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Good morning and welcome to the third meeting of the Procedures Committee in 2004. I am pleased to welcome Patricia Ferguson, the Minister for Parliamentary Business, who will give evidence on agenda item 1, on non-Executive bills. I invite the minister to make her opening remarks, after which I will open up the meeting to questions from the committee.
I really do not want to say very much, except to thank the committee for inviting me to come along today to talk about the issue. The paper that I have already submitted contains much of what I would want to say, about which you might want to ask me, so I am happy just to take questions.
Colleagues will recall that the minister sent a letter in time for our previous meeting, at which we were unfortunately—for various reasons—unable to take her oral evidence. I hope that members have brought that letter with them, and I open up the meeting to questions for the minister.
The minister's letter says that a threshold should be established in relation to the progression of proposals. What should that threshold be, for example in relation to the number of members who support a proposal? Are there other such thresholds that might be used to ensure that bills have sufficient support to make them viable?
In the previous session of Parliament, when the Parliamentary Bureau discussed the matter and came up with its paper, business managers recognised that the securing of colleagues' signatures on a bill proposal did not present much of a hurdle at all. Although we did not suggest that the threshold should be lowered or done away with, because it is a good test, we were not convinced that raising the number of required signatures to 30—or any other arbitrary number—would make a difference. We were more concerned to establish firm criteria against which a bill could be measured before any decision was made about it.
So the ability to fulfil those criteria would inform the bureau's recommendations to the Parliament.
Absolutely.
How would those criteria relate to those that are currently used by the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body to assess bills?
The bureau's advantage is that it oversees committee and parliamentary time, whereas obviously the corporate body does not do that. The corporate body considers the resources that need to be made available, but the bureau considers a different resource, by which I mean committee and parliamentary time. Both kinds of resource should be elements of the criteria, and the corporate body should feed in information about the resources that are available, after discussing the situation with the non-Executive bills unit.
We have seen the paper and it is helpful to have the Executive's outline of its view on the matter. Should the body that makes recommendations to the Parliament about the prioritisation of members' bills—whether that is the Parliamentary Bureau or another body—be involved in parliamentary timetabling in any way?
I am not convinced that it should—but I am not convinced that that is how members' bills should be prioritised, which influences my approach to the matter. At the end of the day, one of the bureau's key responsibilities is the oversight of parliamentary time and I do not envisage that the bureau would want to hand over that responsibility to any other committee.
On whether the bureau is the appropriate place for those decisions to be taken, the committee heard evidence from Paul Grice, who talked about the amount of detail that is required in order properly to scrutinise proposals. Clearly, to make judgements of the kind that you suggest in your letter, there would be a need for detailed discussions with NEBU, with the corporate body and, potentially, with the committees that would handle the bill. There might also be a need to take evidence on the bill and related consultations. The bureau does not seem to work in that way; bureau meetings tend to be very short—half an hour at most—and, as far as I know, the bureau does not normally take evidence. Does what you describe as the role of a committee that would assess bill proposals fit well with the way in which the bureau works?
I think that it does. You have been a member of the bureau in this session of the Parliament and perhaps you have not experienced some of the discussions that have taken place at the bureau. There have frequently been occasions when, for example, committee conveners have come along to argue that they needed more time to consider a bill at a particular stage. In such situations, the bureau would debate the matter and make a decision about whether it was possible to allocate additional time to the committee.
If the bureau were responsible for recommending to the Parliament which bills should proceed, what tests would it employ when making its recommendations?
It may be worth while if I describe how the paper was originally formulated. The Parliament asked the business managers on the bureau to consider a method of prioritising bills, because of a backlog that was occurring. The business managers discussed the issue for three or four months and produced the paper that members of the committee have seen. The intention was that the paper would provide the outline for a proposal that would be firmed up by the parliamentary authorities and referred back to the bureau, the corporate body and the Procedures Committee. That would have allowed the proposal to be fleshed out in much more detail and to be given much more scrutiny.
So in the paper that we discussed previously there was no question of making a judgment about whether legislation was worthy. Decisions would be based purely on the management of committee and parliamentary time. No judgment would be made on whether proposed legislation had majority support in the bureau.
