Abolition of Poindings and Warrant Sales Bill
The next item overlaps with item 5 on the agenda, which largely concerns the timing of our work on the bill. I invite members to address the two items together, as they are part of the same discussion.
The Local Government Committee has indicated that it wants to be involved in the evidence session on the bill. I attended a meeting of the Parliamentary Bureau yesterday. Other members who were there will verify that I argued vehemently that we are concerned about our work load. I also stressed that we are keen to create time to scrutinise the bill, despite what we have said about our work load. One of our problems is that we must fit this work in. However, we are keen to do so.
I have had brief discussions with Roseanna Cunningham, the convener of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, and the clerks of our two committees have liaised with each other, so Martin Verity may want to comment on this as well. We briefly agreed on two key points. First, our committees will share the evidence. The evidence will be distributed to all committees, and the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and this committee will share evidence to achieve a balanced perspective on the cases for and against the bill.
Secondly, the Parliamentary Bureau must provide an indicative timetable. The Justice and Home Affairs Committee needs a report from us at the beginning of February, so our work must be concluded by January. That is what we must understand today. We must conclude our hearings and finalise our view by January, so that our conclusions can be passed on to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.
Do members have any general comments on that? We can address specific issues as we proceed.
Under our original time scale, we were supposed to report by December. My understanding was that the Justice and Home Affairs Committee hoped to conclude its work—evidence and so on—by mid-December and to report early in the new year. The timetable for the bill has been slipping. From day one, I have detected the hidden hand of the Executive in that.
The Justice and Home Affairs Committee, which has an even heavier work load than we do, will probably conclude its work on the bill before we conclude ours. The difference between the bill and the other work that our committee is doing is that the bill will become something tangible—people will be able to say that the Scottish Parliament has done something of benefit for the people, which has not been the case in the past six months. As far as I am concerned, the bill is a top priority and we should give it the billing that it deserves.
The committee has given the bill top billing and that must be made clear. We have cleared our agenda to deal with the bill.
At the meeting yesterday, I resented the suggestion that the committee was not co-operating in some way, because it needed more time beyond Christmas. At least 20 to 25 organisations want to submit evidence; some will have to be in written form. Members will get very agitated when they receive piles of documents that they have to read, rather than hearing evidence. We have to hear and read substantial evidence.
Yesterday, I was given to understand that a month would not make that big a difference to the bill. It would not make that much difference if the bill were to be heard at the end of December or at the end of January. That would give us a wee bit of scope to fit in extra meetings. Between now and Christmas, our agenda is extremely pressed, and those extra meetings would be to our benefit.
Could I suggest that the background to the bill is quite important. The original proposal was submitted in August, and was resubmitted—after various bits of advice—in September. We had a great many problems; people not a million miles from me—Mike, in particular—will understand the difficulties surrounding members' bills. Members have been fighting to try to get the bill discussed as early as possible.
As members will know, the committee to which the bill was referred—the Justice and Home Affairs Committee—is dealing with two pieces of Executive legislation, inquiries into domestic violence and the Law Society, and other matters to do with legal aid. Last Thursday, the clerk to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee contacted to me to say that the committee was determined to make time to hear evidence on the bill as soon as possible. He said that the committee will hear evidence on 17 November, from 9.30 to 12.30 and again on 23 November, and that it would write its report by mid-December. That would allow the stage 1 debate—aside from obstruction by the bureau—to be heard in the earliest parliamentary meetings in January.
I was happy with that arrangement, although I had hoped that we would have got further with the bill before the end of the year. The timetable has slipped. I am unhappy about the suggestion that the timetable should slip again, to the end of February or the beginning of March.
I appeal to you, Margaret, to set in train the original timetable, which was that a stage 1 committee report would be submitted by December.
I will take Keith, Fiona, John and then Karen. We need to hurry up.
Tommy has made his point and I do not want to repeat what he said.
However, I wish to make a minor correction to what Alex said. The Justice and Home Affairs Committee, as the lead committee, cannot report on the evidence that it has taken until we have reported to it.
I made that point earlier.
It is crucial.
Roseanna Cunningham has been extremely co-operative. She is almost a running fixture at the Parliamentary Bureau as she has been at its meetings on each of the past three Tuesdays. As Tommy Sheridan said, that committee has problems that make our committee's work load look relatively light.
