Correspondence
The next item is the continuation of the paper that we started to consider during our last meeting but on which we ran out of time. It is the letter of 9 January from the Presiding Officer on question time and First Minister's question time. The letter is accompanied by the outcome of the questionnaire that was conducted last autumn, which should inform our discussion on the letter.
I shall refresh members' memories. When we discussed the item last time, we talked about First Minister's question time and started talking about question time—we had just got on to the second page. By that time, committee attendance had tailed off; people were heading off to other meetings, so the discussion may not have been entirely representative. However, we received some responses to the Presiding Officer's letter from members. It was not obvious to me or the clerk that there was huge agreement among the responses, or even that the responses covered all the points. Therefore it might be best to start the discussion all over again.
May I ask a question?
Members are always allowed to ask questions.
Who finally decides the matter?
The Parliament decides.
Through what means?
The mechanism is a report from the committee recommending a change to standing orders. Therefore, if the committee agreed to act on any of the suggestions that involved changing the shape of the parliamentary week, changes would have to be made to standing orders to achieve that. We would issue and lodge a report. I would lodge a motion approving the report, and the Parliamentary Bureau would need to agree to accept the motion and, in the circumstances, timetable a debate. Finding the time for a debate might be a difficulty, so the issue might not proceed.
The fallback position is that we leave what everyone else is calling a legacy paper. We leave suggestions from the committee that the successor committee may choose to pursue with the bureau and the Parliament in the next session.
In light of that full and helpful answer to my first question, may I ask a second?
Yes. See, I was never a minister.
I am saying nothing.
Which of the issues addressed in the documents, in particular in the letter, would require changes to standing orders? Some of the points relate only to changes of practice in the chamber.
The proposal to expand First Minister's question time to 30 minutes would require a standing orders change. If, for ministerial questions, we were to take an entirely different approach, change time slots and allow questions to individual ministers, it would require changes to standing orders. All the issues to do with timing and the grouping of questions, whether by ministers or by the Presiding Officer, would require changes to standing orders. The selection of open questions and answers would also require changes to standing orders. There may be some things in the paper that do not require changes to standing orders, but not very many.
The Presiding Officer says in the concluding substantive paragraph of his letter that he believes that there is a degree of agreement about some of the changes, and that the bureau would be flexible about providing the necessary parliamentary time. I am not convinced from the responses from committee members, or from our brief discussion last time, that such a degree of agreement exists.
The survey of members suggested that there might be quite a broad array of opinions in the Parliament. It might be difficult to proceed very far on those suggestions without conducting some fairly full consultation. On the other hand, the Presiding Officer says in that paragraph that it is
"important that the current Parliament uses its experience to bequeath to the new session proposals for an improved Question Time and First Minister's Question Time."
The language of death and inheritance is striking, is it not? He suggests that that may well be a matter for the new Procedures Committee.
I think that the Presiding Officer believes that some of those changes command support and should be introduced. If that is not the case, at least the experience that we have should be distilled and the words of wisdom should be handed down to our successors in office. I suspect that the second of those alternatives reflects his opinions, and I think that that is a worthwhile exercise for us to do.
Before we get into the substantive issues, Susan, are you happy with that, or do you have other questions?
No. I am grateful for the clarification. Thank you.
I think that it is good that the Presiding Officer is addressing these issues, but I think that he has completely missed the mark with the proposal to extend First Minister's question time to 30 minutes. The clear response from our survey of members is exactly the opposite. He is saying that there is already widespread support for extending it, but there is actually widespread support for the view that question time is currently the right length. In fact, that was one of the few clear responses that we got.
It is difficult for us to agree on how to improve those matters. Perhaps we could agree on what we feel is wrong with the current question time set-up, so that we can focus on the outcomes. What are we trying to achieve when we look at the situation? I suspect that we will find ourselves in a similar situation to that in which we found ourselves when we considered the time allocated for back-bench speeches. I do not think that there is a person on the committee who thinks that four minutes is sufficient time for back benchers. However, when we were faced with the options, we were not sure that we could cut the opening or closing speeches or that we could increase the length of the parliamentary day, so we ended up with four minutes again, having gone round in a circle.
