Agenda item 2 is an evidence session on our inquiry into the timescales and stages of bills. I welcome Margo MacDonald MSP, who is here in her capacity as former convener of the Subordinate Legislation Committee—she was the convener when the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was considered—and Alasdair Rankin, who is the clerk to that committee. I ask them to make any initial comments on their experience of subordinate legislation and the timetable for bills, after which we will ask questions.
I am here simply because the experience of the Subordinate Legislation Committee in the first session of Parliament was, of necessity, a bit sharper than the experience of the current committee because we had to deal with the banking up of proposed legislation towards the end of the first session. We wrote two or three "Disgusted from the Mound" letters to the Executive to explain that we did not think that the situation was fair on anyone. As the convener of the Subordinate Legislation Committee, I was particularly concerned that the people in the subordinate legislation team were working well above and beyond the call of duty—until the small hours of the morning—to try to get the work done. Had it not been for the quality of the people in the team, the situation could have affected the quality of the subordinate legislation.
I thank Margo MacDonald for those comments, which I am sure have provoked questions from members.
I am especially interested in Margo MacDonald's idea of requiring a memorandum to support the Subordinate Legislation Committee in its work. Minor and major pieces of secondary legislation are issued. Some of the major instruments are probably as comprehensive and detailed as some bills that we have passed.
I would like both those issues to be covered. Alasdair Rankin will be able to tell you more. When I was the Subordinate Legislation Committee's convener, some of the memorandums that the committee received were excellent. That depended not on timing, or a bill's importance, but on which department produced the memorandum. In the first session, there was a time when much training of draftsmen was taking place. Towards the end of that time, a definite improvement was shown in many respects. However, that was patchy. That is why I suggest a more formal arrangement.
I will clarify that a little. The memoranda that the Subordinate Legislation Committee receives on bills relate to subordinate legislation-making powers in bills. They are distinct from the Executive notes that the committee receives, which accompany statutory instruments.
Arguably, we receive a financial note anyway so we might not need to include that as a requirement in standing orders. However, we need an explanation of why the power is sought and some indication or hint as to when it might be used. That is when subordinate legislation can cross the line between being subordinate legislation and being just a fly way of ensuring that ministers get their own way.
Sylvia Jackson said in her letter to the committee that Executive memoranda are important. She also raised the point about when such documents might be produced. Is it important that they are produced when the bill is introduced or can they be produced later in the process?
If possible, they should be produced when the bill is introduced to allow as much time and flexibility as possible. Without giving that guidance to the Executive, we sometimes found that the memoranda were produced very late.
There are two points at which the committee would expect a memorandum on a bill from the Executive. The first is when the bill is introduced, but in practice it follows some time after the bill has been introduced. Once the bill has completed stage 2, the Executive produces a revised memorandum for the committee. As Sylvia Jackson's letter suggests, it is more critical for the committee that the memorandum arrives promptly at that point because there is usually much less time between the completion of stage 2 and stage 3 for the committee to consider any subordinate legislation provisions in the bill.
If it became a standing orders requirement that such memoranda were provided by the Executive, would that have implications for the timetable at stage 1 when the Subordinate Legislation Committee considered its business and made its report to the lead committee? Or would the existing time scales be adequate?
Much more time is usually available when the Subordinate Legislation Committee considers a bill at stage 1, if only because bills often present many policy considerations for the lead committee. The stage 1 timetable reflects that. Even though the Subordinate Legislation Committee looks at many bills, there is usually enough time to look at a bill satisfactorily within the overall stage 1 timetable for the lead committee.
There is a huge amount of reading, but there is more time to do that at stage 1.
It should be good practice that memoranda are produced early. Margo MacDonald suggests that we amend standing orders to say that a memorandum is one of the documents that must be introduced at stage 1 with everything else, and that we should impose a timescale at the end of stage 2, so that we get a document in time to allow us to conduct the necessary scrutiny before stage 3.
That is exactly it.
Margo MacDonald and I were involved with issues about the difficulty of timetabling on previous bills. How could we improve the timetabling problems? Do we need to extend the timetable or are there other ways to solve the problem?
Remember that political considerations come into the timetabling and prioritising of bills. That is not up to us. It is perhaps just a case of the Subordinate Legislation Committee—in particular—saying as early as possible, "Look, we are going to run into difficulties because we have to consider two or three major bills—we have missed the best bit, but it's all right."
I suppose the issue is whether, at the moment between stages 2 and 3, there is adequate time for the Subordinate Legislation Committee to do its job.