Keith, you are repeating what you said earlier. This is ridiculous.
The Justice and Home Affairs Committee has three bills. We have to cope with the work.
I was not criticising you personally, convener, and I hope that you did not take it that way.
No, I did not.
As you said, the timetable is extremely tight and we do not want to let it slip. You are right—we must not keep on changing decisions. However, we are in charge of the timetable and it must not be allowed to take on a life of its own. In order to insert something like Tommy's bill, other items might have to be postponed. We must start working alongside the schedule.
I am sympathetic to what Cathie Craigie said, as we are all on a steep learning curve. I might know a bit about drugs, but I know far less about housing and other issues that I will have to learn about. If we do not have time to consider written submissions before we take oral evidence, we will have a problem—an increasing problem—as a committee. We must address that problem, but it is difficult to do that when legislation comes in on an already very tight timetable.
Can we talk practicalities? From what we have heard, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee will have two evidence sessions and then will have a meeting to put together its report. So far, on our timetable, we have the same number of meetings. We would start to take evidence on Wednesday 17 November—it is interesting to note that that meeting will probably take place at the same time as when the Justice and Home Affairs Committee is hearing its first evidence. That committee will also meet on 1 December.
If we think that two evidence sessions of three hours' duration will be enough to allow us to do justice to the bill, all we need to do to pull the timetable back in line is to swap sessions, with John McAllion's co-operation. If we swap the session on 8 December, which is meant to be an examination of housing stock transfer, with that of 15 December, which was originally the third session on the Abolition of Poindings and Warrant Sales Bill, we can discuss and agree the final report on 8 December. From what I have heard, that will allow us to progress in tandem with the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.
This is a bizarre discussion. Earlier, members were saying, "Oh my God—we can't do this; we can't do that." Now, they are saying, "Yes, we can." I wish to make one or two points on which I want us to be clear. I do not want to be put into a corner.
As members know, I am sympathetic to Tommy Sheridan's bill; given my constituency, I am hugely keen to assist it. If we take our time to hear proper evidence from a range of organisations, we will do our job properly.
I resent being put into this corner, because I suggested at the Parliamentary Bureau that we could stray a couple of weeks into January so that we could hear more evidence. Is that undermining the bill? I want to be clear that that is not undermining the progress of the legislation at all. It is about doing our job properly.
It will be impossible for the committee to do its work if we make a decision and then overturn it when we reach the next item on the agenda. I am going to have to start being firm with people. We have agreed a housing agenda, but we keep changing it. May I remind the committee that, during November, in one week we will be meeting for a full day and a half, and that it will be the same the following week? I do not know what other commitments members have, but we are getting to an absurd point where we cannot manage the work load. With due respect to Tommy—who is keen to see the bill through, as am I—I honestly do not see the difference that a couple of weeks or three weeks will make.
It seems to me that, from what Tommy said, we are holding more meetings than the Justice and Home Affairs Committee is holding, although I have no idea what that committee is doing. There would be no problem with swapping sessions—putting homelessness back one week and bringing forward the evidence session. In fact, we agreed at the previous meeting not to hear the homelessness organisations right away, but to bring someone else in—I have not yet had a chance to sit down with Martin and to report back on that.
I sympathise with you, Margaret: it is impossible to convene this committee as members continually change the agenda—not from meeting to meeting but from minute to minute in the course of a meeting.
That is right.
I do not see any problem with finishing those sessions before Christmas, as nothing can happen until after Christmas. It would not be a problem to hold back the homelessness organisations a week, if that meant that we could get through the work on the Abolition of Poindings and Warrant Sales Bill before Christmas.
With all due respect, that is not the point. We can swap certain things round—that is not changing the timetable, as such. Given the range of organisations that want to give evidence on warrant sales, I do not think that two evidence-taking sessions and one meeting to decide on our view are enough. The Justice and Home Affairs Committee can take its own view. At least 20 organisations want to submit evidence, and I do not have the time to do the reading that is required, to ensure that we cover all the angles.
How many sessions do you think that we will need?
I was going to suggest four, but that is just my view.
