Parliamentary Time
We are now quorate. I thank the members of the Scottish Parliament who will attend committee today, especially those who have arrived so far. Of the other members who were to attend, we have received apologies from Cathie Craigie. We will welcome—when they all come—Susan Deacon, Carolyn Leckie, Pauline McNeill, Cathy Peattie, Mike Rumbles and Murray Tosh, all of whom are attending the committee as individuals. The views that they will express are therefore their own.
I invited Murray Tosh because he was convener of the Procedures Committee in the first session of Parliament; his viewpoint is therefore useful. Obviously, he is not speaking officially on behalf of the management team or in his capacity as Deputy Presiding Officer.
I suggest that each member should set out their main areas of concern, after which we will move to a discussion. I urge my fellow committee members to listen to our visiting colleagues—we want not to listen to each other but to our visitors. Committee members should ask questions, but should resist making long responses to the suggestions that visiting members will make. That debate is for another day; we want as much as possible of the available time today to be given over to our visitors.
I propose that we take the visiting members in alphabetical order; Susan Deacon is therefore the striker—she is on first.
Thank you. It is nice to return to the committee as a visitor; in a former life, I sat on the other side of the table. Indeed, some of the thoughts that I will share with the committee this morning have been, in part, informed and shaped by work that the committee did in the first session of Parliament. I will return to that in a moment.
The initiative that the Procedures Committee has taken is excellent. Opportunities such as this, particularly when it comes to the operations of this institution, are valuable. We do not spend nearly enough time on discussions such as this. Although we all have good intentions to sit in on other committee meetings and to respond to requests to complete questionnaires or whatever, the world in which we live does not always allow that. Discussions such as this allow people who are particularly interested in a topic to engage much more effectively, so I am grateful for this excellent opportunity.
I have a great many thoughts and opinions on the use of parliamentary time, but I will try to go briefly through some of my key concerns. The review is all about time, and any discussion about time in the chamber always leads to the question whether we need more time. I believe fundamentally that, whether in the chamber or in other aspects of our work or lives, the first thing we should always address is whether we are making the best use of our time. I say unequivocally that we are not doing that in the chamber. For long periods, the chamber is very poorly attended; we have to address that before we can say that we need more time. We need to think about how to make effective use of our time.
I do not have time to do justice to the issue of chamber attendance and engagement and to unpack it, but I want to highlight a few areas. We need to do more in the chamber in response to members' interests and concerns, and we need to allocate time to what really matters and to issues on which we should be taking decisions. Let me be specific. Ministerial statements are a good example: more often than not—Murray Tosh will know better than I, speaking as he does from the vantage point of being a Deputy Presiding Officer—ministerial statements are greatly oversubscribed. We rush through them, with members continually being pressed: "Don't give preambles; ask a question." At the end, the Presiding Officer gives the requisite apology to members who were not called and, at the end of the ministerial statement, the chamber empties.
I remember one occasion—I apologise if my recollection is wrong—when Andy Kerr was speaking about the Kerr report. It was a major announcement on Executive policy and many members wanted to ask questions, but only a very small proportion of them managed to do so. When that item of business closed, the chamber emptied, with a few members from each party staying for the next debate, which was on a fairly anodyne subject. I am not going to suggest an answer to that problem, but I do suggest that such a scenario is plain daft and that we need to do something about it.
Flexibility is important because we cannot create rules that will govern every eventuality. Not every issue will attract the interest that the Kerr report did, but a balance must be struck so that we can be more flexible. We must look ahead to see what items are likely to generate a great deal of members' interest and thereafter allocate time appropriately. We also need to create more flexibility for the Presiding Officers to respond on the day to the amount of interest in a topic.
It is also important that we give time to what really matters. The convener is probably the resident authority on, or at least the continuous champion of, review of our legislative procedures, particularly our stage 3 debates, so I will not even attempt to compete with him. However, I would like to flag up some of the key problems, although I will not offer solutions. I apologise if members think that I am stating the obvious, but I have not read all the Procedures Committee's Official Reports and minutes.
I do not want to revisit what may be painful for us all, but perhaps one of the best—or worst—examples of the daft things that go on in the chamber is the debacle over the Licensing (Scotland) Bill. We cannot just move quietly on and say that we will do it better next time, although there have obviously been efforts on all sides to ensure that stage 3 debates are better in the future. It is important to acknowledge that.
Leaving to one side some of the substantive issues around the Licensing (Scotland) Bill for the moment, I want to flag up one particular issue. A number of manuscript amendments were lodged to the bill on the day of the stage 3 debate; I would like to quote the words of whichever Deputy Presiding Officer was in the chair at the time. I am told that it was the man who is sitting on my right; he will, no doubt, correct me if I am wrong. In the middle of a debate on late-lodged amendments that proposed policy changes that had not been properly discussed and tested through all the months of consultation, debate and committee consideration that had gone before, the DPO said:
"Given that 12—now 13—members want to speak in the debate on group 5, I cannot call all of them. I shall call one member from each party who has pressed their request-to-speak button. I warn them that they will get a very tight two minutes."—[Official Report, 16 November 2005, c 20697.]
I am not criticising the DPO—and not just because he is sitting beside me—but, for goodness' sake, we must find a better way than that. I note in passing that there is another issue buried in that comment. It presupposes that there are always party positions on such issues. I was one of the eight members who were not called to speak, and I wanted to speak against my party's position on that occasion. However, that is beside the point.
Later in the debate, a similar comment was made by the DPO:
"Of the 13 members who wish to speak, I intend to call five … I shall give them one minute each."—[Official Report, 16 November 2005, 20699.]
We cannot agree points of law on the basis of a few minutes' deliberation. I know that that is precisely the kind of thing that the committee is considering, but I take the rare opportunity that I have as a member of this institution to share my concerns about that. It is of particular concern in a unicameral system—in which there is no revising chamber—that we consider what we put on the statute book.