Certainly not. However, it was recognised that there was a need for consultation to take place on bills at an early stage, so that the case could be made that legislation was needed. Consideration was given to testing whether there was already legislation in place that did the same thing as proposed legislation.
I hope that you agree that the process for considering the prioritisation of bills must be open and transparent. It should be politically impartial, because at stage 1 the Government will have its say on whether a bill is consistent with its stance. Given that under the proposal party managers would be responsible for the prioritisation process, do you envisage bureau meetings at which bills were discussed taking place in public, so that the process could be seen to be open and transparent? How would the bureau ensure that the process was seen to be fair, open and free of political partiality?
The business managers were concerned to ensure that the process was sufficiently robust not to be challenged. Although one group of people may agree to deal with something in one way, another group doing the same job in the future may take a different view. We were concerned to make the process and the criteria as robust as possible, so that when an issue eventually came to the Parliament for decision—ultimately, such matters would be decided by the Parliament as a whole—the criteria and the judgments that had been made against them could be measured. It could then be seen that a proper assessment of bills had been made and that the reasoning that had been given held up when tested against the criteria. We were concerned to make the process as open and transparent as possible so that when recommendations were made to Parliament they could be measured against the criteria and all members could see that those criteria had been applied.
Do you envisage that the process would be sufficiently open and transparent for bureau members to take evidence in the public arena from proposers of bills?
The test of that will be in the Parliament. The bureau's recommendations will be made to the Parliament and members of the bureau will have to justify the recommendations that they have made. If the proposer of a bill feels that they have been dealt with unfairly, they will have plenty to say about it at that point. We were concerned to ensure that the process was robust, so that bureau members could justify their recommendations when those were debated in the chamber.
The bureau is politically weighted. In that atmosphere, how do we ensure that proposers of bills can be confident that decisions were taken for the appropriate reasons against the prioritisation criteria, and that things are seen to have been done fairly? I accept the position of the current members of the bureau, but we are trying to put in place a process that will stand the test of time. What guarantee can be given that a future bureau will not knock out or not support a bill for political reasons?
None of us can give that guarantee, regardless of the mechanism that is chosen. The previous bureau agreed the paper to which I have referred, but the current bureau did not. Already we see that decisions vary depending on the people to whom one is talking.
I understand that pressure on NEBU resources has provided the impetus for consideration of this issue. However, as a committee convener I have been on the other side of the table, trying to programme a committee's timetable around the introduction of a member's bill at a very late stage in the parliamentary session. That is a bigger issue for me. What consultation do you envisage the bureau having with committees about how members' bills will fit into their timetables? Obviously, committees have many other priorities.
Absolutely. By going through the prioritisation process and being able to identify earlier in the parliamentary year what pressures will be put on the committee, we would assist in the process, whereas we would not if we introduced bills at the last minute so that a committee had to rejig its entire work programme. The Executive has to consider where its bills are going in order to try to balance out the weight of that burden. It is important that there should be consultation with the convener and the clerks of a committee to ensure that any work that is suggested fits into the committee's work programme and that there is a reasonable expectation of such work being given a fair wind by the committee so that it can be taken forward.
There is a school of thought that the prioritisation exercise should apply only to NEBU bills. It is my experience, however, that bills that come from other organisations are not often drafted as well as they could be. That puts pressures on other parts of the parliamentary organisation and then on the committees when members try to lodge amendments at stage 2. Do you envisage prioritising the whole parliamentary timetable, rather than NEBU bills alone?
Do you mean prioritisation of all members' bills?
Yes.
Yes, I envisage that. If one does not apply the process to all members' bills, it means that bills that are being drafted elsewhere would have an unfair advantage compared to those that are drafted in-house.
As I understand it, the process should allow us to prioritise the work of NEBU. If a bill secures the support of an organisation outwith the Parliament and the consultation is facilitated by that organisation, what role could any committee play—whether the bureau or another body—in setting the priority for a particular bill? At some stage, the matter would be discussed in one of the committees, but it is up to the bureau to decide on the timetable for that process.