Sometimes. That is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question.
It would help committees a great deal if the revised memorandum that is produced after stage 2 were to arrive promptly once the revised bill is available. There can be a delay of a week or more—in some extreme cases much longer than that—between the bill as amended at stage 2 being printed and the memorandum emerging from the Executive.
The reason why there is not a complaint every time is that the situation varies.
This might be a silly question, but do most of the changes at stage 2 that increase the amount of subordinate legislation in the bill come from the Executive?
Yes.
Therefore, the Executive should know what the policy intention is when it lodges the amendment at stage 2. That means that producing the memorandum timeously should not be a major piece of work.
That is correct.
In some cases, amendments to the bill will not have significant subordinate legislation implications and, in other cases, there will be significant new or changed subordinate legislation processes. Should there be a two-track approach, with one track involving the Subordinate Legislation Committee saying that the bill has not changed significantly at stage 2 and the other involving the committee saying that the bill must be examined again because there have been significant changes? In effect, should the Subordinate Legislation Committee be able to call in a bill after stage 2 for further examination if it has changed significantly?
That is a belt, braces and clothes pegs approach. If there are no changes, the bill will simply not be referred to the committee. What must be established is the principle that the committee should be given time for consideration and should be given full information.
Perhaps I was not clear enough. Do you think that the standing orders should say that more time should be given between stages 2 and 3 to allow the Subordinate Legislation Committee to re-examine the bill, which it does presently when there have been major changes? Alternatively, do you think that the standing orders should have only one timescale between stages 2 and 3 irrespective of whether the subordinate legislation situation has changed?
If the subordinate legislation situation does not change, the bill will not come back to the committee. If changes are inserted and need to be addressed and scrutinised, time must be allowed for that to happen.
I apologise, Margo. I might not be making myself sufficiently clear. At present, the standing orders set out a minimum time between stages 2 and 3. Do you think that that minimum time should apply to all bills or, in circumstances in which the Subordinate Legislation Committee has to re-examine the bill because of significant changes, should additional time be available?
I would rather that Alasdair Rankin answered your question. I do not think that I completely understand what you are saying.
I apologise.
No, I am sure that it is my fault.
I am sure that the Subordinate Legislation Committee would be willing to consider your suggestion, convener.
You are suggesting that, if the memorandum is presented in the correct timescale, there is adequate time for you to consider the subordinate legislation between stages 2 and 3. It would be helpful if you could go through your records and find examples of good practice and bad practice. That would give us a better idea of what you are talking about.
The thing is, if you write something into the standing orders, it usually has to be applied in all situations. That is why I would only want certain things to go straight into the standing orders.
Forgive me for being confused, but Alasdair Rankin's comments appear to contradict Sylvia Jackson's note about the process between stages 2 and 3. She says:
The problem arises when the Subordinate Legislation Committee receives the memorandum late. Sometimes, the committee loses maybe one or two opportunities to look at the bill while waiting for the memorandum to arrive. That foreshortens the time for consideration. Prompt arrival of the memorandum would remove many problems, even at busy times.
That is very helpful.
That is a weak spot. We need a mechanism that allows us to scrutinise manuscript amendments at stage 3, which at the moment go through on the nod. I am speaking off the top of my head, but I think that during the passage of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, a couple of major amendments on access were lodged the night before the stage 3 consideration. Those amendments were central to the bill and should have been stringently examined by the Subordinate Legislation Committee. However, there was no opportunity for it to do a proper job. All I am saying is that there must be some mechanism to tighten up the potential loophole. Obviously, I am not referring to this warm, cuddly and wonderful Executive; however, at some point, we might get a nasty Executive that would seek to exploit that sort of loophole.
Did that situation arise because amendments were lodged at the very last minute or because a manuscript amendment was lodged after the normal deadline?
No, it was not a manuscript amendment. We got to know about these amendments the night before, or something.
At stage 2, a vote in the lead committee removed two of the bill's major subordinate legislation-making powers. After that, when I was in touch with the Executive about a memorandum, its officials said that as they were not proposing to change the subordinate legislation provisions they would not produce a memorandum. Perhaps we should have been more diligent in scouring the Business Bulletins, but we found out quite late in the day that the Executive had lodged stage 3 amendments that sought to reinsert the two major provisions that had been deleted at stage 2. At stage 1, the Subordinate Legislation Committee had expressed strong reservations about the provisions in question and said that it wanted more opportunity to discuss them.