There is also an issue about party management and effective management of chamber business. Everybody accepts the need for a system to manage business and to structure who contributes to debates and so on, but such a system should also allow involvement and spontaneity. I cannot do justice to the matter now, but I point out that it was studiously debated by the previous Procedures Committee.
I have brought along that committee's report, "The Founding Principles of the Scottish Parliament: the application of Access and Participation, Equal Opportunities, Accountability and Power Sharing in the work of the Parliament"—which I am sure all committee members have read thoroughly. Murray Tosh will correct me if I am wrong, but I think that one of the four volumes of evidence that went with that report touched on the delicate matter of what the parties do here. If I recall correctly—I have not re-read the report in the past 24 hours—there was an agreement across the parties in the previous Procedures Committee that more flexibility had to be allowed to enable members to contribute to debates even if they had not put their name on parties' speaking lists in advance. A bundle of issues relating to that need to be addressed, but the overarching point to make is that the chamber experience needs to be positive and productive both for members and for those who listen in. Certain things can be done to achieve that objective, if there is the will to do them.
In a similar vein, I flag up a matter that I do not know whether the committee has considered. It is something of which I have become increasingly aware during my almost seven years in this institution. There are few opportunities—procedurally, there are almost no opportunities—for members to come together across the parties to raise issues of general concern or interest. At one end, there is the Executive debate or Opposition time, which is clearly organised along party lines. There are sometimes nice subject debates, which had their genesis in the previous Procedures Committee's report. Some of those debates work better than others, but I am pleased that we have them. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, there is the members' business debate. Could not there be a mechanism in between those kinds of debate whereby two or three members from different parties who share an interest or a view on an issue could have that issue debated?
There are some big issues for which such a system might be appropriate—the war in Iraq strikes me as being an obvious example—but there are also much less contentious issues for which it might work. There are geographic issues and other issues that are of shared concern, but which do not fall neatly within party lines and so cannot be allotted to party time and which are bigger and wider and merit more than a members' debate in 40 minutes at the end of the day.
It will come as no surprise to the convener that I have a range of other views; those were just a few of them. I end by saying this: I have already mentioned the previous Procedures Committee's report. The world has moved on since then and all of us who were involved with producing that report accept that if we had our time over again we would probably do it a bit differently and try for a snappier report.
That ties in with my opening remarks about the use of time; the longer Parliament goes on, the more I detect a snakes-and-ladders approach to things. In other words, we get so far on with a discussion or our thinking, then a committee convener changes, committee membership changes, a minister changes or whatever, and we go way down the snake and back to the beginning again. Across the board, we are not using our time as we might if we got a bit better at taking the work that others have done and, by all means, kicking it on to the next stage.
I know that this committee and its various memberships through the current session have done that with certain aspects of the work that was done in the previous Procedures Committee's CSG inquiry report. I hope that I can be so bold as to suggest that some of the other conclusions and evidence that were offered up during that inquiry would be germane to the work that the current committee is doing. I sincerely hope that that is being considered. Thank you for taking the time to listen to some of my thoughts.
Thank you. If other points that you wish to make do not emerge during the next hour, feel free to put them on paper or to whisper them in people's ears and we will get them into the system.
Next, alphabetically, is Mike Rumbles. The floor is yours.
Thank you, convener, particularly for your welcome and your opening comment that we are here to represent ourselves. Of course, I always express my own views, as I will do today.
The remit for the inquiry says that the Parliament's
"sitting pattern has reflected a number of key principles, including balancing the importance of committee and Chamber business, and operating within normal "9-to-5" working hours (to enable members to combine Parliamentary duties with family and other commitments)."
I do not think that this is a family-friendly Parliament. That might come as a surprise, especially to the 80 per cent of members who can get home of an evening. I notice Alex Johnstone nodding his head; I am pleased that there are two members from the north-east on the Procedures Committee. Parliament is awful as far as being family-friendly is concerned, so I am not very happy with all the remarks that we hear about a family-friendly Parliament.
It is not family friendly because of the distances that are involved in getting here. I find that we are kicking our heels on Wednesday evenings and although we can fill the time in by going to receptions and meeting people, lobbyists and organisations, we should be here doing our job. We are away from our families for that time, which is not satisfactory. That applies to 20 per cent of the members of the Scottish Parliament, so I am surprised that that voice has not been heard more loudly.
I have another plea. If the committee recommends that business in the chamber be moved about, please do not move it to a Tuesday. Some of us would have to leave at 3 o'clock in the morning to get here, which would be ridiculous. The current situation in which we have committee work on a Tuesday and Wednesday morning with chamber business on a Wednesday afternoon and Thursday is right. The remit says that the committee is not necessarily looking for more time but if it is, I urge the committee to consider Wednesday evening, so that Parliament is far more family-friendly to MSPs.
On speaking time, I appreciate that we have moved from average speaking times of four minutes to six minutes, but I would like that to go further to seven minutes because a lot of us like to take interventions and to intervene on other speakers. That is part of the cut and thrust of debate in the Scottish Parliament and it makes debate more effective than it is when members just get up and give speeches. Perhaps we should try something new.
Why not keep speeches to six minutes, plus one minute for interventions? That would encourage members to give way to interventions. It would be fine if speeches were kept to six minutes. However, we should think about changing the system to encourage greater to-ing and fro-ing in debates. I do not like hearing MSPs in the chamber saying that they do not have time to take an intervention because they only have six minutes. That does not add to the quality of debate.
I am not going to say anything more on the stage 3 situation. Susan Deacon spoke on that and it is imperative that the process be reformed. We cannot have bodged jobs, but that is what we are getting with stage 3. We all know that the procedure is not fit for purpose.
