wilson and he has said that he will provide us with a statement, we can schedule in consideration of our report for our first meeting in February. Would that be okay?

I took advice from David Cullum, among others, on the technical side of things and I believe that he discussed matters with the committee's clerk. I am perfectly prepared to go along with what is best for the schedule.

I have a brief comment. I agree with Jamie McGrigor that we cannot leave progress on the issue to the good will of a body that happens to be extant but which may not, because of economic circumstances, exist in five or 10 years' time. If a register is to be established, it needs to be done formally and with Government support, so that it will have a use and a future in the long term, like other registers and catalogues of artefacts that are of importance to Scotland. A register of tartans is just as important.

Does the committee agree to schedule in finalisation of our stage 1 report for our first meeting in February?

Members indicated agreement.

I draw members' attention to the final paragraph of the letter from Iain Brodie of the Scottish Enterprise Party, which I circulated. I thought that it was exceptionally sensible.

I draw members' attention to the first paragraph, which I think is extremely cheeky.

On that note, I thank everyone and look forward to seeing them again next week.

Meeting closed at 15:58.