Perhaps it would be helpful to do some further work on question time and questions in general. If we can come to some agreement on why we think question time is not working quite as we would like it to, we can explore other options than simply extending it. I am not sure why 30 minutes would improve matters. In my opinion, it would not. I am open to persuasion, but I cannot see why it would.
The most commonly expressed view of the deficiency of question time is that there is not enough time to allow a larger number of people in on a wider range of points and we do not always finish all the questions. I agree with what you say about the survey. Maybe there is a deficiency in the survey, but I wonder whether members answering that question were thinking of 30 minutes as opposed to 20 within existing parameters, or of 30 minutes as opposed to 20 within the parameters of slightly more time.
As the last page of the summary shows, we got a clear indication when we broke down the options given in question 7, and members were quite decisively receptive to a later finish on a Wednesday. I wonder whether we could turn the whole thing round and say, "We suggest that Wednesdays should finish at 7 o'clock," for the sake of argument. Within that time, we would propose that the current short debates should be slightly longer and that opening times for speeches would not change but that back benchers' speeches would be six minutes long. As we would be going on until—let us say—7 o'clock, we could have 40 minutes for open questions on a Wednesday afternoon. We could break it into two ministries and rotate the ministries in response to the volume of questions.
On a Thursday afternoon, we would not go on any later than we do at the moment. We would have a half-hour question session with the First Minister, broadly as it is at the moment but with more time. That would take us into the middle debate in the afternoon slightly earlier, so we could have longer back bench speeches then as well. Instead of disaggregating it, if we put a whole package together about the shape of the week, based on what we thought might command overall support, we might get the basis of something that would work. People might look at that and say, "There are six points there. I like four of them, I don't like two of them, but the package I can buy into." We may need to go back for more survey work based on what we tried to work out ourselves, but we need a model to put to people.
Well said.
Are we dealing with Sir David's letter as it is?
Yes, but we are using it as the springboard to a wider discussion about how we allocate plenary time.
I agree with that. The difficulty has been that we are looking at defined surveys rather than putting recommendations to the parties. The working week idea is the most effective way of putting proposals to members.
I raised this matter before, and Gil Paterson and I previously discussed the four-minute time allocation for speeches. Members will have to give and take. If they want six minutes, they will have to give something somewhere else, which may mean additional time in plenary. We will have to be clear about that when discussing the working week.
Sir David Steel's letter of 9 January deals with question time. I have some difficulty with his approach. Question time does not attract a lot of media attention. I mean no disrespect to the media, but we do not set it up as a media event. I do not think that the media want an orchestrated event.
Question time is an opportunity to hold the Executive to account. The current system allows for that; a scatter-gun approach means that I, for example, can ask about the health board in Springburn and another member can inquire about the incidence of domestic violence in his area. The opportunity to discuss various issues at that time is welcome. There is nothing wrong with that.
Members are right to raise some issues, but sometimes they are not able to interrogate the minister or extract the points that they would like to. Accountability is an issue. Perhaps there could be further supplementaries; I know that Sir David occasionally allows members to ask another question on a matter. That is a more robust approach. There would be extreme difficulties if members were advised that their questions would be restricted in two 15-minute sessions, for example, on agriculture and another subject. They might then ask why the system was changed and request that something else be put in its place.
I welcome the approach that Sir David suggests of having the Presiding Officer select the first three questions of a session and then allowing other questions to be asked. That offers an excellent opportunity for the Parliament to deal with issues of current importance. I have difficulty with the idea that we are there to provide a media event. Even if we provided that in some format, I am unsure whether it would get the same attention as First Minister's question time. I am being realistic about that. Such a session might attract the same attention as First Minister's question time if a minister were about to resign or there were a scandal in a council somewhere. Sir David should be more realistic about the attention that those sessions would attract.
