Hansard

I am not sure that that is true, but the quality of the advice that we got from Wolfgang Michalski was particularly good and our relationship was particularly positive. There is maybe something to be picked up in that.I have a suggestion about the process of drawing up our legacy paper. I have noted a lot of practical points about the sessions that we have had, but, rather than take up discussion time, it might be helpful to capture such points through a combination of e-mail and a wee chat outside the committee for those who want to meet. Obviously, if there are points of disagreement, we can discuss those at the drafting stage. If members agree with that approach, I will resist the temptation to go through all the points on my list and will mention only a couple of the bigger ones.The question of our remit was touched on from another angle. I well understand the range of issues that govern how decisions about remits are taken. By definition, they are not taken by committees themselves, but it would be legitimate in our legacy paper to make the factual comment that our remit is too broad. I do not think that it is in our gift to recommend what any future remit should be. We should simply say that it is too broad.I agree with Jamie Stone's point about science, but given the extent of our remit we have not done badly. We have considered a range of areas, but we have not done justice to some of them—as we could if our remit were divided into more manageable chunks. That should be carefully considered in the future.I am not sure that we acted on our predecessor committee's legacy paper as much as we could. The issue is not just about producing the paper; the new committee will need to build in some time early in its timetable to ensure that it considers the paper. Also, instead of considering the paper only once, there is a case for the new committee revisiting it once a year, or certainly a couple of times during the parliamentary session, because circumstances change. It is only when members have been around for a while that they become aware that they might be reinventing the wheel or revisiting something on which a good piece of work has already been done. We do not have enough institutional memory to build on such work and often rely on members who were previously members of committees to say that something was done before. We must get better at capturing such information.I have been party to a parallel conversation in the Audit Committee about a left-hand, right-hand issue that concerns the interrelationship of committees. That is a corporate issue and, if members agree, it would be helpful to capture it in our legacy paper. That is an issue for the Audit Committee, because it covers subjects that overlap with many subject committees' remits.The essential point is that knowledge, information and expertise are not shared enough between committees. The intention when the Parliament began was to have more mechanisms for that, but for all sorts of reasons—I do not know whether we can even identify them—sharing has not been nearly as systematic as it should have been. Two examples that involve this committee's relationship with the Audit Committee are the work on individual learning accounts and the work on further education, for which the mechanisms for feeding in learning and so on were not as effective as they should have been. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that point as a subject committee. I have not thought about them today, but I am sure that other subject committees have similar issues. I will leave that point for now. Perhaps we should consider the relationship with other committees.I will not go through my full list of process points. What is bubbling under and what people have already talked about is the value of informal sessions. The constant discussion is about the balance between meeting in public and having the free flow of an informal session that does not have a full Official Report and so on. My firm view is that the Parliament needs much more of a continuum and that it is possible to strike that balance. Even from a cost point of view, the full-blown Official Report and all that goes with it are not needed, probably even for a discussion such as this. I know that I am raising wider issues. When, outside a formal session, we have received briefings and tried to get our heads around issues early, that has been more effective and more efficient. The outcomes can be captured or there can be a bona fide minute. I realise that the situation is different for a more formal process, whether in relation to legislation or a later stage of evidence taking for a policy inquiry.As I said, I have a host of other detailed points, but I am happy to pass them to the clerks.