All meetings of the Parliament in the Debating Chamber and most committee meetings are open to the public. You can find information about attending parliamentary business by looking at the Public Tickets section of the website.

Scottish Parliament committees frequently consult the public when conducting inquiries into issues of concern or considering the general principles of a bill at Stage 1. Details of current Scottish Parliament consultations are available on our website.

The Scottish Government also carries out consultation exercises, which allow you to express your opinions on proposals. Information about the Scottish Government's consultation process and details of its current and forthcoming consultations can be found in the Consultations section of the Scottish Government's website.

You can find full details of a committee’s membership and remit by clicking on the name of the relevant committee within the committee section of our website.

A list of all current committee members that you can download or print out can be found in the fact sheets on our website.

If you would like to find out which committee(s) an individual MSP sits on, click on the MSP’s name in the Current Members section of the website. Each MSP’s pages contain details of committee membership, as well as other biographical information.

Any group or individual member of the public can submit a petition to the Scottish Parliament's Public Petitions Committee. More information on how to do this is available in the document How to submit a public petition (587KB pdf). The committee will consider how to respond to the petition. There are a number of options open to the Public Petitions Committee including:

• forwarding the petition to another parliamentary committee for consideration
• forwarding the petition to an external organisation e.g. a local authority.

The Scottish Parliament is a single-chamber legislature in which the committees play an important role in considering and revising proposals for new laws.

Under the rules set out in the Standing Orders, most committees in the Scottish Parliament should have between five and 15 MSPs as members. (The current mandatory and subject committees generally have around eight members.) They carry out detailed scrutiny of bills, consider subordinate legislation and European legislation that fall within their remit, conduct inquiries, examine public petitions and hold the Scottish Government to account by examining its spending plans and questioning Cabinet Secretaries and Ministers. Scottish Parliament committees also have the power to propose new laws by introducing a committee bill.

For more information, see The Work of Committees in the Scottish Parliament.