If you look back to the original paper that the business managers drew up in the first session, you will note that we regretted the need to prioritise in that way. We did not come up with the idea; it was put to us by the Parliament. The Parliament said to us that NEBU felt under pressure because it did not have the resources to cope in all situations. There were times when it was okay, but there were other times when the unit was under pressure.
In what way do you envisage NEBU's involvement further down the line with a bill that was supported by an outside organisation?
My understanding from previous conversations is that some bills have come in that have not been drafted to a standard that allows them to be developed. NEBU has then had to help the member concerned to make sure that their bill can advance in an appropriate fashion.
That supposes that all such bills are badly drafted, but there could be some that are adequately drafted. I understand the role of the bureau is to make decisions about parliamentary time for bills, but is there a role for a committee—whether the bureau or another body—in prioritising a bill that does not make demands that impact on NEBU to the same degree as a badly drafted bill would do, or that do not impact on NEBU at all? I find it difficult to understand the distinction.
The bureau was not asked to look at NEBU's resources alone. From memory, we were asked to look at a mechanism that would help to prioritise to ensure that parliamentary resources—including, in the fullest explanation of that term, parliamentary and committee time—were also considered. That is what we reacted to.
Okay. I want to clarify that point. The issue is not just about NEBU resources; it is about the overall management of non-Executive bills right across the process.
To date, there has never been a situation in which there has been a problem gaining parliamentary or committee time for a bill that has been introduced at a point in the session when it was possible for the bill to go through. An exceptional example is that of a bill that was introduced so late on in the previous session that it was absolutely impossible to get it through all the stages. In the same way, there is not always a problem with NEBU resources. The problems tend to arise mid-way through the session, if the previous session is anything to go by. We were asked to look at the situation across the four-year session, to work out a process that would apply throughout, that members would understand, that was clear and that worked to criteria. That is what we attempted to do.
I am a bit concerned about what we do about fairness in the Parliament if we have a system that could prioritise bills that have the support of an outside lobbying organisation ahead of bills that do not. I accept the criticism that the members' bills process should not be used simply to support Executive legislation that cannot be included in the Executive's timetable. Similarly, members' bills should not be used as lobby fodder for any lobbying organisation. We have to be clear about any system that the Procedures Committee puts in place. Would any procedures with which the bureau is involved ensure that there is equality among members' bills, rather than setting one type of member's bill above another?
That was the whole point of the paper and the criteria that we are trying to put in place. We want to ensure that all members' bills get an equal opportunity to emerge, that they are all weighed against the same criteria and that they are all considered in the light of that criteria. At the end of the day, a recommendation will go to Parliament from the bureau and the Parliament will make its decision.
Mark Ballard will ask a question on the same point. Jamie McGrigor has been waiting patiently to ask a question, too.
Some of the first evidence that we heard was about the bottlenecks in the bill process. One of the bottlenecks faced by NEBU occurred when the bill had gone through the consultation process and was at the drafting stage. Corporate body criteria for assessing access to NEBU time were relevant at that point. You mentioned potential NEBU support for bills that were not drafted by NEBU, minister. My recollection from when the NEBU people gave evidence is that they did not indicate that they saw that as a significant problem—they did not see it as a major bottleneck.
Please bear in mind the fact that the paper was not my idea; it was the Parliament's idea. The business managers reacted to a request from the Parliament to consider the resources, including parliamentary and committee time and NEBU resources. That is what we did and that is what the paper outlines. I am not sure how more flexibility in the bureau would help committees to manage their time better. At the end of the day, committees have only a certain amount of time. If they are given too much work, they have limited opportunity to do things differently to allow them to cope with the pressures that they are being put under. I am not sure how the proposal would work.
I can see why the bureau would be involved in that decision, but the criteria that you were talking about were much wider and were more similar to those that the corporate body would take account of, in deciding on access to NEBU for example.
That is not at all what I am suggesting. Members would still have the right to have bills drafted elsewhere; that is a right that they should have and if they wish to proceed in that way, that is fine. However, members should not have an automatic right to have bills considered when other members' bills must meet the criteria. All I am saying is that each proposed member's bill must be treated in the same way.
Jamie McGrigor has been waiting patiently for some time.
I am sorry that I was not here at the start of the meeting, convener.
Yes.
