The next item is paper PR/01/2/2, which is on time scales for bills and bill amendments.
I hope that the paper is largely self-explanatory; it is intended to implement decisions in principle that the committee has already made. I am happy to answer any queries that arise. We have tried to explain, as far as possible, the reasons for the precise changes that we are making to implement those general decisions.
I warn members who have not been on the committee for long that this is an extremely interesting area for questioning; they enter it at their peril.
If we are to make the changes that are in paragraphs 6 and 7, we must be careful about how we disseminate that information. At the moment, members are banging amendments in at the last minute. We do not want members to lose out because we have brought the times forward.
Would it be valid to recommend that the change should be intimated via the business bulletin and readvertised for each bill at the appropriate point in the process? Would that be done anyway?
It would be extremely sensible to have a business bulletin announcement when those changes have been implemented by the Parliament—assuming that they are—because it is a change in a practice that has been widespread since the passage of the first bill.
We must highlight the fact that there is a change. I accept that the information appears in the business bulletin, but members must be made aware that we are drawing attention to the fact that there is a change to the time of the deadline.
The announcement would make that clear.
I seek clarification on a couple of points about the reconsideration stage and manuscript amendments.
No, we have not. It is a stage that the Scotland Act 1998 requires the Parliament to have, but it applies only when a bill that has been passed by the Parliament is challenged under the Scotland Act 1998 before the Presiding Officer can submit the bill for royal assent. It is a stage that allows whatever is in the bill that has provided the basis for the challenge to be corrected, so that the bill can be given royal assent. No bill has been challenged in that way so far—I hope that that will continue. It is a backstop.
That was my understanding of it.
Yes. I suspect that the rules about reconsideration stage were slightly overlooked when the standing orders were being prepared, so there are one or two gaps; we are trying to fill the gaps so that, essentially, the same rules would apply as at stage 3.
Manuscript amendments will now be ruled out during the reconsideration stage. They cannot be lodged during stage 3 or the reconsideration stage, but they can still be lodged during stage 2.
That is correct.
A lot of the other changes allow manuscript amendments to be the means by which to lodge urgent amendments; that provision still exists—at the discretion of conveners or the Presiding Officer—at stage 2.
Under the current rules, manuscript amendments may be moved only at stage 2—at the discretion of the convener.
I am not sure where the guidelines from the Presiding Officer are in the documents, but he suggested that there should be clarification of the criteria under which amendments could be accepted at stage 3. Would those criteria also apply to the reconsideration stage?
I am not sure whether I know to what Mr Macintosh refers.
I think that Mr Macintosh is referring to reasoned amendments, which comes later on the agenda.
Reasoned amendments are a different matter. They are amendments to motions, which are, in standing orders, subject to entirely different rules from amendments to bills; they are a different species of amendment.
I am glad that you are here to keep us straight on those matters.
Andrew Mylne is our expert on all such matters. The Presiding Officer referred the issue of manuscript amendments to the committee; it is part of our work load and it will come back to us in future.
I have some points about the deadlines for withdrawing and supporting amendments. Are we on to that?
Which paragraph are you talking about?
Paragraphs 19 to 24.
Before we come to that, I will make the point that the changes that are encompassed by paragraphs 15 to 18 are technical changes to the private bill procedure; the committee has completed a report on private bills. We should note the fact that we have had to change those procedures to accommodate the changes that were made to overall procedures. I do not think that any of those changes are contentious.
I have never gone in for withdrawing amendments and so on. I want to be clear about the position; I do not quite understand how paragraph 24 coheres with the rest.
That is a question of the order in which things happen. If Donald Gorrie already supported Murray Tosh's amendment—
No. Let us say that I had just decided to support it as an 11th hour chap—which I am—and rushed in to do so.
In that situation, it would not make a great deal of difference in what order things happened. If the amendment is unsupported at 5.29 pm, when Mr Tosh comes into the clerks' office to say that he is withdrawing the amendment, he is entitled to do so. At that moment the amendment is withdrawn. If Mr Gorrie then says that he wants to support the amendment, the clerks will say that the amendment has been withdrawn, but that he is perfectly entitled to lodge the same amendment in his own name. The amendment would then become an amendment in Mr Gorrie's name, which is the same result as if the two things had happened the other way round.
I do not understand how paragraph 24 relates to the other paragraphs. Paragraph 24 seems to suggest that a member can support an amendment after the event—posthumously, so to speak. Could you go through paragraph 24 for clarification?