It is interesting that we are being told that we can swap meetings round, as we have been over the issue of timetabling repeatedly and have repeatedly been told that, because housing stock transfers are high up on the political agenda, the matter must be considered straight away by the committee. We cannot put it off, because there is a pressing political imperative.
The bill is important and, like the convener, I support it and want it to make legislative progress. However, it is a complex bill and the Social Inclusion, Housing and Voluntary Sector Committee would be failing in its responsibility if it did not consider the impact that it will have on society and on poor communities, which many of us represent. We, as a, committee have a responsibility to consider how they will be affected if warrant sales are abolished. How will those people, who are already on low incomes, access credit? We need to listen to those arguments and to consider those issues. Like Margaret, I think that that will take time and that two evidence sessions will not be enough. We have a responsibility to poor communities in Scotland to get the legislation right.
I am basically sympathetic towards the bill, although I would require a number of reassurances on it, in everybody's best interests. We are repeatedly getting ourselves into a guddle—a guddle that is largely of our own making. Basically, we must decide on a course of action and stick to it. As Keith Raffan said, we should not accept any more work until we have cleared our backlog. I am firmly of the view that we should stick to what we have agreed thus far. If there is anything else that we can do to expedite the bill, by all means let us do it, but let us also adhere to our timetable.
I support what you were saying, Margaret. Like most of us in the Parliament, I am sympathetic to the bill. However, as Karen said, we have to do our job properly and take the evidence.
Earlier somebody made the throwaway remark that they saw the hand of the Executive in the timetabling of the bill. I do not think that the Social Inclusion, Housing and Voluntary Sector Committee should allow its timetable to be dictated by that of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee. It might think that it can take the evidence in a couple of meetings, but we have to take the evidence as we see fit, so that at the end of the day we arrive at a proper decision. We have waited this long for the bill to come before Parliament, and I cannot see a few weeks making much difference.
About 15 minutes ago, we agreed how important it was to stick to a timetable. If we change that now, anyone who reads the Official Report of our meeting will think that we are making fools of ourselves. I realise that there will be occasions when timetables will have to change to deal with emergencies, but I do not think that this is one of them. We need this amount of time to get good and proper legislation through the Parliament. We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we tried to rush it.
There is a reasonable way out of this. Three committees are involved: the Justice and Home Affairs Committee will hold two evidence-taking sessions; we have already agreed to three; and the Local Government Committee must be having a minimum of one. That makes a total of six meetings, which means that a minimum of 12 to 14 hours will be spent on the bill. That must equal if not surpass the average time spent in consideration of a bill. There is no question of the Parliament as a whole not properly considering the implications of the bill.
I think that I am right in saying that there is agreement among the conveners of the three committees involved that there will be no duplication or overlap: anyone who gives evidence to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, for example, will not give evidence to the other two committees. That would be an absurd waste of time. We have already scheduled three evidence sessions. Given that the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and the Local Government Committee are also considering the bill, I would have thought that three evidence sessions would be adequate for this committee.
If we agreed on that, the only change to our planned schedule that would be needed would be to swap round the meetings that were set aside for dealing with housing stock transfer and warrant sales respectively. John McAllion and Fiona Hyslop indicated that that would be fine. We would then take warrant sales a week earlier and housing stock transfers a week later.
That fairly minor adjustment to our planned schedule would allow us to complete our work on the bill in December in tandem with the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and the Local Government Committee. That would solve the problem.
I do not think that that will solve the problem. I am constantly being reminded that we do not have enough time to ask witnesses follow-up questions. Keith Raffan did that again today. It would be difficult to find two hours for the thorough questioning that Keith expects. As Roseanna Cunningham said at the Justice and Home Affairs Committee yesterday, members will also be required to read the Official Report of proceedings in other committees for an overall view of the bill. Substantial work has still to be done; committee members are underestimating the work involved.
I want to suggest a compromise. Perhaps we should swap consideration of the bill with our consideration of housing. Loth as I am to make the change, in that way we would recognise that we must shift our timetable slightly. If we had one or two meetings in January—depending on the range of organisations that sent in submissions—we could try to get our report to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee by the third week of January.
As it is almost 12.30 pm, I need the committee's quick views on the issue. Does the committee agree to my proposal?
Margaret, you talked about one or two meetings in January, depending on submissions. The deadline for submissions has passed.