When the bureau produces the recommendations, as well as recommending which proposed bills should proceed, will debating time be allowed for the proposals that it has recommended for rejection, to allow the Parliament to overturn the bureau's recommendation if it wishes?
I am not sure whether I have picked you up correctly, but the bureau would produce a recommendation outlining which proposals should proceed and which should not proceed. Obviously, Parliament would debate whether the allocation was right for that year. Also, we are not saying that the proposed bills that were not recommended for acceptance would not stand a chance; they would be reconsidered if the members still wished to pursue them when the next sift was done.
How often would the bureau consider the proposed bills?
The paper suggested that we should do that once a year, at the beginning of the parliamentary year.
Given the difficulty that arises when members propose bills late in the final year of a session of Parliament, do you recommend that that there should be a cut-off date?
The paper suggested that the date should be around September in the year prior to dissolution.
So members would not be able to propose bills after that date.
There would be no new bills. Obviously, those that were in the pipeline would still be taken through the process.
To follow up, do you envisage that the cut-off date would be for the lodging of bills, or would you still allow bill proposals after that date? The consultation process on some members' bills that have been lodged in this session of Parliament started in the previous session. Would it still be possible to lodge proposals and start consultation after that cut-off date?
The business managers' paper suggested a cut-off date after which no new proposals could be made. Frankly, I am not too worried about that one way or another, as long as members who submit proposals at that late stage understand that there is no likelihood of a bill progressing through to enactment before Parliament dissolves. One unfortunate situation in the previous session was that members expected to pursue bills, but that expectation could not be fulfilled.
The minister's answers have been useful. If we accept the general principle that all proposed bills, wherever they come from, must meet the threshold and fulfil the criteria, if the bureau—or whichever body considers the matter—accepts that there is space for 10 bills, but 20 proposals meet the criteria, how will the bureau judge which 10 will receive support? I use those figures loosely; I realise that they are not valid in any way.
One element that would have to be considered is the size and complexity of the proposed bills. It was suggested that had one previous member's bill proposal proceeded, no other members' bills could have been produced. When proposed bills are particularly large or complex, a judgment will have to be made about them. In the normal run of things, 10 bills might be able to go through NEBU, but because some of the proposed bills happen to be small or less complex, we might manage to take, say, 15. All the issues would have to be weighed up. The content of members' bills varies hugely. I think that one bill in the first session of Parliament had one line, but others were much longer.
I recognise the problems, which you are right to highlight, but that does not tell me how the bureau would score proposed bills and decide whether they should be recommended. We can all see that having 20 proposals might raise many problems for the bureau, but what would the decision-making framework look like?
I return to an answer that I gave to a previous question. The paper was meant to be the starting point for a discussion about how the process would work in practice. The paper was meant to give the parliamentary authorities the opportunity to consider the issue and draft a working document, which would then be discussed by the bureau, the Procedures Committee and, ultimately, the Parliament before it came into play.
That is useful, minister.
It is not for me to tell the Procedures Committee what to do, but as I am being given the opportunity, I will make a suggestion. This will sound terribly presumptuous, but I would have thought that the best way forward would be to agree what we need to achieve and then to consider whether to proceed on the basis of the paper that has been circulated or on some other basis. Once the Procedures Committee has done that, the best way forward would be to allow the parliamentary authorities to make a proposal that can then be discussed. The proposal must be discussed by the bureau, the Procedures Committee, the corporate body and colleagues in NEBU. Ultimately, the proposal must go to the Parliament as a report, but a lot of discussion must take place first.
I was interested in your comments about the size of bills. One criticism of the current process is that it works on almost a first come, first served basis. You seem to be suggesting that the basis should be the smaller, the better.
No.
If I interpreted your comments correctly, you implied that it is better to have two small bills rather than one large one. If that is not the case, what relevance does size have? Surely criteria other than size matter, otherwise we would just go for the smallest bills.
I was not suggesting that at all. I was responding to a question from a committee member about the number of bills that would go through the system in any given year. I was simply making the point that it is not possible to second guess the number.