Sir David's suggestion was not driven by the idea that that session should be a media event; he simply felt that if a minister faced sustained questioning on a ministerial brief that in itself would appear to be more important and possibly more newsworthy. It would be more akin to the coverage of our ministerial statements. However, statements are always predicated on news or announcements, so that may not be a precise analogy.
We are talking about a sense that there is not always a sustained focus in questioning. Paul Martin made the point that, if more time was given over to question time, we could get in more supplementaries. I suspect that if we had more time for open questions, we would get through more questions rather than allow for more supplementaries.
The Presiding Officers try to anticipate whether there is a lot of interest in a question, particularly if it is on a narrow subject. If a question is about health services in Springburn, we know that Paul Martin and perhaps one other member will want to be involved. If, however, the question is about compensation for the fishing industry, we will try to take a member from all the parties in recognition of the fact that the question is on an issue that is more geographically diverse. If we had more time for questions, members might not be able to go deeper but they might be able to go further into the subject.
My commitment is to attracting more attention from the public, as well as from the media. As far as I am concerned, given the need for accountability, our focus has to be on the public interest. It is also not good for the media if we set in place a question time that is more of a showboat media event. Sir David makes clear in his correspondence that question time does not attract the attention of the media.
That is true as a matter of observation and fact.
The point at issue is that the media do not turn up until First Minister's question time. That spells out to the public that question time is not to be taken seriously. The problem is the structure of the session: at the moment, a member asks a question after which a second and perhaps third question is called. If question time were to be portfolio driven, the media would be more interested. In a sense, the impact of that change would be a feeling that the minister was being questioned by the Parliament on a much more wide-ranging basis.
The change would mean that members could see whether the minister had a grasp of their portfolio. It would also mean that members could press their request-to-speak buttons knowing that not only the usual suspects would be called to speak on issues such as the problems at the Scottish Qualifications Authority. It is more meaningful and better for constituents if we put ministers on the spot. Ministers should be put on the spot: they need to tell the Parliament what they are doing as well as to give us answers, but the aim of question time is not only for members to catch ministers out.
The SNP might be running the Administration in the next session. A few of the members are smiling at that, but I am not. Perhaps I should have recorded this session so that I could have sent it to the doubters in a couple of months' time. We are talking about more than exposing the minister.
We cannot look at the issue in isolation. The change would have an impact on timetabling of parliamentary business. If 10 minutes is to be added to question time, the last people we want to give that additional time to are the usual suspects who get to ask the questions during First Minister's question time. I would rather that the expanded time was given to question time and used to bring in other members, as that would make it a more meaningful session.
We seldom reach question 5—and, rarer still, question 6—in First Minister's question time. However, questions 3 and 4 give back benchers the opportunity to question the First Minister, which is a good thing.
To be quite honest, I am reluctant to give the Presiding Officer the gift of picking what he thinks is a meaningful question. I support Paul Martin's suggestion that what is important to him and Springburn—or to any other MSP—might not be quite as important to the Presiding Officer, because the issue might not be sexy or play to the gallery. We should not take something away from ordinary members and give it back to the Presiding Officer. I think that he has a lot of say at the moment as it is. I would retain what we have at the moment. I might come back on other points later.
It is a very rare event in this committee, but I think that I disagree with every single thing that Paul Martin said. We usually have a degree of consensus on matters. However, he has not really thought through the issue of questions.
A scatter-gun approach might mean that for months on end some members might not get drawn in the lottery to ask an oral question. If a particular department has 15, 20 or 30 minutes for questions, members could use some ingenuity and bring in other reasonably related supplementaries to that department on the back of the original question. That means that members would have more chance of getting in a topical question.
Lengthening the time for ordinary questions from 40 to 60 minutes in the week and having two 30-minute sessions would allow enough time for members to quiz departments once a month or once a fortnight, depending on how much time each department received. As a result, the questioning would be better focused, which would be beneficial to members and ministers, as well as the media. I agree that we are not here for the media's benefit; however, we are here to question ministers seriously. As members must be aware, many MSPs are very unhappy with the present form of question time and feel that it is not effective.
