Procedures Committee, 07 Oct 2003

Meeting date: Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Official Report 174KB pdf

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Non-Executive Bills

Before us we have a note from the clerk, the purpose of which is to start the discussion of the question whether we want to proceed with an inquiry into non-Executive bills. You might recall that the Presiding Officer wrote to us asking us to consider the issue as a matter of urgency. At that time, we asked the Parliamentary Bureau whether it endorsed the paper that had been agreed by the Parliamentary Bureau in the previous session, but it has not yet reached a view on that. Bruce Crawford and Mark Ballard might be able to confirm whether the issue is to be considered at today's meeting of the Parliamentary Bureau, but I do not think that it is.

We might wish to consider how we might handle the inquiry, however. Members have a background paper on the issue. We have two options. One is to hold a limited inquiry to consider any specific proposals that emerge from the bureau's considerations; the second is to hold a wider inquiry that considers options that are additional to those that the bureau may suggest.

To help the process, I point out that the bureau currently takes no view of how to prioritise members' bills, although it is generally accepted that we must prioritise. The paper that was submitted by the previous bureau has not been signed off by the present bureau and is unlikely to be signed off today. The convener mentioned the available options. Several issues are going through my head. We must consider how much the committee should be influenced by what the bureau thinks. We should bear it in mind that, whatever process is arrived at, some political consent is required because the proposal will not work without that.

The issues of how we arrive at a decision on priority are not only for the bureau. Part of the original ethos of the Parliament was that as many members' bills as possible should proceed, although we will never have a situation in which back benchers introduce two bills each in a session, which was always a pipe dream that could not be achieved. However, it was accepted that members' bills were a different way of doing business that would empower individual members to produce legislation that might impact on the law of our country. I am slightly worried that, if we allow the bureau to direct us to a considerable extent, we will not involve back benchers—who produce members' bills—in the issues of ownership and the process of prioritisation.

That is a long way round for me to say that, although a fuller inquiry might take a bit longer, it would do the Parliament more justice than a shortened inquiry that considered only the bureau's options.

We are in a difficult situation and somebody somewhere has to make hard decisions. We must be honest: the current system does not work and means that the members who shout the loudest and cause the most disruption have their bills accepted. That is not fair. I read the stuff on the issue in the newspapers last week. I have submitted a proposed member's bill, which, I think, relates to an important issue, but I have not been running about complaining to the newspapers that the system may mean that my proposed bill will not be accepted. However, I will make my views on the process heard.

We cannot continue with the status quo. My worry about a longer inquiry is that we might continue to stymie the process. The non-Executive bills unit cannot cope with the bills that it has at the moment. The folk that cause the most fuss will get to the top of the queue and other folk will be disadvantaged, even though their bills might have equal or perhaps more merit than the ones that have been accepted. We need to find some middle ground. We need a short-term and a longer-term solution. Perhaps the short-term solution is to have an inquiry shaped around the bureau's proposals. If we do not do that, the system might collapse. I am aware of one proposed bill that would have taken up all the non-Executive bills unit's resources for the next two years. That proposed bill is worthy and important, but so are the other 21 proposed bills.

I do not think that raising the number of signatures required will stop bills from getting through; all that it will mean is that members will get more of their pals to sign proposed bills. Ultimately, the decision on prioritisation should be for the Parliament—somebody will have to rank the proposed bills and Parliament will need a mechanism to vote on them. We must move quickly on the matter.

My party recognises that prioritisation is required but difficult. The sound and fury over the issue did not come from my party. As a new member of the bureau, I find decisions on priority to be difficult. One of the problems on the bureau has been to get the new members and the new parties that are represented up to speed on the issue.

As the clerk's paper demonstrates, once we started to discuss the issue, we got into some fundamental philosophical questions that did not seem to be the kind of questions that the bureau is designed to answer. Parliamentary Bureau meetings tend to be fast and task-oriented rather than taking time to philosophise about the founding principles of the Parliament. The issue is about the appropriate body for taking such decisions.

