Subordinate Legislation Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Official Report 477KB pdf

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Scottish Law Commission Reports

The purpose of agenda item 4 is for the committee to consider correspondence from the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee on Scottish Law Commission bills. Members have the correspondence along with a briefing paper from the clerk. The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee will consider the matter again at its meeting on 14 March and it has asked for a response by tomorrow, which is Wednesday 6 March. It would therefore be best if any comments were agreed today.

I suggest that we respond that we are content with the proposed standing orders rule changes. Do members have any comments on that?

Members: No.

With regard to the committee’s seeking policy input from subject committees, I suggest that it is not appropriate for a timescale for such input to be specified. Committees work well together on an informal basis and I see no reason to put in place a specific timescale. Do members have any comments on that?

We are not suggesting a timeframe, but surely there is a wish that input will be received within a reasonable time.

Yes. I am sure that the committee clerks will be capable of agreeing that. They would usually expect a response within a few weeks.

What has been described are circumstances in which, having been given a piece of Scottish Law Commission work to do in the expectation that there is no policy content, we reach a point at which we believe a policy issue may arise. It would not, of course, be for us to probe that in detail; that would be for the lead committee that was dealing with the policy. Therefore, we would not readily be in a position to come to a view on how big such an issue might be. That would be for the lead committee, which might conclude that the issue was substantial or might quickly conclude that it was a matter of substantial triviality. Therefore, we are never well placed to put a timescale on things.

As a matter of good practice, we should probably indicate by when it would be useful to our processes to have a response, but we should certainly not get ourselves locked in to timescales, because we will not attempt to assess the policy issue, which we will raise in a question. That is precisely why it is appropriate not to formalise the schedule. It is really only the policy committee that can come to a conclusion, not us.

Thank you for that eloquent justification.

I am sorry, but I disagree with that. The whole point of an item’s coming to the Subordinate Legislation Committee is that it has been held up in the Justice Committee. It will come to this committee because we will be trying to support the Justice Committee to get things done sooner rather than later. Anything that we send back to any committee should therefore go on the top of its agenda, so that the process is successful. If we send to a committee something that is then put into its scheme of things, if one can use that phrase, we will not succeed in trying to clear up the backlog, as there will be a backlog in the backlog.

In saying that there should be a reasonable timeframe, I am suggesting that, if we send something back to a committee, it should put it on to its next agenda to try to speed up the whole process, so that we can be successful in clearing the backlog.

That is just a suggestion.

I entirely endorse your thoughts. Basically, you are absolutely right. However, I am conscious that—as Stewart Stevenson eloquently put it—the other committees will sometimes conclude that a matter is trivial and will not really be worried about it, but at other times they will conclude that a significant policy issue is involved, so they will stop and think about how on earth they will address that policy issue because we did not think that there was a policy issue to start off with.

Sometimes the Justice Committee or any other committee might be looking at an extensive stage 2 schedule, and may be unable to fit something in. We have to be slightly careful not to put in the standing orders something that we might instantly regret. There will not be too many of the bills in question, so I am in no hurry to suggest that we put in the standing orders something that we might subsequently realise was simply not helpful.

I do not want to be unreasonable or to gild the lily, but I do not want the committee to have a backlog because other people have not supported what we have tried to do. I will leave it to the convener’s discretion to decide the best method of achieving that, but the whole point is that, if people are asking the committee to take on additional responsibility to support clearing up the backlog, we do not want to add to that backlog. That is all I am saying.

Yes. I am with you.

We are forgetting that the timetable for each stage of a bill is, of course, set by Parliament through motions from the Parliamentary Bureau; it is not as if the process is without time constraints. At the end of the day, a committee may have to go to the bureau and say, “This cannot be done within the timetable that Parliament has agreed,” and Parliament must take another decision. That has happened in the past. We should not fail to note that there is a timetable, but that is done by a different process.

Yes. I am getting the sense, largely by what people are not saying, that we are not arguing for a particular period of weeks. I suspect that, as with quite a number of things in the process, we will have to learn as we go along. We will do the bills one at time; we will not do terribly many in a hurry. Therefore, let us just see where we get to. There is a sense that nobody is arguing for a particular period of weeks.

We also need to think about a possible name change to reflect the committee’s new role. I am all in favour of that; I see no reason for having a name that is wrong. When we know that something is changing, let us at least reflect that.

I propose that we call ourselves the delegated powers and law reform committee—as the clerk suggested before the meeting—not because we are the only people who ever consider delegated powers or do law reform, but because that name would cover the two things that we are being asked to deal with in the future. Are members happy with that proposal?

Members indicated agreement.

Okay. Let us see what other people want to say about that.

That brings us to the end of the agenda item and therefore the end of the meeting. I thank members for the swift progress that has been made. Our next meeting will be next Tuesday.

Meeting closed at 11:00.