I will move on slightly. We have taken evidence from former MSPs and from members who have introduced bills. We discussed with them the point that has been raised about the number of bills that members are able to introduce in any one session. The number that has been suggested is two and we discussed how realistic a number that is given the resources and time that the member would have available to them. We also discussed whether we should reconsider the number of bills and perhaps restrict it to one member's bill per session. Do you have a view on the issue?
I think that that is a matter for the Parliament. That said, I do not think that such a limit would help to resolve the problem of a bottleneck occurring. If every member of the Parliament bar ministers was to propose one bill in the course of a parliamentary session, we would still be talking about an awful lot of bills, and I doubt very much whether the Parliament and its various elements would be able to cope even with that number.
I hope that you are not suggesting that there are members without bright ideas.
No.
I will turn to a couple of issues that have been raised in the evidence that we have received to date. The first has been referred to already, which is the concern that the bureau might be seen as being too politicised or too much under the control of the Executive to be able to consider proposals for members' bills impartially. That concern led to the suggestion that another committee, either one that was specially set up and composed of back-bench members or an existing committee, should do that work. I am not suggesting that we want to do it, but the Procedures Committee was suggested as one of the committees that could undertake the exercise.
I will return to what I said before about the process being important. The process needs to be robust enough to withstand the scrutiny of the Parliament. If we do not have that, the process will not be successful. Of paramount importance to the discussion is the success of the process and the ability of members to accept the outcome of the process. I understand that members would be unhappy if their bill was not to go through, but that is life—all of us would be in the same situation if we were in that place at that time.
Thank you. I assume that we are talking in the main about members' bills. Do you see bills from other non-Executive sources, for example committee bills, also being subject to the prioritisation process?
They would have to be considered because they put a burden on committees. Obviously, as a package, they do not put the same pressure on the Parliament's resources but, from time to time, they cause pressure for committees, perhaps in relation to staffing. To be honest, I think the issue needs a bit more discussion across the parties and around the Parliament.
It has been suggested that, although there may have been some points in the first session of the Parliament when there was a fear of too much pressure on members' bills, in fact there was not a problem. Therefore, we might be setting up a system that is not required. Do you believe that the system is required to address potential problems in future? If not, do we need to hold such a process in reserve in case there is a problem, or should we not be bothering about the situation because, in fact, there is no problem?
To be honest, that is a question for the Parliament. The paper was drawn up originally by the business managers at the request of the parliamentary authorities, who had identified a problem. As I have said, as our paper sets out, business managers wish to emphasise the regret that there is a need to prioritise members' bills in this way. Business managers did not come up with the idea; the parliamentary authorities suggested that we could helpfully progress this piece of work. The suggestion arose because of a bottleneck. Whether a bottleneck will always occur in the middle of a parliamentary session or will occur from day one is something that the Parliament needs to consider.
Bruce Crawford has one small follow-up question.
The minister has said a number of times that the parliamentary authorities requested that this piece of work be undertaken. Can the minister be more specific? Which arm of the parliamentary authorities requested the work to be undertaken?
I can. I think that the directorate of clerking and reporting made the original request back in 2002.
The directorate of clerking and reporting.
Yes. I think that a proposal came to the bureau asking us to consider a method of selection. As a result, the business managers went off for a couple of months and came back with the proposals that are set out in our paper.
Thank you. I think that the details of the request will be in the original paper that we received from the bureau. As there are no further questions, I thank the minister for her evidence this morning, which has been very helpful. No doubt we will be in touch once we have decided what to do, if anything.
Thank you.
I draw members' attention to two of the papers that were circulated under agenda item 1. The first is the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party submission, which was submitted by Bill Aitken. He apologises for being unable to attend in person again due to his injury problems. He has asked me to make clear his view that, although the final decision on prioritisation must be for the Parliament to make, the initial sift should be done by the bureau, which should then make recommendations to the Parliament. To that extent, he supports the position that the previous bureau agreed.
Paragraph 5 of the report is pertinent to some of the issues that we have discussed this morning. It refers to the Canadian sifting and selection process. I might not agree with the way in which that is done, but the paragraph is relevant to our discussion.
It is for members to make their own judgment of how relevant the paper is when we come to consider the issues. My personal view is that the Canadian system tackles a slightly different issue from the one that we are dealing with.