It was a "face of the bill" thing. Because the provisions in question were so fundamental, we had to ask whether they should have been dealt with in subordinate legislation.
If members have no other questions, I thank Margo MacDonald and Alasdair Rankin for attending the meeting and giving useful evidence to the committee. We will take it into account when we consider our report.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I welcome Pauline McNeill, who is here to give us evidence for our inquiry into the timescales and stages of bills. She was convener of the Justice 2 Committee when it considered the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill; I am pleased that she has come along to the committee to tell us about her experience of that. I offer her the opportunity to make introductory comments on the timetabling of that bill, as she saw it as convener.
It is strange to be on this side of the committee table for a change. I apologise for my lateness. It was not my fault, but ScotRail's.
Thank you. I thought that it would be helpful if we examined the Justice 2 Committee's experience of the various stages of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill in order, so that we do not jump backwards and forwards too much. We will consider stage 1 first. The previous Justice 2 Committee was the lead committee on the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, to which a number of secondary committees had to report. Was the timescale sufficient to allow the secondary committees to report to the Justice 2 Committee and to allow the Justice 2 Committee to take full account of their views in drawing up its report?
The Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was a large bill. As you probably know, it was the second largest bill that Parliament passed in its first session, with three parts and 97 sections. Four committees fed into the lead committee, which was the previous Justice 2 Committee. We certainly managed. I would not say that the timescale had a detrimental effect; we simply had to work extremely hard. The note that has been prepared for the committee explains the work that was done to meet the deadlines.
I want to follow that up, but not necessarily in relation to the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. The justice committees are often secondary committees to other committees. My experience as a convener was that if the committee had to deal with only one bill we focused on it and could work to a pretty tight timescale because it was the only thing we were dealing with. The pressure came when we received secondary reports from committees that had huge timescale pressures, because they had many other priorities.
That is one of the downsides of trying to work to an onerous timescale, as we did with the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. We were dealing with other legislation, consultations, statutory instruments and a petition on reducing the timescale of civil cases for asbestos victims. The way we dealt with that was that the deputy convener and convener—Bill Aitken and I—had at least one additional meeting a week to push forward work that the committee could not deal with, although it was already meeting twice weekly.
We heard from other witnesses that improved pre-legislative scrutiny might help the process because it might mean that committees would not have to revisit evidence. Would that have helped in the situation you were in when you had to call a lot of witnesses in order to compile a great deal of stage 1 reports?
The Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was predominant in the press. There was a consultation that we were not involved in and the bill that emerged was substantially different from the draft. Even if we had been involved with the consultation, we would still have had to go through the same scrutiny. The answer to your question would depend on the extent to which a bill had changed. The call for written evidence on the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill lasted only three and a half weeks because there had been some pre-legislative scrutiny and the witnesses that we called got a chance to say what they would have said anyway during the consultation. Perhaps the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill is not the greatest example, because it changed so much.
Your submission talks about there not being enough time to consider a bill if changes are made after pre-legislative scrutiny. You say:
It is possible to ask the Parliamentary Bureau for more time, as we have done. Part way through consideration of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, we thought that we might need more time. We asked the bureau for an extra week and our request was granted. That is not uncommon. The Executive presented the Justice 1 Committee with a timetable for the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Bill and the committee considered what work it had to do. We asked for an extra week for consideration of that bill and that request was granted. It is possible to get extra time without there being provision in standing orders.
In the case of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, there was only a four-day gap between publication of the stage 1 report and the debate on the general principles. Is that adequate or should standing orders allow for a minimum period between publication of the report and the debate in the chamber?
That suggestion should be considered. Four days might be fine for members who draw up a report because they know, or should know, what is in it. However, for other interested members who are awaiting publication of the report, four days is not a long time, particularly if they want to take part in the debate.
Obviously, with the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, there was a lengthy gap between completion of stage 1 and the start of stage 2, but that is not always the case. A few moments ago you said that we should consider the time between stages. Should standing orders include provision for more time between stages 1 and 2, or is the present practice reasonably flexible?
My major concern is about stage 2. My experience has been that conveners are also required to sign off groupings of amendments; standing orders state that. If the convener has a committee meeting on Tuesday afternoon and the deadline is the following Friday, the convener will, if he or she follows the Business Bulletin each day and cuts and pastes all the amendments, have a complete list at the end of the day on the Friday. The convener is expected to sign off groupings on the Monday before a meeting on the Tuesday.
