Procedures Committee, 07 Dec 2004

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 7, 2004

Official Report 218KB pdf

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Private Bills (Dublin Visit)

Item 4 is our report from the visit to Dublin.

It is all right for some.

It was very hard work.

I remind members that we are still in public session.

The visit was helpful and the information in the report is useful. The meetings with the Department of Transport officials and the private bills clerks were especially helpful. In Ireland, the definition of a private bill is much narrower than it is here. If a bill has any public policy implications, it is not treated as a private bill. Transport bills would, therefore, never be treated as private bills in Ireland, as there are public policy aspects to them.

Do members have any comments on the visit or the report?

Paragraph 11 of the report states:

"Both Acts were superseded by the Transport (Railway Infrastructure) Act 2001."

Alison Gorlov talked about the parliamentary process being done away with and the buck being passed to someone else. That seems to have applied in the Irish Parliament just as it has in the Westminster Parliament.

Indeed, that is the case. The Irish Parliament has gradually got rid of just about everything that went through the private bills procedure. It is now looking for ways of getting rid of what is left; it is essentially getting rid of the private bills process altogether. However, I am not sure that we can do that in Scotland, as certain things require private legislation.

I am unfamiliar with the language. Paragraph 23, on parliamentary involvement, states:

"All Orders made by the Minister under the Act are laid before both Houses of the Oireachtas and are subject to annulment within 21 days."

Such an order is a negative instrument, in our terms.

Have any debates been triggered by that process?

No. I do not think that there have been any motions to annul under that process.

So the parliamentary involvement is theoretical rather than practical.

The procedure is the same as that used for any negative instrument in the Scottish Parliament. If members have concerns, they can lodge a motion and trigger a debate.

But that has not happened in Ireland.

As far as we are aware, that has not happened in the Irish context yet. An alternative would be to lodge an affirmative instrument, which would require at least a short debate in committee.

I was a little sad that we did not meet more than one member of the Committee on Transport, but there was trouble with the roads.

Indeed, there were transport difficulties.

It was interesting to hear about the extent of prior consultation on works acts before the orders are made. A considerable effort seems to be made to clear the ground before the formal stages of the process are reached. Perhaps the key to speeding up the process is what is done in advance, rather than the procedures themselves.

For me, the visit demonstrated how important it is for us to separate genuine private bills from those that seek to implement public policy. The railway bills are clearly the latter, as we have a clear statement from the Executive on railway bills. We also have democratically elected local authorities producing bills that are said to be private, but the authorities are not private institutions but public bodies. I think that we have got the wrong process. The visit clearly demonstrated the difference between public and private bills in a manageable and understandable way.

We note the report, which is useful. It has not necessarily simplified our considerations, but it has been helpful to them.

Members indicated agreement.

Meeting continued in private until 11:22.