I just want to ensure that that is not the committee's view.
I did not say that it was the committee's view.
I have a question based on the last question that I asked the minister. Have we received any evidence so far on where the process originated? Who started it and how did it come about? I cannot remember seeing that in any evidence. If it is there, that is good, but I would like to know that it exists.
It was in the paper that was sent by the clerks to the bureau in October 2002.
I was not on the bureau at the time but, from the papers that we have received and the discussions around it, I believe that the original request came to the bureau from the corporate body, which received the request from the non-Executive bills unit. NEBU was concerned that it was, in effect, being asked to prioritise and make political decisions. That is my understanding of where the original request came from.
You think that it was the corporate body, but the minister thinks that it was the clerking and reporting directorate.
A request from the clerking and reporting directorate would have been made through the corporate body.
Surely, we can find out. Do we have a copy of the original report?
We need to be absolutely clear.
The background paper on the report that came to us, which is the report that went to the bureau, states:
That was on the formulation of the criteria.
The proposal came from the director of clerking and reporting to the bureau in the previous session.
Can I have a quick look at a copy of that? I want to be clear in my mind about where the process started, so that we can make it clear in our evidence that we recognise the starting point for all this. I will sit and read it as other members talk away.
In evidence, several members and Paul Grice talked about fundamental rights. Given the fact that we are moving into quite complicated territory regarding the working of the Parliament, I would like to hear from somebody such as Barry Winetrobe, who gave us an interesting talk about the underlying workings of the Parliament at the committee's away day. Alternatively, we might hear from Professor Alice Brown, of the University of Edinburgh, who was involved in drawing up the original standing orders, which included provisions for handling non-Executive bills. It would be good if we went back a stage to talk about some of the bigger questions that we seem to keep on coming up against in our committee papers. Indeed, that was the point that the Minister for Parliamentary Business made when she said that we had to start with where we want to go. Therefore, it would be worth while to take such evidence.
I do not have any objection to that, but we really have to get our heads round this and make decisions, as it has been dragging on and on. We are almost a year into the new Parliament and we still do not have a better way of dealing with members' bills. If we are going to take that evidence, we will have to do it quickly.
Mark Ballard's suggestion is reasonable.
I have no problem with our holding an additional oral evidence session to which we would invite people from external agencies, as suggested. If any member has any other suggestions for witnesses, we will need to know quickly so that we can issue our invitations. However, I note the point that Cathie Craigie is making. We do not want to start going round in circles in this inquiry.
Exactly. The clerk's paper asks us whether we have got all the evidence that we think we need on the process. It lays out well the different areas that we have examined and asks us some pertinent questions. Nevertheless, if we accept that every bill needs to meet criteria and reach a threshold, we must ensure that we have taken enough evidence on what the criteria and the threshold should be. We may have taken enough evidence—I think that we probably have. I am including outside bills and inside bills.
We have to know where we are going. We have to know which group will make the decisions before we can get down to that sort of detail. Would it be the bureau? We look forward to having the discussion. If 20 bills met all the criteria but 10 of them would go to the Education Committee for scrutiny, the fact that it would not be able to get through 10 bills would be a criterion. We would have to consider how realistic the timetabling was for committees.
The bureau could do that job now.
I do not think that we are at that stage.
Technically, the bureau could do that job at present. It can set specific timetables for certain bills and not set them for others. However, one of the problems with the present standing orders is the fact that they do not include any procedure to prevent bills from proceeding to stage 1. That is where problems might arise at some point.
I accept entirely what Cathie Craigie says. We need to agree what process we are going to have. That is a fundamental stepping stone to success. Whatever decision-making framework exists—whether it is a committee of back benchers, the bureau, or whatever other option we might decide on—that group of people will need to have a clear set of criteria beyond the criteria that we have already, which the bills will have met, on which to make a decision about prioritisation. The question for the committee is whether we should help in that process by taking evidence to ensure that the process can be seen to be open and transparent or whether we should leave it to another part of the organisation to come up with the criteria, which will not be agreed through the Procedures Committee.
I thought that what the minister said on that was quite helpful. If we agree that there needs to be a procedure, we can establish what that procedure should be and then consult on and produce the guidance for that group—whether it is the bureau or whatever.