I welcome Murray Tosh in the light of his past dignities.
Thank you for those warm words of welcome.
To say that we have a famine of members wanting to speak in debates is not correct—we never have famines. I accept that last week we suspended early one morning, but that was the first time in ages that has happened. There are no debates in which we are desperately short of speakers to fill the available time, but there are occasions when we are desperately pressured for time. Some issues that have been raised are worth pursuing.
In the past month, I have presided over two ministerial statements. One was by the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport for which an hour was allocated and in which everyone who wished to speak was called. That was a good experience. Several weeks later, there was a statement on forestry for which half an hour was allocated. Seven members who legitimately wanted to speak on forestry were not called because there was not enough time. That was a deeply disappointing and frustrating experience. I am not speaking officially as a DPO, but obviously my comments are informed by what I see.
There is a tendency not to allocate enough time for ministerial statements, which is a pity because ministerial statements tend to draw better than average attendance in the chamber. There is a real problem with chamber attendance and interest in that few members attend the chamber unless they are speaking in a debate. Quite a few members are reluctant to attend except when they are to speak themselves. Most members who are speaking in any given debate accept that they should be there for opening speeches. Attendance during the closing speeches, however, is not always what it should be.
Attendance at question time, other than at First Minister's questions, is very poor. Members turn up just to ask a question and then leave. There does not seem to be any interest in feeding off the questions and asking supplementaries. I know the committee has spent a large amount of its time in this session considering how to improve the performance of question time. I do not know why members have little interest in questions. I am not suggesting anything that the committee has not looked at already.
Members' business is another area in which enthusiasm has flagged. We are required only rarely to extend the time for it. There does not seem to be any pressure to take part in it.
Attendance in the chamber is much thinner than it was in the first session and in mainstream debates the level of intervention is now less than it used to be. I agree with Mike Rumbles on members not taking interventions in six-minute speeches. The standard speech in the first parliament was four minutes, during which members nearly always took interventions; some were even happy to take two interventions. Now members regularly say, "Sorry—I've only got six minutes." I am not sure whether extending the allocated time will work. Just as when members moved effortlessly from four minutes to six minutes, if we moved to seven minutes, it would not be long before we heard members apologising because they only had seven minutes. I do not have an answer to that problem. Unless a member is delivering an opening or closing speech—both of which I think are under-resourced; closing speeches probably more so—they can say quite a lot in six minutes.
Some members are exceedingly good at varying their delivery when they are told that they have four, six or 10 minutes. They just get into the subject and make the points that they want to make and they use the time that they are given well. Other members perhaps spend too much time either on an elaborate introduction or on closing with a series of quotations. Their speeches are truncated because I have to press what I still think of as the red button—the button in the new chamber set-up is not red—to bring them to a close. If members were better able to balance their speeches, they would get more mileage from their six minutes.
I accept that members who make the opening speeches for their parties find it difficult to lay out their party's positions on complex issues in six minutes, and that it is impossible to do a good closing speech in just five or six minutes. We pay a price for that. A noticeable feature of the round of closing speeches is that members tend to make what are, in effect, their own speeches and do not necessarily reflect on what has been said in the debate or pick up points that have been made. Ministers are better at doing that. Of course, they are briefed and it is more their job to do that. That said, all members who close should pick up on what has been said in the debate and respond to points that have been raised. We tend not to be very good at that, but the reason is partly time pressures.
I turn to bill processes. The real horror story was the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Bill. Following the stage 3 debate, the convener of this committee drew attention to the lack of time that had been allocated to members other than those who spoke to amendments and responded to debate on their amendments, which was calculated to be 19 minutes, virtually all of which was found as a result of the Presiding Officers' squeezing of the subsequent debate on the motion to pass the bill. If we had had to adhere to the timetable for that debate, only three or four minutes would have been available for such contributions.
That information was a great shock to the Parliamentary Bureau, the Minister for Parliamentary Business and the parliamentary officials who did the calculations. Although that case was an extreme one, as Susan Deacon has pointed out, there were obvious time constraints on the stage 3 debate on the Licensing (Scotland) Bill. That said, we have never got it quite as badly wrong as we did on the stage 3 debate on the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Bill.
The example of the Licensing (Scotland) Bill shows that there is pressure to allow members to speak, which is not responded to. By contrast, plenty of time was made for last week's stage 3 debate on the Human Tissue (Scotland) Bill. We do not have a problem with most stage 3 debates, although now and again we hit a shortage of time for a stage 3 debate.
I agree that it is pretty rough justice for a Presiding Officer to call members and tell them that they have only two minutes, but we do that to include as many members as possible. I agree that not every member speaks from a party-political point of view. The Presiding Officers' job tends to be to manage the time and to get in as many members as possible.
The importance of everyone who wants to speak in a debate being able to do so is a matter for debate. My view is that we need to have full and flexible debates on amendments, including probing amendments and those that are lodged to make party-political points, grab newspaper space and so on, which people are perhaps less concerned about. If we do not resource those debates, the opportunity for a member to create doubt in other members' minds about an aspect of the bill proposal or to persuade Parliament—or even the minister—that something in the bill needs reconsideration, is lost.
However good a job we think that we have done, it defies human logic to think that we can get everything right on every bill, but we have never in seven years used the reconsideration procedures that are available to us when we think that there has been a problem with a bill. A good example of that is the issue of off-licence opening hours in the Licensing (Scotland) Bill. Given that many members had difficulty with the provisions, what reason was there for forcing through a decision and reaching a solution that no one really wanted in the first place? That said, the law of unintended consequences came into play and opening hours ended up being restricted further instead of being made more flexible.