The Presiding Officer's proposal to brigade questions is a good one; indeed, it is one of the few things that work quite well at Westminster. I support the proposal that the First Minister should have 30 minutes instead of 20, although that is a separate issue. Moreover, we should have more time for ordinary questions, perhaps with two sessions a week. As for the grouping of questions, I feel that the minister should be allowed to answer several similar questions. On the question of timing, the questions could be divided over two days.
I certainly do not want to allow the Presiding Officer to select open questions. I am sure that succeeding Presiding Officers will be excellent people, but that is not what the issue is about. On the other hand, we should give the Presiding Officer some authority to reduce the time of both questions and answers. After all, some questions and answers go on for ever. Although such a system would be difficult to implement, it seems to work quite well in New Zealand. As the New Zealanders are very like us, it should work here.
There are several reasons why many of us were sitting smiling at the suggestion that the SNP would be in government, one of which is that we do not think that it is a credible option. However, were that ever to happen—God forbid—it would be so much fun airing all the old complaints about the way in which the Executive operates and seeing how many of those comments would apply no matter which party was in power.
That brings me full circle to the issues that we are trying to address. Some of the concerns that people have expressed—including Donald Gorrie's perennial ones—about the flow of questions and whether or not questions have been answered are a symptom of functions and structures rather than a deliberate desire of any political party or individual minister to obstruct or obfuscate things. Anyway, that is my humble opinion.
It would be valuable to consider the area further. I support the convener's suggestion of producing a big-picture paper that examines all the issues drawn together. One problem is that the committee has considered issues in isolation and that the questions that we have asked members have often been in isolation.
I recall discussing in some detail with the clerk my concerns about the questionnaire on the length of time for debates in the chamber. By necessity, such questionnaires often concentrate on quantitative rather than qualitative aspects but, in my opinion, it is difficult to answer the question, "What is the right length for a debate?" As Gil Paterson has said, on certain subjects, a high-quality debate could be sustained for hours, but plenty of members would be happy for other debates to be over in half an hour because they add little to the sum of human knowledge and are generally an unedifying spectacle.
I support the idea of drawing together all the dimensions in one paper. We should give members models to respond to, which is better than asking open-ended questions. In drawing together such a paper—if that is what we decide to do—there should be a three-pronged input. First, input should come from the evidence and views that the committee has gathered. Secondly, it should come from the Presiding Officer, who clearly has gained a vantage point on the issue during the past four years. It would be a pity if we were to lose that knowledge and expertise when we start over again in the new session with a new Presiding Officer. The third dimension would be to get ministers, perhaps—dare I say it—both past and present, to express their views. As the Presiding Officer has said in relation to answering questions, ministers have views and insights on such issues that could help to improve the process. It is important that we get the Executive's input in some form.
I responded in writing on some of the specific issues, but I will make a couple of points for the record. Even our relatively brief discussion illustrates the range of views on the issue. I share some of Paul Martin's concerns about the problems, but I have reached a completely different conclusion about the solution. The present system of ministerial questions is staccato and perfunctory and it is not a particularly meaningful experience for anybody. I accept that members want to hear the relevant minister say something about topical issues in their constituency and that, to the extent that members receive responses on such issues, which can be put into the public domain locally, the system serves a purpose. However, the system does not allow members to drill down into the issues or hold ministers to account.
I am attracted to the idea of dedicated subject-specific ministerial question times or cross-cutting sessions involving two or three ministers on, for example, poverty or the economy. We should at least test out that idea, even if it is done explicitly on a trial basis for a few months in the next session. None of us, whichever side of the divide we are on, will know for certain what works or does not work unless new systems are tried in practice. There is room for improvement.
Paul Martin said that we should be concerned about what the public think and not what the media think. That is a false dichotomy because, with the exception of the couple of hundred people who sit in the public gallery on a Thursday afternoon, the public view us through the prism of the media. Therefore we have to be concerned with how the media view us.