So, there would be a secondary stage.
Yes, we could have a secondary stage with detailed guidance on the criteria. That would be a sensible way forward, rather than trying to work out the detailed criteria and then deciding that we do not need a process.
This is in reply to what Cathie Craigie said. I am still thinking about the answer. I can see that the bureau would be able to make the kind of timetabling decisions about committee time that might be needed. However, notwithstanding the minister's answer, I do not think that the bureau is the appropriate place to take detailed evidence. That does not seem to be the way in which the bureau operates. The criteria that we use will determine which is the appropriate body to judge those criteria. There is a link between the criteria that we use on the one hand, and the body that we use on the other hand. We cannot decide on the body and then on the criteria; to some extent, we have to decide on the criteria and then on the appropriate body.
We could end up going round in ever-decreasing circles and never reaching conclusions. We have got to work our way forward and reach some conclusion. That conclusion may be that there is no need to have any process—in which case, why waste time in developing criteria? We must first make decisions on the general, broad principles of whether there should be a process and the way in which it should work. We will then need to look at the detail of the criteria to ensure their transparency. That is my thought process on it.
We have already heard from NEBU; we took evidence from David Cullum. However, having talked to people about the issue, I think that one reason why members' bills might have taken a long time is that members have not introduced the bills or responded to letters quickly enough. If a member is taking too long, or is being inefficient, he or she is holding up everyone else in the Parliament. I would like to hear from the people at the coalface practical examples of why the process gets snarled up. I would also like to have recommendations on what to do with members if they do not push their bills quickly enough and miss deadlines.
I am not aware that any bills have reached stage 1 and then been delayed because members were not progressing them. Once the bill has a timetable—
I am not talking about specific bills, but I believe that things can get held up by the member or their staff rather than by the procedure.
I am sure that that is the case, but any such delay would be likely to happen at the pre-consultation stage when the member is driving the process. Once the bill gets—
That is the stage that I am talking about—it all impacts on NEBU's time.
There will be an incentive for all members if the process contains a timetabling stage, when priorities are decided at the end of June or in September and the committee makes its recommendations. There will be an onus on all members to ensure that they have completed the consultation in time to meet that deadline; if they have not, they will miss the boat for that year. The onus will be on the member.
Convener, what you said about the criteria was helpful, because it allows us to acknowledge where we are going. We know that there is further work to be done once we have made the initial decisions. However, I want to clarify some of those initial decisions. The clerk's note poses several questions. Do we think that there should be a random process? Do we think that the decisions should be taken by the bureau or by a committee of back benchers? Do you want us to discuss that today and give you our views? I have some strong views on the issue and I am happy to talk about it now, if that will help the clerks to prepare a report. How do you want to deal with the issue?
We need to clarify that we are asking the right questions. We will then bring the options paper to a future meeting.
In that case, the only question that I have—other than the one that I raised with you earlier—is about the initial criteria laid down by the corporate body and the threshold. Are we confident that we have enough evidence on the matter to be able to say that we agree that the threshold is appropriate? Can we amend the threshold and criteria or do we need more evidence? I am not entirely confident that I am in a position to say whether the criteria laid down by the corporate body are robust or whether they require amendment. I am not sure that we have the evidence.
What evidence are you seeking and from whom?
Have we taken any evidence about whether the criteria are appropriate? For example, one of the criteria is that a member cannot progress a bill if the Executive is proposing to introduce a similar bill. Have we taken any evidence to check whether that criterion is sufficient?
When we heard from NEBU, every member had the opportunity to challenge its evidence. We also took evidence from members and from representatives of the political parties, who also had the opportunity to comment on those specifics.
Forgive me, convener, but many of the issues have become more relevant because of what the minister said about how the process will work.
We have a set of criteria that the corporate body uses, but NEBU does not take the decisions, so it does not use the criteria. The representatives of parties and bureau members do not use the criteria. Given that we have a set of criteria in place, surely we should take evidence on how they work from the people who are taking the decisions.