I am talking about the organisations that we want to hear from. The committee has already decided to investigate warrant sales in the context of debt and credit. Keith, were you going to say something?
Sorry, Margaret, but you interrupted me in the middle of making a point.
Hurry up, Tommy, because we are running out of time.
It seems unfortunate that you have been accused of undermining the process because you wanted more meetings. However, the fact that the Justice and Home Affairs Committee thinks that it can deal with the matter in two meetings does not mean that its investigation will be any less detailed.
That is the view of that committee.
Exactly. I do not think that such a remark is particularly helpful.
Furthermore, I ask you to bear it in mind that this is only stage 1 of the bill. We still have a detailed, line-by-line consideration of the bill to go through.
Absolutely. I know that well.
I tend to agree with Alex Neil. We spend too much time discussing our work programme instead of getting on with it. We could meet at 9.45 am or at 10 am. I support Robert Brown's point about grouping questions before every evidence session, including those for Tommy's bill. We should go into the session no later than 10.30 am and continue to 12.30 pm or 1 pm. A decent length for evidence sessions will allow us to take two or three sessions of oral evidence in two and a half hours. We will get a lot more done that way. However, we have to change our working practices, not the programme.
Perhaps the convener could put a motion to the committee.
Yes, I will. I propose that we stick to the outlined agenda. We will swap around housing, as Fiona Hyslop suggested, which will give us the space to take extra evidence in the first two weeks in January. Barring accidents and emergencies, we will report to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee in the third week of January.
I want to propose an amendment that three sessions will be enough and that we can complete our work in December. We will then be able to submit our report to the Justice and Home Affairs as the lead committee. If we do otherwise, the lead committee will be ahead of us in the work programme.
Okay, Alex.
Members are being asked to vote on an issue for which they do not have any evidence. We should accept what the convener is saying and keep the matter under review. If we are making good progress, fine—we will be able to report in December; if we decide that we need further sessions, we will have those sessions.
I have not seen which organisations have been asked to give evidence. It is stupid to force votes that will only go down party lines.
I will accept a compromise that we review the situation in December. If it is necessary to have a fourth or fifth session, that is fine, but we should not commit ourselves to five sessions on the bill on top of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee's work.
I will have to make a report to the Parliamentary Bureau on this matter. I have gone out of my way in this committee to be co-operative and to ensure that other people's agendas are taken into account. I have genuinely tried not to pursue my own agenda. Given all the representations that I received from every committee member about changing the work load, and having trawled through the Official Report, I thought that I had come to the committee with an extremely reasonable suggestion. All we are talking about is two weeks in January.
On a point of order, convener. The committee takes the view, not the convener. You have proposed a motion to the committee; I have proposed an amendment; John McAllion has suggested a compromise. I have said that I am prepared to accept a compromise; you are not prepared to do so. In that case, the committee should vote on your motion and my amendment.
I am quite happy to go along with that.
Does John want to push his compromise to a formal proposal?
If Alex wants to press his amendment formally, he can do so. He will lose.
No, but John's compromise—
Order. It is absurd that at this stage in the committee we are arguing about two weeks in January. My proposal is that we give ourselves space in January to formulate a view to report to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.
That is eight weeks.
No, Tommy. We had timetabled up to December for this issue. I am requesting that the committee give itself extra time in January to hear further evidence if that is necessary. Alex has suggested that we do not need that time and that we should conclude our deliberations in December. That is the vote.
On a point of clarification, convener. Is John formalising his compromise proposal? Yes or no?
No.
The question is, that we conclude our hearings on the Abolition of Poindings and Warrant Sales Bill by December in order to give our recommendations to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee. Can I see all those in favour? There are three.
The question is, that the committee gives itself extra time in January to hear all the evidence. Can I see all those in favour? There are eight.
Therefore, the committee will give itself the extra time in January.
We are over our time. I will liaise with the conveners of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and the Local Government Committee to achieve a balance in the organisations that have made submissions. I will circulate a list of those organisations. Committee members should give their views to Martin Verity and to me about the evidence that we should hear. Although we will proceed with our timetable, we will switch housing and consideration of the bill to facilitate speedy progress of the bill.
Meeting closed at 12:37.