The daily lists that are published for each bill are directly accessible on the website. Members should be able at least to see what is on the daily list, although the marshalled list is not available—
Currently, if we miss a day, we have to go back, which is time consuming.
I appreciate that.
I am suggesting that someone could collect all the amendments together.
Perhaps we need to consider how the information is made available on the website. The lists of amendments are there, so it would theoretically be possible to produce a single list from all the daily lists, which would be available at the touch of a button. That might be relatively straightforward.
Yes.
Pauline McNeill has made valid and interesting points.
In general, the Executive sticks to its practice, so that other members can ascertain the Executive's intentions and lodge their own amendments. That is a good thing.
Would you set a timetable in which the deadline for lodging Executive amendments—
The whole thing would have to be moved back—
Should we say, for example, that the Executive must lodge its amendments seven days before the meeting and that members must lodge their amendments five days before the meeting?
If a committee meets on a Tuesday afternoon, the deadline for lodging amendments should be the Thursday before the meeting, to give members 48 hours in which to consider the amendments. If the marshalled list and the groupings are to be available, the deadline might have to be the Wednesday before the meeting.
Are you suggesting that if a committee meets on a Tuesday, the marshalled list and groupings should be available on the Friday before that?
Yes. That would allow members to consider the amendments on the Friday and the Monday before the meeting. However, that is the minimum amount of time that should be allowed and I would welcome more time than that. I realise that there would be practical arrangements in relation to whether committees could consider stage 2 amendments every week.
If amendments were considered only on consecutive weeks, what impact would that have on a committee such as the Justice 1 Committee? That might be the ideal situation, but what impact would it have?
Do you mean if the deadline were moved back 48 hours?
I thought that your suggestion was that committees should consider amendments not every week but every other week.
My point was that if the deadline were moved back too far, committees would not be able to consider amendments every week. That would make things difficult because it would drag out the timetable for stage 2 in a way that would probably be impracticable. At the moment, we consider amendments pretty much every week. For the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, we met twice a week on consecutive days.
Others have given evidence on what should happen when a committee meets to consider amendments to a bill on two separate days in the same week. The experience of your committee is a perfect example of that. People have suggested that such meetings should be adjourned and reconvened so that, instead of having two different sets of amendments and marshalled list, members could follow the same amendments on the same marshalled list. What is your opinion of that?
I do not understand what you mean.
At the moment, if a committee has two separate meetings, it will have two separate deadlines for submission of amendments and it will have two separate marshalled lists. It has been suggested that, instead, a committee should have one meeting, which could be adjourned, then reconvened on the following day or the day after.
It should be possible to anticipate that. As convener, you have to tell other members what point you expect the committee will reach; you can then go no further than that point. You can anticipate how far you will reach, so all the deadlines for the two days on which the committee met would remain the same.
If a committee is considering amendments on three occasions and twice in the one week, does not the fact that there are separate lodging deadlines for different days add to the confusion of the process? Does that not make it more difficult for members and other interested parties from outside to follow what is happening?
If you are suggesting that there should be just one lodging deadline for each week, I would not have a problem with that.
When you were convener of the previous Justice 2 Committee, the point was put to me that too much time was allowed during evidence taking for politicians to make statements rather than ask questions of witnesses. Will you comment on that?
No. What has that got to do with bill timescales?
That is not a matter for this inquiry, Jamie.
But it takes up time.
The way in which committees conduct their business is not the subject of our inquiry. Such matters must be determined by the members of the committees when they are considering evidence.
I have a question and a comment for Pauline McNeill. The Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was fairly controversial in parts and the debates involved two clearly opposing sides. Would consensus have been reached by altering the timescale within which amendments had to be lodged, or were the issues such that members simply had to decide on the amendments based on the evidence that they had heard? Would members have made the same decisions regardless of the timescale for lodging amendments? In essence, were the decisions political rather than based on timescales?
There is no doubt that that bill was controversial. As I said, members worked hard to ensure that everybody got their say and that everything was said. The committee went faithfully through two lever-arch folders of written evidence.
I do not know whether this is an appropriate point at which to raise taking evidence at stage 2 on amendments that make significant changes to bills. Do you have the power as a convener to do that already? What changes would be required to allow you to take additional evidence on amendments?
At stage 2?
Yes.
There is nothing to prevent a committee from taking evidence at stage 2. Donald Gorrie lodged an amendment on sectarianism to the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill. The Justice 2 Committee had not considered that issue at stage 1, but we felt that it was so important that we took evidence on it at stage 2. We stopped the process, took the evidence and allowed some time before going back to stage 2. There is nothing to stop a committee doing that—it is just that generally they do not.