We have already taken such evidence. We do not have a set of criteria for any new process. We have taken all the evidence, so surely we should be making recommendations to the bureau on the basis of that evidence. We would expect our evidence and recommendations to influence any criteria that come before the Parliament for adoption.
I do not disagree with what you say, Cathie. We need a recommendation that says, "These criteria are good or bad or need amended." I accept that entirely. I have my own views on what the criteria should be, but that is a different matter from deciding whether we have secured sufficient evidence in what must be an evidence-based decision-making framework.
As well as the evidence from people who have come from all the different parts of the Parliament, we should be bringing to the table our experiences as members of the committee and members of the Parliament in considering how the system should work. I do not see whom else we could bring in to get more evidence. The suggestions that Mark Ballard made earlier are fair enough. Once we hear evidence from Barry Winetrobe and Professor Brown, we will be able to proceed to make decisions and recommendations.
Through the process I have come to the conclusion that the trigger point of 11 signatories is not robust enough. Where in the process we have that debate remains to be seen. I do not think that 11 signatories, which is not even a fifth of the number of members of Parliament, is a robust enough criterion to enable us to say, "This bill has attracted support across the Parliament." We need to consider that. Members would not even need cross-party support to get 11 members to sign up to their proposed bill; all the signatories could come from one political party, which would not reflect general support throughout the Parliament.
I suggest that we agree at this stage to have a further oral evidence session to which we will invite Barry Winetrobe and Alice Brown. If anyone has other suggestions of people who ought to be asked to give evidence, please let me or the clerk know within the next couple of days. Secondly, I suggest that, if members think we need to cover particular areas that we have not yet covered, they should make a specific request to me or the clerk so that we can produce a note for our next meeting. Obviously we do not need to make a decision about the report until the subsequent meeting, when we will have taken further evidence.
To short-cut the process, I suggest that we take evidence from the corporate body on the robustness of the criteria that were used in the previous session.
I understand the point that you are making, but my feeling is that we have already done that.
I sound a note of caution. Alice Brown's role as Scottish public services ombudsman may give rise to a conflict of interest. Do we have a fallback position? Do we have someone else in mind whom we can invite?
We will consider whether other members of the consultative steering group might be appropriate.
On Mark Ballard's point about the corporate body, I accept that, if we have taken evidence from a corporate body member about the threshold, what you say, convener, is fair enough. However, I do not recall hearing any specific evidence from a corporate body member on that issue. Given that the corporate body is the initiator of the threshold—it brought the criteria into being—surely it would be appropriate for us to understand why it did so and to ask whether it thinks that, in the light of experience, the criteria could be amended and the threshold raised to more than 11, as Karen Gillon suggested.
I want to suggest an alternative to try to find a way forward. I do not think that we need to hear from the SPCB. The clerks could examine how many members signed up to each of the bills that has been proposed and find out whether a general pattern is emerging whereby a bill that receives a large number of signatures manages to make its way on to the statute book whereas a bill that does not have so many gets stuck somewhere in the process. Perhaps we could get the data from the clerks instead of having to take evidence from the SPCB.
I have to say in response to Bruce Crawford and Mark Ballard that the non-Executive bills unit has already presented, and given evidence on, a paper that covered the criteria—members have had the opportunity to question the unit's representatives on that matter. We have also taken evidence from the clerk of the Parliament, Paul Grice, who spoke on behalf of the parliamentary authorities. I am concerned that we are simply saying that we have to ask someone to come back and give evidence because the committee failed to ask the right questions. That is not necessarily the way in which we should operate. In any case, I am still not clear about what evidence we would receive that we have not already received.
Neither Paul Grice nor NEBU had the task of assessing bills against the criteria.
With respect, NEBU assessed bills against the criteria. Bills were referred to the SPCB only when the unit was unable to determine the priority.
In that case, I would be interested in finding out why bills were referred to the SPCB and how it acted in those situations. No one from the SPCB has given evidence on that matter.
I do not think that we need to take oral evidence on that. Instead, it would be simpler to ask for written evidence on whether any bills in the previous session were referred to the SPCB to determine whether they met the criteria.
I would find that useful.
And we should ask whether we can see the full minutes.
If members have any specific issues that they think require to be covered, they should let the clerk know before the next meeting.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—