Has the reconsideration procedure not been used because there is a sense of machismo that means that the first minister who agrees to use the procedure will be seen as a failure? Would using that procedure be a mark of failure? It should not be. When a bill has been thoroughly considered, has consumed hours of committee time and has involved many authoritative people in Scotland giving massive amounts of evidence, which the civil service and ministers have considered at length, use of the reconsideration procedure should be seen as a mark of wisdom. If two or three matters arise at the end of a bill's progress that we think should be considered further, it would be appropriate to refer the relevant sections back to committee for further consideration. That might take another month, but that would show strength rather than be a sign of weakness.
We need more flexibility. Extra plenary time might not be needed in many weeks—the week's business is often perfectly manageable within the available time—but it would sometimes be better to have had more time so that more members could speak after statements, and we might sometimes do better with stage 3 debates. We should consider our ability to expand the time that is available; procedures allow meetings to close later, but we are reluctant to use that facility and it is done only in exceptional circumstances.
Mike Rumbles made a point about using Wednesday evenings as a safety valve. Apart from that, I would not change the shape of the parliamentary week. The split between committee work and plenary work is sound, but we should make more use of the capacity to expand business into Wednesday evenings when we are under pressure.
I will cheat by kicking off with the first question.
On Saturday, I enjoyed myself at Murrayfield, which I rarely do. Clocks are now used in rugby games on the same principle as they are used in basketball games—the clock will not progress if a chap is injured or whatever. Could a system be used in the Parliament in which the clock does not progress if there is an intervention? Could Presiding Officers use the concept that is behind injury time or time out so that interventions are encouraged without basic speech times increasing beyond six minutes, for example?
Such a system could be used, but things would have to be done manually. I do not know whether the software that we have would be equal to such a task. The clerk would need the presence of mind to stop the clock.
The difficulty with the suggestion is that it would make managing debates impossible. Management is possible if members have, for example, six minutes to speak and intervention times are absorbed within those six minutes. We work not just towards 5 o'clock, but towards when closing speeches must start. In a typical afternoon, we will have perhaps just over an hour of open debate time to play with and already members will not be called. If unpredictable amounts of time start to be allocated, more members will be squeezed out of debates, which would make managing debates a much less predictable and more ill-tempered affair than it generally is.
In my opening statement, I did not argue that we should go from having six minutes to having seven minutes for each speech per se—I argued for encouraging interventions. The point that the convener made is, in effect, the same point as I made. I understand what Murray Tosh has said about practicalities, but my suggestion was that Presiding Officers should not only acknowledge that they can give members who take interventions an extra minute but make that acknowledgement public, so that what will happen is known about and expected and interventions are encouraged.
I take Murray Tosh's point. Time is finite—it is not infinite—and he will not be able to let as many members speak if the suggestion is adopted. However, parliamentarians should make a judgment. If we want to encourage better-quality debates and more interventions, members must be made aware that the Presiding Officer will grant an extra 60 seconds. That is important.
We will have to think about that.
I will pick up that point. The debates are artificial. The rigid timetabling of debates and of speakers' time prevents the free flow of many debates. However, the problem with Mike Rumbles's suggestion is that if somebody has an extra minute, where is that taken from? At the moment, there is an insistence on rigidly timetabling debates and speakers and on having decision time at 5 o'clock. Either we have a rigid timetable, or we have a much more free-flowing arrangement. What would such an arrangement look like? What would we do if extra time needed to be given in a debate before general questions or First Minister's question time? I am glad that I am asking the questions.
I do not have an answer, but I will share a thought. I note that in the Procedures Committee report to which I referred, one of the 140-odd recommendations was to provide a mechanism, through the intranet or whatever, for members to indicate in advance their interest in a debate.
One problem is that it is difficult to know how interested members are in a debate until it is upon us. I recall that the Procedures Committee kept returning to the conclusion that much more advance notice is required of potential topics. The matter affects not only members but engagement by external organisations.
I accept the point about the difficulty of having flexibility on the day—or at least about the knock-on consequences of having more flexibility. However, if we are being honest, people are often dragooned into speaking in debates to fill time. Better advance planning of parliamentary business could reduce the time for the debates in which people are dragooned into speaking and allow a little more time for debates that have a high level of member interest—members might not put their name down to speak but they might say that they will attend the debate or intervene. Perhaps something could be done on that.
I do not know what answer I can give Bruce McFee. If a debate starts at 2.35 and finishes at 5, if the political parties have their opening and closing slots and if we want to fit as many people into the open debate as possible, we must ration time. From doing that for several years, it has become clear that unless we are prepared at times to be brutal, some people will take all the time that is available. Most people recognise the signs and wind down just after six minutes but, if the threat to cut off people's sound were not made, some people would talk on and on.
We either operate in that way or make debates open ended and say, "Right—let's have a debate. We'll finish and take decision time when the debate is complete." That would not worry me. If I am doing members' business, I am in the chamber until 6 o'clock anyway. Provided that my colleagues were around to share the chairing, continuing until 7 or 8 o'clock would not faze me. However, I wonder whether members in general would be prepared to support such flexibility, with its knock-on implications for the other things that they do on a Wednesday evening. I am not sure what proportion now go home on a Wednesday evening—that might be interesting information—but if we take it for granted that the majority of members are here on a Wednesday evening, they are doing other things, which are not all just a question of filling time. Some of them may be filling time, but many people value other activities and might resist such flexibility. We might also find that the Executive business managers would not be happy with a non-fixed decision time, because that could create issues with the attendance of members at the appointed hour.
I suggest a compromise. Rather than a fixed decision time at 5 o'clock, I see no problem with a fixed decision time that is between 5 o'clock and 5.30. I return to my previous request that we encourage interventions and proper debate rather than have speech after speech without an intervention. Allowing some members an extra minute to speak would not encroach into a day's business by more than 30 minutes. Everybody would know that decision time would be not at 5 o'clock, but between 5 and 5.30. Sometimes, decision time does not start until 5 past or even 10 past 5, so why not have an envelope? That would be a compromise between having certainty and the flexibility to encourage proper debate.
