Hansard

Members will perhaps not be surprised that, in the brief time available, I will not consider the substance of what the committee has done—other members have done that—but will instead reflect on how we have done it. Other members, particularly John Wilson and the convener, have commented on some of the external engagement, and I suspect that the deputy convener will do so, too. I would like to consider our internal processes and reflect on what we have achieved, whether we could have done a few things slightly differently and whether we might make some recommendations to our successors.

The first thing that happens when a petition comes in is that the clerks do a considerable amount of work to knock it into shape, if I might describe it that way. As other members have done, I thank the clerks for the huge amount of work that is involved in that. The Scottish Parliament information centre staff give us extremely helpful briefings, and I am conscious that no member has yet thanked them. I do not suppose that any staff from SPICe are here, but I put on the record our thanks to them.

As members are well aware, we then have a first consideration and, in about a quarter of cases, the petitioners come before us to give a presentation. I am not sure that that figure is precisely right, but it is the one that I have been given as being about right. Typically, we then write to a large number of organisations to scope the issues that the petitioner has raised. We generally decide to write to the Government to ask for its response to the petition. That means that the second meeting at which we consider the petition, which comes some time later, is, effectively, the first meeting, because that is when we actually think about what the real issues are and try to tease them out ourselves.

I wonder whether that is the best use of our time. Perhaps we could do things a bit faster in terms of getting to the meat of the issues. The result of that process is not only a little bit of delay, which we could eliminate, but a considerable amount of paper—a huge amount of paper is associated with some petitions, and I suspect that some of the words did not have to be written, although I am sure that they were written in good faith. Another issue is that we do not engage with the majority of petitioners face to face.

I wonder whether we could rectify those issues by changing how we deal with petitions. Let me be absolutely clear that there are petitions in relation to which how we operate at the moment is entirely correct, but I would like to suggest an alternative way of working, where that would be appropriate—I guess that deciding on that would come down to the convener’s discretion, as such things usually do.

As I have previously suggested, each petition could be considered by only two members, on some kind of timetabled rota basis that was suitable for those members, and one of the clerks. That would enable those members to tease out with the petitioners what the issues are and to do the obvious things such as writing to the Government and relevant organisations—members will be well aware of the kind of organisations that we speak to. That would ensure that, when petitions came to the full committee, the basic groundwork had been done. We can all see that, in many cases, that would work and would enable us to make progress rather faster.

I also suggest that we need to be a little bit better at recognising those petitions that could be closed on first sight. In relation to some petitions, we can see fine well that the Government has adopted a position and is not going to adopt a different one, because it has already said that it will not. In such cases, we might as well just say so and close the petition the first time we see it.

15:47