There are particular issues in relation to the broadcast media. My mind is on this subject because yesterday Fiona Hyslop and I were party to a session with the House of Commons select committee responsible for broadcasting. Broadcasters in Scotland have had a fairly constructive on-going dialogue with the Parliament since its inception. Scottish Television and the BBC took part in the session yesterday. I am sure that they would be amenable to a dialogue about how the process could be developed and improved. I agree with Paul Martin that we should not be going to the other extreme of simply playing to the gallery or the press. We have to protect the integrity and objectives of the parliamentary process.
Equally, it would be possible to involve the media in a dialogue. It is all well and good for us to develop our practices or give out information in the chamber. However, we must be able to communicate that to the wider public consciousness, whether we are talking about a health issue in Springburn or an environmental issue in Portobello. It matters to us that we get wider coverage for our activities and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that.
In conclusion, I agree absolutely with the suggestion about a big-picture model to which people can respond and which draws in all the different strands. However, it should address the qualitative and not just the mechanical and quantitative dimensions of how our week works. There are different people and different parts of the process that could contribute to putting that together.
The problem with the questionnaire is that we cannot please all the people all the time, especially if they are our colleagues. We all know that people want change but, if you look at the questionnaire—and the answers—in isolation, most of it is just about the status quo.
I strongly agree with the convener's suggestion that we should put together a model. It was interesting that there were nods from everyone around the committee table when he suggested that. We also need to go back to Paul Martin's point about getting something for nothing. There will have to be compromises, and that is why we will have to find out what the consensus is.
We are about to go into holding full-day sessions on Wednesdays, so members might get a feel for having a longer working day on Wednesday. From the business planning point of view—and I say this with my business management hat on—Wednesday afternoon is a difficult slot because it is not long enough for some things, but it is almost too long for others.
Although my instinct is against late sessions, the only way we can deal with the problem is to get committees to finish by 12 noon on a Wednesday, to have the plenary session start earlier and to finish later than 5 o'clock. Those suggestions should form part of the model that we put together.
Susan Deacon is absolutely right. There might be practical issues that the Executive might be concerned about that we do not know about. It might be useful to find out about those.
On question time, I agreed with that we did in Aberdeen—extending First Minister's questions from 20 minutes to half an hour. The extra 10 minutes would be for back benchers' questions 4, 5 and 6.
I also think that the free-flowing sessions we have during question time are by far the best. If all we have is members reading out written questions and having a written answer read out to them, then a supplementary question being read out that is no different from the original question, and the minister reading out the same answer as they gave to the original question, that could have been done through correspondence. Oral questions and answers should be a bit more free flowing.
The best sessions we have are when the Presiding Officers take a number of questions on one subject. The original question kick-starts the subject, but four or five members are then brought in to ask questions on the same topic. We get more from that approach; it is probably better for ministers, because they have more opportunity to respond and to give information; and it is far better for the people watching and for the participants.
We have three models to consider. There is a consensus that any extension of the time for First Minister's questions should be for questions 4 to 6 or for supplementaries from members other than the usual suspects. For a subject-based question time, we would want free-flowing questions on specific topics. We need to identify how to do that. The third model is to have a time when members can ask anything about constituency matters or topical matters of the past week. Paul Martin wants to retain that. It would be needed for topicality.
If we can cover those three bases in a question time that is spread over two days, we will start to reach a proposal that would be agreed. We should suggest the model that the convener has proposed. Instead of having a no-change agenda, we should start to address the fact that everybody knows that everybody wants change. The model that the convener has proposed would get a lot of support.
I usually agree with Donald Gorrie—the Labour business managers have not asked me to disagree with him—but Susan Deacon and Fiona Hyslop suggested covering several portfolios when considering specific subjects, which might be helpful. However, I count eight ministerial departments. If we were going to have a rotational system, that would mean that one week we would discuss agriculture and transport, for example, and members would have to wait for the rotation to come round to social inclusion and housing if they had questions on those areas.