The issue was sent to the bureau because it was aware that there had been some discussion and the bureau had submitted a proposal to the previous Procedures Committee. It seemed logical, therefore, to ask the bureau. Parliamentary time is the responsibility of the bureau and financial resources are the responsibility of the corporate body; neither is the responsibility of this committee. Standing orders are the responsibility of the committee. Any proposals that are made by the committee have to command the support of the majority of members, so it was useful to get an idea of whether our proposals were politically acceptable.

I understand Karen Gillon's point about the time scale and we might have to make some immediate proposals in order to give NEBU some guidance on how it handles the bills that will be introduced in the near future. It is wrong that officials should have to conduct the prioritisation of bills on behalf of the Parliament, which is in effect what happens at present. They have to make the decisions and it is not right that they should be put in that position. Prioritisation should be a matter for the politicians.

The original consultative steering group report did not suggest that members should be able to move straight to submitting a bill. It talks about members being able to submit proposals for legislation that would then be considered either by the Parliament or the relevant subject committee to see whether there was sufficient support or need for such legislation. That might be one route that we could consider. Should there be an intermediate stage between a proposal for legislation and the introduction of a bill? That would certainly reduce the pressure of drafting on NEBU, because it would know that there was at least some support for the proposed legislation and we would not have to go through stage 1 of the bill process only for the bill to get thrown out after stage 1. We might want to consider that proposal in the longer term rather than immediately. I believe that that is the process that the CSG intended and not the one that we currently have in standing orders, which is that if a bill gets 11 signatures, it can go forward to stage 1. There is nothing in the process to manage that.

It is difficult for the committee, because we do not know how long it will take for the bureau to come up with a view. Do we want to wait for the bureau to complete its considerations before we make a decision, or should we bring a paper to the next meeting, or the one after that, on how the committee would handle those bills, irrespective of what the bureau decides?

We should bring forward a paper. We know what the Parliamentary Bureau's thoughts are.

We know what the previous bureau's thoughts were.

Yes, but I do not know whether the current bureau will move away from those thoughts.

There are some difficult issues to be dealt with. We are not just talking about the committee's proposals. Other proposals have been made to the bureau, such as a committee of back benchers that would form a body that considers non-Executive bills. If the committee's paper outlines the options, that would help to inform the next committee meeting and, by the time that we get to that meeting, the bureau will have made a decision, whether or not its view is shared by everyone.

We will bring forward an options paper that has two streams for handling the issue. One will go down the line of looking at what the Parliamentary Bureau is proposing at present as an interim, and one will say that we want to examine the issue on our own and will lay out how we would handle that. The paper could also indicate a timetable for how quickly we could handle both those streams.

But, to re-emphasise, the previous business managers on the Parliamentary Bureau signed up to that; it is not the position of the bureau at the moment. The bureau is still trying to find consensus. If we had been able to go with the paper on which the bureau agreed the last time, that would have made my life much easier, in terms of the reading that I have had to do, but we could not agree to it. As a result, it should not be taken as something that we can—

I entirely agree with that point. That is why I asked the Presiding Officer whether the present bureau endorsed the previous bureau's report, before we took it as the starting point. The report is there for information at present; it is not there as a series of proposals. Either the bureau comes up with a view, in which case we can take it as the basis of our inquiry, or this committee has to say, "Let's get on with it ourselves, because the bureau is not coming up with a view." The status quo is not an option.

I have one small point. The bureau may come up with a solution by the time of our next meeting on 4 November, when we will have an options paper, but it is also possible that if the bureau adopts a position in principle, that position might need some work done to it to make it work right in the interim, before we do the long-term stuff, so there will have to be an inquiry anyway.

This committee will have to conduct an inquiry into the matter. The issue is whether it is a limited inquiry that asks, "Do you support or do you not support the bureau's proposals?" or a wider inquiry that examines other options as well. That is what we have to decide at our next meeting.