WHY would you have a meeting and not make a record of it? For many suspicious or cynical types, the answer might be because you have something to hide.
I used to sit on the committee of my local allotments. There may be some who would imagine this to be deathly dull. I have to tell you it was not. There was no shortage of personal rifts, political manoeuvring and a need for robust financial accountability.
(My aunt is involved her allotment committee in rural Yorkshire and hers is almost as bad, so I believe vegetable gardening is universally more exciting than it sounds).
My point, here, is that despite our small membership, despite the relatively minor import of the decisions we made, despite that fact that our business was mainly – ahem – small potatoes, minutes were one of the ways we kept ourselves straight.
The Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland (CFOIS) may well contain its share of cynics, but exists simply to ensure the public can find out how they are governed and how their services are delivered.
But the campaign is increasingly concerned about a decline in the simple habit of recording meetings to discuss government business.
This follows concerns raised by Neil Findlay MSP, who last June told Holyrood: "We are regularly told that meetings listed in ministerial diaries have no agenda and no minuts and that no notes were taken because no substantive government business was discussed". He suggested it was not credible to suggest ministers met people like the heads of Scotrail, petrochemical giant Ineos, Cosla, without discussing relevant political matters. But maybe he's cynical too and they were sharing views of the weather over an afternoon tea. Many more meetings go unrecorded, CFOIS claim.
Perhaps this is a reaction specifically to the freedom of information laws. The right to request information under this law simply doesn't exist if the information is not recorded somewhere. Perhaps our political leaders have simply got sloppy.
But when the campaign used FOI laws to ask about the rules which determine when civil servants and Scottish Government ministers decide to produce written agendas notes or minutes for meetings they discovered, frankly, a mess.
The rules were too complex to be consistent, while being too vague to provide any kind of guarantee of openness. In fact, the campaign says, this confusing combination results in loopholes which are all too easy to exploit if, for some reason, a record is not to be kept.
The Scottish Parliament has agreed two measures to sharpen up the way freedom of information operates. It voted for an independent inquiry into the way the Scottish Government itself response to FOI requests, and for post-legislative scrutiny of the 2002 Freedom of Information act, to see how the law is functioning 15 years on.
I say 15 years - it will now be 16, as the Government has yet to act on either of these votes.
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