One issue that has not been raised so far is to do with speeches. I speak for myself, as a humble back bencher. I often find the scheduling of debates annoying. It is ridiculous that we often have several debates in a day. The mornings and afternoons can be divvied up into different debates that parties have introduced. I understand entirely the right of parties to debate issues that they want to debate—that is up to them—but the parties can decide what to debate only within the rules of the Parliament and those rules should be changed.
To return to Murray Tosh's point about non-attendance. Why should I attend a debate in which I know members will not be able to engage? On many occasions, I have heard Murray Tosh or one of the other Presiding Officers say almost straight after the front-bench speeches that we are now coming to the closing speeches. Sometimes only one back bencher makes a speech. That is ridiculous—it brings the Parliament into disrepute and frustrates back benchers. It is a real problem. We should not tell parties what they have to debate, but they should have to conduct debates within parameters that are good for Parliament and for proper debate. My suggestion would be one way of addressing that.
Some of the foreign Parliaments that we have visited or exchanged information with store up voting until a certain time, which is worth considering. Some of them also give a lot more warning of the topics that are to be debated, which is a suggestion that other members have made. Those issues are on our agenda as possibilities.
I want to take up points that were made by two members. Susan Deacon talked about a kind of debate that she believes we do not have in Parliament in which there is greater opportunity for members to build on cross-party issues. Murray Tosh made a suggestion that I have heard from other sources, which was that members' business has lost its sparkle. Should we consider how members' business is used, with the aim of releasing it from its shackles and making it a more flexible, exciting and important part of the Parliament's business?
The short answer is yes; that has to happen. If a procedure is patently not working well, it is incumbent on all members at least to ask questions about how it might work better, as the Procedures Committee is doing. I have two suggestions, which, as we have all said, are just personal opinions. First, we need more opportunities for collective initiatives through which two, three or four members come together on an issue. That idea has been proposed before but has not been taken up.
My second suggestion may go against conventional wisdom once again, but I wonder why the rules place such an emphasis on members' business motions having to address constituency issues. My point is not that constituency issues are not important—many good bona fide constituency issues have been raised, some of which had a wider national resonance. The rules on that were revisited recently, but debates can be very localised. People take one look and say, "That's in Argyll so it doesn't affect me," or "That's in Fife so it doesn't affect me." Substantial issues such as transport or wind farms would have wider national resonance, but members are shoehorned into discussing local issues and everybody just leaves. Members' business could definitely be improved.
All members should stress the time pressures that they are under. People have a mental image of the empty chamber during members' business and—because of the press coverage over the years—they think, "Ach, that's just them. They're not doing anything." Lots of us feel terribly guilty walking out the door knowing that we are leaving an empty chamber behind. However, we also know about our other time pressures.
At Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body question time last week, I managed to ask a question by the skin of my teeth. I asked whether the SPCB might consider amassing, and making publicly available, information on the range of work that MSPs do. That could be a counterweight to the forensic examination of our bus ticket and paper clip costs; it could give a backdrop to discussions on these issues. I am not talking about gathering awful collections of forms filled with details, because we do not need that; I am talking about getting a wider picture of the range of work that MSPs do and of how that work varies depending on where the MSP lives and on whether the MSP is a regional member or a constituency member.
Those of us who live within travelling distance of the Parliament often have constituency commitments midweek. I have surgeries on a Wednesday night. Obviously, such things can be shifted, but the point I am making is that everybody's week is different and depends on a host of different factors. To my knowledge, nobody has ever systematically assembled a picture of what the life and work of MSPs are really like. The committee may want to think about that a little.
Susan said that the shape of everyone's week is different. She says, "Oh well, I don't just go home, I have a surgery on a Wednesday evening." Well, I would love to have a surgery on a Wednesday evening. Everybody's life and work programme are different, and the Parliament is not family friendly for people in the north and north-east.
I was attracted to what Susan said about making members' business more open and not linking it to constituencies. However, as a back bencher, I am aware that members' business is the one time that is whip free. A reason for that is the absence of a vote, but another reason is that the debates relate to constituency interests. I can foresee a problem: if the constituency link is removed, the party machines will move in. We should avoid that.
The party machines already decide who gets to have a members' business debate.
Indeed, but the party machines will have an even greater influence if we move away from the constituency link.
I will add my tuppence worth. If the committee intends to pursue changing the criteria used to select motions for members' business, it should take evidence from business managers. Members might find that they look at things from a different perspective.
Susan spoke about the narrow focus of debates, and sometimes that applies. However, last week we had a debate on childhood obesity. That is not restricted to any area; it is an important issue that affects the whole country. At the debate, there were 10 members in the chamber at the start and eight members in the chamber by the end. Although childhood obesity is a significant issue, it had clearly not caught the interest of the great majority of members—including many members who have participated in debates on, for example, free school meals and some of the other issues that are germane to that topic.
I wonder whether there is a specific difficulty on Thursdays because that is when members leave the Parliament, whether to go home or to go on to other events or functions. There may be something to be said for trying a sustained experiment of holding members' business debates on Thursday lunch times. One of the downsides of that—apart from the impact on staff, which I presume could be adjusted for—is that visitor services would lose the opportunity to bring people on to the floor of the chamber over Thursday lunch times during the debate. Conversely, people could watch the debate from the public gallery at that time, which would be a different part of the experience. The committee might want to consider the few members' business debates that we have held at lunch time and recommend that we run a pilot that the bureau could go along with. You would need to raise the matter with the bureau.
Has there been any discussion of giving over a Thursday every two months or so to members' business debates, in addition to possibly using lunch times?
You are referring to the recommendation that the previous Procedures Committee made in its session 1 report, that members should get time in what is sometimes referred to as Executive time.
