Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Official Report 428KB pdf

Work Programme

Item 4 is consideration of our work programme in outline. There are two or three decisions that it would be useful for us to take. The first is to consider holding a business planning session, which will give us an opportunity to consider the legacy report and to consider and agree our statement of intent for the committee for the coming session, and also to discuss all the other relevant issues that we might wish to consider about how we do the work of the committee.

I propose that we hold a planning session during the summer recess and that we aim, all things being equal, to do that in person here in Parliament at some point, probably during the final week of recess.

Do members agree to do that? I will not come to you all individually, because we know from experience that that can take half an hour. I will take it that the proposal is generally agreed.

The second issue that is before us is to consider the status of 15 on-going petitions that our predecessor committee referred to subject committees. The committee had taken those petitions as far as it could and had decided that they would best be taken forward by a subject committee. By convention, at the end of a parliamentary session, if such a petition is still under discussion, it is referred back to this committee, because it might be that the subject committee that was considering it has been disbanded or constructed in a different form.

As I said, we have 15 petitions in that category; I suggest that we refer them back to the most appropriate subject committees, which might, of course, be the same committees that were dealing with them before. Do members agree to do that?

I see that we all agree.

Do members have any other matters that they would like us to consider this morning? Brief as this meeting has been, we have considered all the immediate items on the agenda.

I take members’ silence as agreement that we do not want to consider anything else today. We look forward to our next public meeting after the summer recess. Until then, I thank you all and wish you a good morning.