I am not opposed to free-flowing questioning and I am not opposed to open debate, but I keep going on about the real world and asking how the suggestion will play out. My concern is that members would say, "The tourism and agriculture debates this week are interesting, but I have some other pressing issues to discuss." Perhaps I say that because I am first at question time this week, but the ability to submit questions and be part of the ballot process is an issue. Under the proposal, members would not be part of a ballot process. They would have to depend on the week's topic covering the pressing issue on which they want to interrogate a minister.
Are you telling me that, if the topic were transport, there would be no Springburn-related question that you could ask?
I appreciate that point, but some members would create questions because a particular portfolio was being discussed. I do not know that it would add to the quality of debate if I decided just to throw in a question about Springburn. There would also be potential for abuse of the system if people created questions that did not fit in with the portfolio. As the committee knows, that happens already with supplementaries. Members create questions that are not necessarily to do with the subject of the main question.
I have ruled one or two of those out of order.
We have all been guilty of asking such questions at some point.
We can sit here and talk about the romantic notion of having a free-flowing session. That sounds ever so friendly—although, in some of the cases that Gil Paterson mentioned, it would not be friendly, because he would nail the ministers—but would it achieve what we want? I do not necessarily think that it would.
The point that Fiona Hyslop made about having four or five supplementaries on a particular subject is correct. That happens when there is an issue of the day. Recently, Richard Lochhead raised fishing quotas in Aberdeen, and a number of members wanted to ask supplementaries. However, if the week's subject was transport, some members would have aspirations to submit questions that were not necessarily related to the subject.
There might be a way in which we can accommodate both. We could keep a debate for the scatter-gun approach, as the Presiding Officer called it, but have a mix of both styles of debate. It would be difficult because there would be the rotational system. Susan Deacon touched on the matter. Members might ask why the Minister for Finance and Public Services is coming in front of us this week, and we would be told that that is the way it is—he comes in every fourth Thursday of the month. We could end up being caught up in a system where ministers appear before Parliament because that is the way it is.
I am not opposed to free-flowing questioning. Every member in the Parliament wants to raise questions. A great deal of thought must be given to the matter. Members can be parochial and will raise questions about their local constituencies as well as about issues that affect the whole of Scotland. We must be clear about how any system will play out.
I started off with question time, but I want to air several issues. Comments have been made about focusing on ministerial portfolios and the recommendations made by the Presiding Officer for reforming question time. Some of the comments that Gil Paterson made heightened my anxiety. The wrong approach would promote personality politics. The whole emphasis would be on the minister's performance rather than on outcomes or the impact of his or her decisions or actions. That is exactly what is wrong with both First Minister's questions and question time. They emphasise all the wrong things in politics.
Having said that, I think that we have begun to come round to a more constructive idea. We need to examine seriously question time and First Minister's questions. We copied them totally from Westminster and they have never worked; they are a pale imitation of the Westminster system and do not work. They do not suit any purpose in the Parliament. There is some mileage in Susan Deacon's suggestion—which was echoed a couple of times—that we could focus on issues and group the questions that way. In order to ensure that Paul Martin does not feel isolated, I say that I endorse almost every comment that he has made today, including his comments about playing to the media gallery. There is a consensus in one corner.
There is a Glasgow conspiracy.
Exactly. Paul Martin's points are true. We should not design a system that plays to the media. Ministers are already scrutinised by committees; that will continue to happen. Their work will be scrutinised in-depth by members who are examining the whole brief. I welcome the opportunity that question time gives for all MSPs to raise issues. I think that to limit that—all the suggestions that have been made would do so—would limit the opportunity to raise questions, in particular topical questions. It would encourage members to put in questions on subjects that they do not particularly want to raise that week—as the topic for the week is finance they will put in a question about finance when they would rather ask a question about schools or hospitals. We must be careful. There is room for issue-based questions.
We can also agree that when we consider the issue and make proposals, we should examine the whole working week rather than individual items in isolation.
