Petitions

Agenda item 3 is our regular petitions report. The first petition is PE453, which is from Fr Stephen Dunn and calls on the Scottish Parliament to carry out a full review of the process of consultation with local communities regarding the siting of the proposed secure unit in the Greater Glasgow NHS Board area.The Parliament considered a previous petition on the matter. Committee members will recall that that was one of the first pieces of work that the committee did. At that time, we decided—as we have consistently decided since—that the Health and Community Care Committee's role is not to make the decisions that health boards should make after consulting local communities. However, we also decided that we would consider issues of national strategic relevance and importance that are raised by local situations.In the case of the Stobhill secure unit, we took that approach and produced specific recommendations relating to consultation with communities on new developments. When Dr Richard Simpson produced his report on behalf of the committee, we found that some of the guidance that boards were following was 25 years old.We are now faced with a new petition that has been submitted to the Public Petitions Committee. That committee has referred the petition to us and asked us to consider it in the light of our previous work on Stobhill. We are also asked to consider whether progress has been made on the issue of consultation. I ask John McAllion whether that is a fair reading of the intention of the Public Petitions Committee in referring the petition to us at this stage?

From reading the papers, I am aware that two members of the committee—Janis Hughes and Dorothy-Grace Elder—are mentioned in dispatches. I am sure that other members, such as Nicola Sturgeon, will have a particular interest in the petition, because it relates to Glasgow.We can probably do two things. First, we could pursue the points that John McAllion has made and focus on consultation. Secondly, we could take the opportunity to revisit the recommendations that we made in our report on the previous Stobhill petition and ask the Executive what progress it has made on those more general points. Given that the Executive has a locus in the matter, we could ask it to indicate whether it is able to support the methodology that was used by Greater Glasgow NHS Board and to say whether that methodology had been used satisfactorily elsewhere. There seem to be questions about the methodology that the health board used, although I am not an expert on large-scale public consultations. I am open to suggestions from members.

We have done some work in your absence, Ben.

I am happy with that.

One of the issues that the background papers on the petition raise is that a number of different organisations, such as the Glasgow north action group, have been involved part of the time, but not at other points. A number of MSPs have been involved for prolonged periods and have then boycotted parts of meetings for reasons that are obvious to them, bearing in mind what they felt about consultation.We need guidance about from whom to seek views. We should seek the views of the petitioner, but I wonder whether it would also be worth the committee's while to seek the views of the original petitioners, whom I think were from the action group, if we are to revisit the original petition. If it were acceptable to them, they could come in and give the committee joint comments, as new petitioners and as petitioners from whom we have heard in the past. Do members agree that we should take oral evidence on the petition?