Yes.
I do not recall any discussion of that. In general, although the Minister for Parliamentary Business is pretty flexible about topics for debate and accommodating the wishes of other business managers, she regards that time as Executive time and would probably want a very good case to be made for releasing it. Occasionally, an extra hour and a half is found on top of committee time for a Procedures Committee report, for example, or for a ministerial statement on an important topic. Occasionally, the Executive will slot in a debate on an issue that Opposition parties argue should be debated. However, there is generally more Executive business than there is time available to the Executive. You will have to push the Executive on that again and see what its reaction is.
My question was related to that, and much of what I wanted to know has been covered already.
I cannot resist commenting on Murray Tosh's remark that it is impossible—on occasions, on a complex issue—for a party to lay out its position in six minutes. The party of which I am a member is almost never allowed more than four minutes, and that is sometimes cut down to three minutes, so I find the remark interesting.
First, if we opt for cross-party members' business debates, I presume that we will have to enable cross-party motions to be lodged, some of which may not be chosen for members' business debates. I am interested to know whether the panel thinks that that is a good idea.
Secondly, if we have cross-party members' business debates, where will the time for them come from? Will it come out of the general allocation for members' business debates? Will it come out of general parliamentary time, to be "paid for" by the Executive and non-Executive parties?
Thirdly, we have touched on the possibility of holding members' business debates over Thursday lunch times. Would it be worth considering holding members' business debates at different times? For example, they could be held at the start of the day. That would avoid the undignified spectacle of all members leaving the chamber after decision time, leaving only seven members present for a debate that will be of prime concern to 20 or 30 people in the public gallery.
I will start with your point about time for speeches. If the Greens lodged an amendment, they would get the same six minutes as other members get. If the only Green member to speak did so in the open debate and only four minutes was available—as would be the case on a split Thursday morning, for example, when there are two debates—it would be difficult for them to get much substantive said, I agree. However, that issue affects not only the Greens; it affects every member who is asked to speak for four minutes.
On the whole, I dislike debates in which speeches are reduced to four minutes. The bureau has left it to parties and allowed the Conveners Group to allocate the time for committee business as appropriate. You will have to take on the bureau to get that changed if you think that that is a priority.
What was your second point, Chris?
Do you think that cross-party motions would be a good idea? Presumably if we have cross-party members' debates, we should also have a system of cross-party motions.
I am not sure what you mean by that. One of the criteria for selecting members' business debates is that the motion has attracted cross-party support. In order to get that, members have to express their views on issues in such a way as not to preclude members from supporting them. Some motions are clearly tailored to be signable only by members of a certain political disposition, but members who want to generate support for their motion will generally frame it in such a way as to maximise cross-party support.
At the moment, a motion can be lodged only in the name of one member. If we were considering a form of members' debate along the lines that Susan Deacon suggested, presumably we would have to change the standing orders so that a motion could be lodged in the name of a group of members. Do you have an opinion on that?
No. I am sure that it would be possible. However, given that all the members who support a motion are welcome to speak in the debate in support of it and get due recognition from the person leading the debate, I am not sure whether it would have any material impact. Perhaps Susan Deacon has some idea of how what you suggest would involve more people.
Although we have now veered into a discussion about motions, my initial point was not specific to motions but was a wider point about subject debates and the extent to which general chamber time is organised along clear party lines. We all need to be clear about what we want to achieve from debates in the chamber and then work back from that to find the mechanisms and rules to facilitate it. I am not sure that we have clarified what those overarching objectives are. I am certainly not going to attempt to do that today as I have not been immersed in thinking about the issue as coherently as you have all been in recent months and years.
Questions of detail such as, "If we do X, where do we find the time?" are perfectly legitimate. However, I do not think that in this environment we can ever design a timetable or rulebook, although we can reach agreement about shared aspirations on how we want the Parliament to work and what we want it to achieve. It would take a smaller number of people in a different environment to produce worked examples of what would enable that to happen.
I suppose that I am ducking the question, but only because it would be inappropriate to say what procedural or rule change should be made. Rather, the overarching objective, which is in line with the founding principles and expectations of the Parliament, should be to find more mechanisms to foster support for and encourage cross-party initiatives. I am sure that there are a range of ways in which that could be done.
I am not clear what the purpose of a cross-party motion is. As far as I can see, we have cross-party motions now. When somebody lodges a motion, it does not matter that it is in the name of a particular MSP; if members of more than one party support it, it is clearly a cross-party motion. I do not see what changing that structure is meant to achieve. I am puzzled.
Murray Tosh made an interesting point about members' business. One of the issues that struck me was the lack of notice that we get about the subject of members' business debates. Notification comes quite late, by which time members might already have something else in their diaries. I am interested in whether the members who are here think that there would be benefit in receiving greater notice of the subject of members' business. The issue to be discussed will not necessarily be pertinent to the particular day on which the debate is to be held, so members could be given time to research the subject.
Members have talked about the splitting of debating time. Personally, I think that that is a bad idea. I would be interested to hear whether you think that there should be rules to prevent that from happening, so that there would be a minimum time for a debate, which would allow a debate, rather than a party-political rant. That applies to everybody, including the Executive.
Finally, always being the last speaker, I have never found that we have needed 90 minutes for a Procedures Committee debate.
You always rise to the challenge with an astonishing level of commitment. The difficulty with preventing the splitting of debates is how that can be framed and applied. There have been some very short debates that have slotted in issues that needed to be addressed. There can be no political calculation about maximising any party's advantage in dividing time for committee business, but time for committee business is regularly divided. For example, sometimes something from the Procedures Committee or the Standards and Public Appointments Committee comes up that requires parliamentary approval, in which case a time slot must be found. There is no way that a whole afternoon would be allocated to a procedures debate that could be completed in an hour. We might want to reduce the time in that case and to do something else with the balance of time. Similarly, there are 10 or 15-minute debates on what used to be called Sewel motions and are now called something much more complicated.