I will address some of the other issues that have been raised in the Presiding Officer's letter and in the survey. I am not opposed to the idea of questions being grouped; I am not sure that it is a pressing concern, but I am not against it. I am certainly sympathetic to the idea of selecting more topical questions. Members might know the old Soviet joke about the workers: "We'll stop pretending to work if you stop pretending to pay us." That is a bit like our current approach to question time. Perhaps ministers would stop pretending to answer questions if members lodged genuine questions rather than fake ones. We must try to remove the theatrical element of question time.
I am totally against asking the Presiding Officer to rule on ministerial answers. That would put the Presiding Officer in an invidious position. All Presiding Officers from all parties have been neutral and I do not agree that we should ask them to arbitrate and rule ministers out of order. Other methods might be used to obtain more substantial answers. One of the best suggestions—I do not remember who made it—was that the original questioner should have a second supplementary question after the answer to their first supplementary question to their boring or static question. That is a good idea. It would encourage a free flow and would get away from the practice of all of us having written questions and written notes, which Fiona Hyslop talked about.
I did not mention initially the fact that, although opinion in the survey was evenly divided on some issues, some questions received clear-cut answers, including the question on Wednesday evenings, as Fiona Hyslop said. That proposal offers opportunity for expansion, if needed, but work expands to fill the time that is available, and work should always be disciplined—he says, as he goes on at length. I urge caution about automatically jumping to move Wednesday's decision time to 7 o'clock. That option should be available when needed, but we should not automatically expand the working day.
I still think that the solution to the back-bencher speeches issue lies in the Parliamentary Bureau's finding better methods of responding and being sensitive to the political issues that matter to MSPs. Members want to speak on some issues on which they cannot speak and are asked to speak on issues that are not necessarily their priorities. A balance can be struck, because we still have debates whose length could be reduced.
I endorse the final suggestion in the questionnaire that the Procedures Committee—that is us—should undertake further work.
What we had heard, and the electronic responses that we had received, did not suggest unanimity on many issues. By talking, we have discovered more common ground, at least on the approach to the next phase. The questions in the questionnaire were a bit scatter-gun; they were fishing expeditions. We have got enough from the responses to them and from our discussion to allow us to work up a model; the model will have options, because we need to test members' views.
We are all considering the matter from our own standpoint, or from the standpoint of discussions that we have had, but we do not know what the whole Parliament thinks or what ministers think, which is a significant deficiency. Susan Deacon talked about prisms. We know the Executive's view only through the prism of the bureau, the Minister for Parliamentary Business or whoever is involved in the process. I do not know how we can get at what ministers think. An interesting idea is that ministers and former ministers have a perspective of which we should be conscious.
The paper that we produce must highlight the fors and againsts. Perfectly valid points are made for and against all the arguments. It is unrealistic to imagine that we will finish the work in the time available and that we will produce a set of concrete proposals. However, we have identified matters on which we can go away and do a wee bit of work, and that will allow us to produce the legacy paper by the end of the parliamentary session, so that the people who follow us can consider our suggestions and how they might develop them, and decide when they might bite on the decisions that will have to be taken. We have run out of time to propose changes to standing orders and to expect plenary time in which to debate and put in place such changes. However, we can gather the experience and knowledge that the Parliament collectively possesses and pass that on constructively.
I want to make a further point on the issue of the Presiding Officer selecting questions. Sometimes, it would be helpful for the Presiding Officer to have the opportunity to select questions for question time. Recently, the first person to die in a fire in Scotland during the firefighters' strike died in my constituency. I was thankful that a question had already been lodged on the firefighters' dispute, but if that question had not been lodged, I might not have had the opportunity to submit a question that would be selected. The Presiding Officer should be able to select some members' questions for question time, as he does for First Minister's question time.
I do not necessarily mean that the Presiding Officer should be given that power—I know members were concerned about that—but members can sometimes make a special request for a question to be selected, because of a constituency interest. I know that everyone has specific constituency interests, but there are times when it is helpful to have that opportunity. That is the only reason for my raising that point.
That is relevant to First Minister's question time. The last thing that I would want the Parliament to do would be to prevent a member from expressing a view on such a matter. It would be in the gift of the Presiding Officer at First Minister's question time. We could send the Presiding Officer a note asking whether we could tack on to a certain question because what has happened is important to our constituents.
