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Chamber and committees

Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.  

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Dates of parliamentary sessions
  1. Session 1: 12 May 1999 to 31 March 2003
  2. Session 2: 7 May 2003 to 2 April 2007
  3. Session 3: 9 May 2007 to 22 March 2011
  4. Session 4: 11 May 2011 to 23 March 2016
  5. Session 5: 12 May 2016 to 5 May 2021
  6. Current session: 12 May 2021 to 17 August 2025
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Displaying 2049 contributions

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Education, Children and Young People Committee

Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 8 February 2023

Bob Doris

Could you come back to us on that?

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 8 February 2023

Bob Doris

Okay.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 8 February 2023

Bob Doris

That is reasonable.

Louise Storie, I apologise if I am misquoting you—I have got mixed up with the scribbles in front of me—but I think that you said that schools will have different priorities in relation to transitions, young people with more complex needs and the resource implications and resource pressures. You are generally supportive of the legislation, but, if resources are finite, might that prioritisation mean that some young people have plans on paper without the resources to make them meaningful, and that other young people with more complex needs get a more significant transition? Do you have any concerns about that?

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 8 February 2023

Bob Doris

That is helpful. You want more consistent capturing of those with disabilities. We will talk more about that later.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 8 February 2023

Bob Doris

Thank you. That is helpful. Those are very reasonable points.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 8 February 2023

Bob Doris

Dr Whelan, you have spoken quite a lot about the real challenges for universities, such as the lateness of identifying which young person is going to which institution, the building of early transitional relationships and transitional plans being more difficult with higher education. Who should take the lead? This might be your opportunity to say that there is something that we could change, irrespective of the bill, to give universities more of a chance to build deeper, stronger, quicker and more meaningful relationships with young people before they go to university.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Disabled Children and Young People (Transitions to Adulthood) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 8 February 2023

Bob Doris

I am not remotely trying to be awkward. Just because additional resource may be required does not mean that it is not the right thing to do. I am just trying to tease out the realities of the legislation.

Dr Whelan, will you answer from a university perspective?

Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee

Correspondence (Net Zero Scrutiny)

Meeting date: 2 February 2023

Bob Doris

I found the correspondence to be informative in relation to the ambitions of the Conveners Group and the wider Parliament to embed the scrutiny of net zero into the work not just of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee—I acknowledge its convener, Edward Mountain, who is with us today, as he is a member of this committee—but of all parliamentary committees as we scrutinise legislation.

However, the letter also said:

“The Group noted that it was important that the Scottish Government was able to provide essential data to facilitate this scrutiny work. With this in mind, you will have seen the correspondence that I have had with the Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero requesting better information on this; the Group will return to this at our meeting later this month.â€

I have not seen that correspondence, and I am unaware of whether the Scottish Government has replied to it. I would like to see those two essential pieces of evidence before we make a specific commitment to do further work, or even decide what such further work might look like, in relation to our approach to any changing of standing orders or rules in the Parliament with regard to net zero.

Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee

Correspondence (Proxy Voting Scheme)

Meeting date: 2 February 2023

Bob Doris

This is specifically on the variation to the proxy voting scheme that the Presiding Officer is suggesting. Can I just check—I am sure that the answer is yes—that annex A, the letter from the Presiding Officer, is a publicly available document?

Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee

Correspondence (Proxy Voting Scheme)

Meeting date: 2 February 2023

Bob Doris

I ask that because it refers to two colleagues who had a loved one nearing the end of their life and sought to use the proxy voting scheme in those circumstances. It is unanswerable that that would be the right thing to do, but I had not realised that the pilot scheme that our committee agreed to did not build in such flexibility and discretion for the Presiding Officer. That is okay, because we always said that it would be an iterative process and that we would shape the scheme as we went along to reflect circumstances as they developed. I am keen to clarify that such a use would be allowed under changes to the proxy voting scheme.

If I am allowed to share them, my personal circumstances were that when my mother was approaching the end of her life, the Scottish National Party’s whips were wonderful and I got to spend my mother’s final week with her. There was no pairing and no proxy but, even as I sat at my mother’s bedside, I was still on my phone, doing my work and clearing emails. I would have liked to have had a proxy, which would have meant that I did not feel excluded or remote from the Parliament but instead had that link. That would have enabled me to avoid having to log on to vote virtually by permitting me to have a trusted colleague to vote on my behalf.

I think that the proxy scheme should cover such circumstances and that, if the Presiding Officer does not think that the scheme is suitably flexible at present, we should agree to change it to provide that flexibility.