Legislative consent motions.
Excellent—I knew that somebody would know what they are called. We often have mini-debates at the tail-end of the day on Scottish statutory instruments, although not as often as we used to. There is a fair bit of flexibility there. How you would keep that flexibility but ban the Opposition parties from dividing up the time I do not know.
I think that the Parliamentary Bureau has agreed that this has been resolved and can be published: it has agreed to a reallocation of business time, which will now mean allocating half-slots to most, if not all, of the Opposition parties, because of the change in party sizes. The Greens have two mornings under the new disposition, but the socialists and the independents have only one and a half slots each. The Conservatives have four and a half and the Scottish National Party has six and a half. There will therefore be more half-slots than there were before. I do not think that you can criticise the intention behind that, because it is to try to allocate the time fairly among the political groupings. There is no bad intention there; it is just that it is very difficult to manage the time.
To return to what Susan Deacon was saying earlier, much of the overarching purpose of the Parliament is to deliver an Executive programme; to provide an opportunity for the Executive to set out its policies and intentions and to take on board the reactions to them; and to expose the Executive's ideas to debate. That is our principal purpose for being here, and that is why ministers will be reluctant to be persuaded that we should sweep away the fixed decision time and radically alter the balance of time allocation. You need to move by persuasion and consensus.
The call for far more notice to be given is quite right—there should be more notice of everything. The people in the Executive staff who plan its forward programme know much further ahead than is ever made public when things are likely to get slotted in. Party business managers can often get advance notice of when their slot is likely to come. Committee dates are known in advance. Information is usually given when it is specifically requested.
We could generally identify topics for debate earlier, subject to the understanding that, when it comes to Executive time, ministers might change their minds about the level of priority that they attach to certain subjects.
Notice of the subject for members' business could be given earlier. It is usually given only a couple of weeks in advance. One of the scenarios that we have very often is that members are scrambling around at the last minute to find a suitable topic. Alex Johnstone was a business manager so he will know that when a slot comes up and a business manager looks at the Business Bulletin to see what would fit the criteria, it is not always easy. It is perhaps easier for the Labour group because it has 50 members, but there might not be a range of motions from the smaller groupings. Sometimes a motion is selected for debate within days of its appearing in the Business Bulletin and getting the necessary signatures. We might argue that we should approach the process in a much less mechanistic way, but business managers, for good reasons, are dedicated to the d'Hondt allocation because it guarantees that they get their fare share over the piece. Fair shares are an important part of our approach to the matter.
I am dismayed to hear Murray Tosh announce that the business managers have been at it again and have allocated half-slots. I suppose that that will be brought to the Parliament and that we will be able to have our say on the matter in the chamber.
In response to Karen Gillon's question, Murray Tosh said that it is difficult to ensure that half-slots are not allocated, that back benchers are not squeezed out and that there is a proper debate, but those things are easily done. We do not have to think within a mindset that says that we must allocate so much time for this and so much time for that. Why cannot we have a rule that says that, in each debate, the time that the Presiding Officers allocate to front-bench speakers must be the same as the time that is allocated to back-bench speakers? Under such a rule, debates could be elongated or shortened, but there would be a proportionate approach to each debate.
I strongly echo Murray Tosh's point that the issue of lead times does not apply only to members' business debates. I always find it helpful if we consider such issues with reference to actual cases. A good example of the consequences of poor lead times is the recent Executive debate that ended up being on the employability framework but initially featured in the Business Bulletin as being on skills and training. Skills and training are issues that interest a lot of people and various members from different parties were geared up to take part in the debate and express their ideas. However, 24 hours before the debate, a motion appeared on the employability framework. That is also important, but it interests a different selection of members. The point was made in the chamber during the debate. Frankly, it ended up being a guddle because there was no clarity or common understanding in advance about what the debate was about.
I do not regard that as an implied or actual criticism of the Executive. I just think that it is symptomatic of the way in which we operate. However, it is not beyond the wit of man or woman to find ways of militating against that situation, particularly when we are in terrain where there are no particular considerations to do with deadlines or topicality. We just need a bit of clarity of thinking and planning in advance. I hope that it is useful to share that example.
Karen Gillon's reference to Procedures Committee debates reminded me of another issue, which I do not think anyone has mentioned today, although I know many people have talked about it informally. It is the question of how many debates are now, by default, attended only by members of the relevant committee. That does not apply only to committee debates. The parties assume that if the debate is on skills and training, it will be members of the Enterprise and Culture Committee who are in the chamber, and invariably it is.
The same applies to debates on legislation. Stage 1 debates have almost become an extension of the committee, with detailed speeches about the particular issues and concerns that individual committee members had in committee. I do not detract from the validity of their views and concerns, but there is an opportunity for other members and for the wider Parliament to go back to what stage 1 ought to be about, which is the basic principles of the legislation. Obviously, there are exceptions, but we have all been aware of the trend. I honestly do not know how rules can be created that will stop that happening. That is why I am reluctant to respond to questions by saying, "This is how the rules should change." However, if general principles are established, behaviour at every level can be changed—including how parties plan and manage debates—to create a higher-quality experience for everybody in the chamber.
I think that Susan Deacon is talking about a problem that exists largely in the Labour Party. As a Conservative, given that we have only one member on each committee, it is hardly likely that we will flood a debate with committee members.
I think that I have been utterly non-partisan all morning, but I do not think that this is a problem that exists solely in the Labour Party. Factually—I think that this would stand up to analysis—it happens across the piece. As far as I can see, the same is true for the Conservative party. It is for the party spokesperson and/or the party committee member to debate an issue while everybody else flees the chamber. Of course these things manifest themselves differently in different parties and depend on different party cultures and party sizes. It happens in general. It is only the members who are made to run on issues in committee who then appear in the chamber for debates on those subjects. This is an issue of general concern.