It might be helpful if I were to go back a stage. There are various reasons why a member might want to support an amendment. The most important reason for supporting an amendment, other than to illustrate that it has some cross-party support, would be to prevent the member who lodged the amendment from withdrawing it. In Mr Gorrie's example, if Murray Tosh lodged an amendment that could be worded only in one way—such as "leave out section 1"—and Mr Gorrie also wanted to lodge that amendment, his only option would be to support Murray Tosh's amendment—he could not lodge the same amendment. He would be the supporter of the amendment and that would provide him with some assurance that the amendment would be on the marshalled list, because it would prevent Murray Tosh from withdrawing the amendment on his own account.
The paper states:
Yes. However, even if you have not supported the amendment, Murray Tosh cannot withdraw it after that time either, so you would still have the assurance that the amendment would be on the marshalled list. It might be in Murray Tosh's name, but that would not cause a problem if your concern were simply to ensure that the amendment could be moved. The amendment must appear on the marshalled list. In that situation, the amendment would appear in Murray Tosh's name, but if he did not move the amendment, you would be entitled to move it, as would any other member who was present. If an amendment does not appear on the marshalled list, it cannot be moved.
If Donald Gorrie's intention was simply to demonstrate support for my amendment—for which I would thank him—he may do that by speaking in support of the amendment before the relevant committee. He could even lodge a motion congratulating me on my amendment and that would appear in the business bulletin. The point is that by making the deadlines the same, we avoid the risk of allowing something to fall through the cracks, leaving us powerless to change it.
This would not apply to you, convener—you are a man of principle—but there might be some more weak-kneed members who could be leaned on by their party whips and told that their amendment was not so good and should be withdrawn. However, the member might think that it was a rather good amendment that should be kept on the books. That would mean that we would have to register our support before the closing date. I think that I can live with that. Thank you.
Has the Executive hinted about its views on the proposed changes?
No.
So, we are not asking the Executive for its views on potential changes to the registration time scales and so on.
Andrew Mylne and I are in discussion with Executive officials and they will have an opportunity to put their views.
What is the next stage?
The next stage is set out in the covering note to the paper. Another tranche of changes will be brought forward and we hope that Executive input will be included in those.
I want to clarify a point. This morning, we are going to agree all the recommendations and changes, but that is before we have heard the Executive's input on the subject. Is that right?
We can have input from the Executive. We could, if the committee wanted to, arrange to ask ministers to come along to give evidence.
Has the Executive suggested that it wants to give evidence?
No one has suggested that.
What would be the normal consultation process for deciding whether we should take advice or evidence from the Executive?
We would get in touch with officials and the committee would make a decision after that.
It is a fair point—we might want to run the practical points past the Executive.
The time scale issue might have implications for the Executive.
That is an issue that we have already taken up with the Executive. We understand that officials are in contact with ministers on that subject.
What stage have we got to with the question of an earlier time scale for Executive amendments?
We are awaiting correspondence from the Executive.
That issue has spanned the changes in committee personnel. We discussed the issue of a different time scale for Executive amendments when the committee had a slightly different membership. We decided that it might be a contentious issue and we embarked on discussions with the Executive. However, the changes that we are considering today are unlikely to cause such difficulty. I accept the point that it might be appropriate to run changes past relevant people before we recommend them to Parliament.
I can offer the committee some assurance on that. A draft of the paper has been shown to Executive officials and I believe that they have taken whatever soundings they consider appropriate. That may well have involved ministers, although it is not for me to say what those soundings were. Officials have certainly been consulted on the matter and are content with the changes.
What about the second point that you raised, about the different timetable for Executive amendments?
That is not on our agenda today. We will come back to that when we have received a response from the Executive on the recommendations that the committee agreed last December.
I have one question to show what a conscientious and sad person I am. I read through the report and cross-referred the list of proposed changes to standing orders to the text of the report. I understood them all apart from change 11, which I could not find an explanation for in the report. What was the reason for that recommendation?
That is a difficult question. Rule 9.16.4, which is being replaced under the recommended change, disapplies for the purpose of a budget bill the current rule about two-week intervals between stages. As one of the other changes that we are recommending is to change from a two-week interval to a different set of intervals, it would not be appropriate to disapply a rule that does not apply in the first place. Does that make sense?
I am appalled to say that that does make sense.
We therefore need to reword the rule about budget bills so that it disapplies the correct rule, rather than an incorrect rule. I hope that that rather arcane explanation goes some way towards explaining the point.
I am most impressed by the answer. I understand it in principle and I am sure that we will consider it in detail before we finally approve all the changes. Before we get to our final report, I must guarantee that we have general agreement on those issues and that we have consulted with the Executive. Does the committee agree to the changes in principle?