New Petitions

Our next new petition is PE803, on the Parliament's standing orders. The petition is in the name of Hugh Sinclair on behalf of the movement for a register of freemasons and it calls on the Scottish Parliament"to amend its Standing Orders to ensure that the Petitioner receives an official copy of the full text of the Petition stating that it has been accepted as admissible for consideration by the Committee prior to its publication on the web-site of the Committee and that such text is duly published on the web-site."The petitioner is concerned that what he regards as the full text of his earlier petition, PE761, was not published on the Parliament's website.The full text of a petition is the wording that is published in the Business Bulletin. Any other text or information that is supplied by the petitioner is treated as additional evidence and is made available to the committee prior to its consideration of the petition. However, the reference on the Parliament's website, on the "open petitions" and "closed petitions" pages, to"link to full text of petition"could be considered to be misleading. To avoid any further confusion, I suggest that the committee should agree that that wording should be changed to "link to any additional information". That will address the concerns, and it will be easy to make that amendment. Do members agree to that?Members indicated agreement.