Members should bear it in mind that we aim to finish reasonably soon.
I would like to discuss the wider issues. There have been calls at previous meetings to make extra time for chamber business, including using Mondays occasionally. That will probably not curry wide support. I get the impression from what you have all said that the emphasis should be on using the current chamber business time more wisely and with greater flexibility. Susan Deacon made a key point about the better identification of the subjects in which interest would be greater if more notice were given and members could discuss the subjects in which they had most interest. At that stage, the bureau should prioritise those subjects and give them more debating time. For example, if there were more interest in a members' business debate than in an Executive debate—although, as Murray Tosh said, there are issues with that—the members' business debate could be prioritised in the timetable.
That is a fair summation. In the first parliamentary session, the idea of using Mondays was discussed a lot. Given his long Westminster experience, Sir David Steel regularly expressed the view privately—and publicly—that members should do constituency work at the end of the week and that Monday should be a working parliamentary day. He constantly suggested that committees work on Mondays. That idea never flew; committees would not do it. We now have an established working pattern in which committees work twice as hard as anyone ever envisaged—it was always seen that they would work fortnightly, but instead the majority of committees, and certainly the big policy ones, meet weekly. They go through an enormous amount of work in the available day and a half. That gets nearly all members to Parliament.
We have not discussed the suggestion that we alternate committee and plenary work on a week-by-week basis. That would be very difficult to follow, and some members would simply not appear some weeks or could come for their committee only in certain weeks. We could lose the extent to which this is a community in which members are on campus for the three days that we interact with one another and with the people who come here specifically to interact with us. Within that envelope, we have as much flexibility as we want. However, we are here for the three days and we should divide them between committee time and plenary time.
Given what we are saying about members being absent from the chamber and the difficulty in changing that, it may be worth looking again at the argument for not having coincident committee and chamber meetings. There is not much point in saying that we have to preserve the primacy of chamber work if members are not there anyway. The danger might be that committees that are already stretched to the limit might become more heavily overloaded if committees can freely meet on a Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. Perhaps there is some scope for committees being free to get on with dealing with bills when something entirely different is being discussed in the chamber. For example, in a parliamentary justice debate, the same three members will be on the Conservative bench every time, and nobody else will participate. If it is a rural debate, it will be another set of three members, but it will be the same three members—of whom Alex Johnstone is one and a half. So, while a justice debate was going on, could the Education Committee be dealing with a bill that it would not otherwise have time to cope with? I am not saying that that is what should happen. It is just a thought in response to the paper that was circulated in advance of the meeting, and it might be time to consider the issue again.
I would like to ask Murray Tosh a specific question. During our visit to Norway, we spoke at some length to the chief executive of the Norwegian Parliament, who has gone through a number of the experiences that we are discussing. One of the things that he has done during his tenure is to work towards removing some of the restrictions on debates—removing limits on speaking times and allowing more people to speak in debates. He told us that relaxing some of those regulations did not increase the length of the debate significantly but simply resulted in a more relaxed attitude being taken to who became involved. Is there any scope for the Scottish Parliament to be more relaxed without suffering dramatic increases in the amount of time that debates take?
Conceptually, it has to be possible. I am aware that there are time-limited debates in the House of Commons, and the same issues arise there with members complaining that they have only 10 minutes and speakers starting to get twitchy when other members go beyond their time allocations. Not every debate in the Commons is time limited, but some are. If you have good, detailed examples from other countries of how that can work, let us consider them. I am just a bit wary of some of the implications of such changes and I would like to see how that has been done in Norway.
Reference was made to votes being stored up until a certain time, for example. If you take away the discipline of the vote at the end of the day, you may reduce the attendance and participation of members if there is nothing to wait on for and they have other things to do. On the other hand, it may be that if you free up the arrangements, people will find the natural level at which they wish to speak. I am not trying to mock what Mike Rumbles said, but I believe that, even if the time limit is lifted to seven minutes, eight minutes or 10 minutes, whoever is in the chair will still have to try to make members stick to those limits. I do not know what would happen if the time limits were abolished altogether, but it might be worth trying. It would certainly make my life a lot easier; I sometimes find it difficult to consider any of the strategic issues, because all that I am focusing on is the end of six minutes and how on earth I can get member X, who is in full flood, to sit down and leave enough room for member Y.
A more flexible approach would not dismay me at all, but there might be all sorts of management issues, including implications to which members do not give much thought. For example, if we debate until 8 o'clock in the evening, there are implications for staff who work in the building, such as the official reporters; all those people have the right to a decent working environment as well and knowing roughly when they get to go home is not an unimportant part of someone's work experience.
One illustration of the pressure of work on members is that three members who had hoped to attend this meeting—Carolyn Leckie, Pauline McNeill and Cathy Peattie—have been kept away by other commitments. We are grateful to the members who have attended. Does anyone have any final dying words on a matter that they feel has not had adequate attention? Are there any last thoughts?
I would like to share one thought that has not featured this morning. If we as individuals are to be effective, and if the Parliament as an institution is to be effective and respected, that requires activities of quality in a range of areas. We have talked about constituency activity and parliamentary time, but members also engage in conferences, events and a whole range of other activities in Scottish public life. Our overarching objective must be to ensure that everything that we do, individually and collectively, adds value to our outputs and to our reputation. I want to factor in that wider sense of what we all recognise as the reality of what we do and what we need to do, and I sincerely wish the committee well in its endeavour to help us to do it more effectively.
I thank all the witnesses for their contributions, which will be mulled over and put in the general Christmas pudding, and I am sure that some nuggets will come out.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—