I can see the limitations of what Paul Martin suggests. I do not want to face two ways at one time. If question time is structured by portfolio or driven by subject—I am attracted by that idea—there might not be an opportunity for members to get in. We would need to leave it to the Presiding Officer to decide and say, "Since we can't get Paul Martin in on that area, because it is not on the agenda, I will need to give him some time elsewhere."
Are we rolling the two final items into the one slot? Are we going to talk about the questionnaire?
We used the questionnaire to inform the other discussion.
From the paper, it is obvious that, almost across the board, members are saying that there is not enough time in debates and they go on to say that four minutes is far too short a time for speeches. They are talking mainly about back benchers speaking, but I suspect that everybody is in the same boat. The two points are compatible.
The one thing that is not necessary is extending the time of plenary meetings on a Wednesday. We could get round that by making the debates more meaningful and we could have a rollover period. If we are to ask more questions, I wonder whether members would be amenable to rolling over the debate from one day to the next. That would also entail the bureau's looking much further ahead than it does at present. The people who are involved in the architecture of the debates and the allocating of time would have time to assess debates and more timetabling could be involved. They could consider whether a given debate was interesting.
We always have the same members speaking in the big debates. Just recently—I think it was about 10 days ago—the Presiding Officer said that he was going to allow back benchers in and that he would give them three minutes, because it was a big debate. That is not on. Back benchers should have the right to get into a debate and to speak for at least four minutes. They should not always be subject to the Presiding Officer's saying, "This is a big favour; you can get in, boys and girls." We need to find a way around that. Rather than eating into time, we could extend debates in the future.
I indicated earlier that I thought that it was important that we did not just consider mechanical issues and that we alluded to qualitative issues. I want to record almost a philosophical view that flows to some extent from what Gil Paterson has just said. I am referring to the business of the role of individuals and—dare I say it—even personalities in politics.
We were talking about the chamber. We have to be quite sensitive to the need to allow members, be they ministers or back benchers, the opportunity to express themselves and for their—dare I say it—character and personality to some extent to come through. I take issue with something that Ken Macintosh said earlier. He said that what he did not like about question time was that the focus was on personalities rather than on substance, and that that was what was wrong with politics. I agree, and I feel strongly that too much attention in the Scottish Parliament has been paid to the who-said-what-to-whom type of personality politics, but that is different from us saying that there can be and should be a human face to what we do.
Fiona Hyslop's point was pertinent. If the whole process in Parliament, whether it be questions or debates, was simply somebody reading out by rote their party's or Government's position or whatever, and somebody else reading out something else, what would be the purpose of that? Okay, members would get some words recorded in the Official Report—which is not insignificant in itself—but there has to be something more to it. I would like us to recognise that in any proposals that we make.
Four-minute speeches are a constraint on members, and prevent them from relaxing and being themselves in debates. Members often say that, because they are desperate to record two or three points, they use a written script, when otherwise they would choose not to. They are so worried about getting cut off because they have had their three or four minutes that they have to stick to their text. That is one thing that has really reduced the quality of debate in the Parliament.
As I say, I disagree with Ken Macintosh's comments on question time. It is one of the times when people have a right to see a wee bit of the personality and—dare I say it—oratorical skills of ministers, because they can get all the rest of it through the written process. In taking this forward, we ought to be explicit on that point.
We may not have touched explicitly on enough of those issues, although we know from private discussions and from some of the more crude and simplistic and critical press commentary around these issues that they are real. If we were to bring them to the surface as part of this debate, we would be doing something to develop the Parliament and its practices.
The idea that we produce composite proposals is good. Options are needed. There is a way forward. If we increase the amount of time available to Parliament, some of it can be given to questions and some of it to debates. That would allow people to speak for a wee bit longer.
Okay. I think that we see the way forward. We will have a further discussion when we have a paper that we can use as the basis for wider consultation.
I thank members for their contributions this morning.
Meeting closed at 12:02.