Are you just looking for the bureau to give more time to committees when they need to consider evidence? What procedural changes would you like to see?
There should be a minimum time for submission of written evidence. For stage 1, the standard period is about eight weeks, or six weeks for a shorter bill, which is about right, but the period should never be shorter than that. There should be—there generally has been—some flexibility on the part of the bureau in setting timescales for bills. Following examination by the committee of what it thinks it can do, there should be negotiations between the committee and the bureau. That flexibility should remain throughout the process. Our experience is that the bureau has been pretty flexible when we have asked for an extension and justified our case.
The Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was particularly complex. Did the committee feel that it had sufficient time to reflect on what had happened at stage 2 before going into stage 3, or did it feel that it should have had more time to think again and have a look at the bill as a whole? A committee comes to the end of the stage 2 process, and suddenly the bill disappears. Should the committee have the chance to see whether there are any minor issues from stage 2 that it might want to reflect on before stage 3?
Do you mean that, if there are issues that arise at stage 2, there should be some point between stage 2 and stage 3 at which the committee could reflect on what has just happened?
Yes.
That would be useful. However, a note of the changes would have to be prepared to allow the committee to see the effect of amendments. That would certainly assist in reflecting on the bill.
Is it your experience that the explanatory notes that are provided at the back of the chamber for members can bear little resemblance to the bill that they are debating at stage 3?
The explanatory notes and policy memorandum for a bill at stage 1 do not change after the bill has been amended. They are exactly the same. If a whole section is removed from the bill, or the meaning of a section is changed, there are no notes to advise members what has been done; the only notes that are available are the notes that the committee had at stage 2. I presume that there is a resource issue, but it seems to me that, if things were being done properly, a note would be prepared after stage 2 to explain the effect of, for example, a new section. I know that, in the bill as amended at stage 2, the changes can be identified because they are marked by lines, but I think that there should be a note to say that that is the effect of a certain amendment.
Ministers sometimes say during stage 2 debates that they will come back to the committee prior to stage 3. How is that done? Is there good practice in that regard, or is the process haphazard? In the Environment and Rural Development Committee, we have followed a useful process in which the Deputy Minister for Environment and Rural Development goes through the bill, point by point, explaining what change has been made, what he has done and his reasons for making that decision. That has been useful in tracking what the issue is, what the minister is doing and why, and his reasons for not doing what he has been asked to do. Do you have such a process for the Justice 1 Committee, or do you think that it would be useful to adopt such a procedure?
We always have a good dialogue with ministers about their intentions. There are probably five or six official letters attached to any report, which explain exactly what ministers' thinking is on a given amendment. Committee members will have that information, but anybody else who wants to see what has happened will not have it unless they have copies of the ministerial letters. However, that covers only what the Executive does; it does not cover changes that are made by anyone else.
If the Executive—or the member in charge of the bill, in the case of non-Executive legislation—were required to provide revised explanatory notes for stage 3, which would seem to be good practice, how would it deal with an amendment that it had not wanted to be agreed to but which had been agreed to at stage 2? For example, a non-Executive amendment with which the Executive did not agree might be agreed to. How could the Executive produce an explanatory note to explain the cause and effect of such an amendment without misrepresenting the amendment in its own interests? Obviously, I am not suggesting that the Executive would do that.
The person who had lodged the amendment could provide a note of what the amendment was intended to achieve.
But how could the Executive, or the member in charge of the bill, put into an explanatory note for which they were responsible the effect of an amendment for which they had not been responsible?
I see—I thought that the Scottish Parliament information centre drew up the explanatory notes.
No—the member in charge of the bill is responsible for the accompanying documents.
Surely the onus is on the Executive to provide an honest assessment of the bill. Therefore, the Executive has an obligation to report on what has been done at stage 2, regardless of whether it agrees with it. The Executive will have to lodge stage 3 amendments to change the stage 2 amendments with which it did not agree, but the explanatory notes should explain the bill as it stands, and not as the Executive would like to see it. Otherwise, what is the point of having explanatory notes? The Executive should be obliged to act on the will of the Parliament—at that point, the will of the committee—and to provide an explanatory note based on the committee's decision, rather than on what the Executive wishes that the committee had done.
What you are suggesting would mean that any amendment—regardless of whether it was lodged by a back-bench member or by the Executive—would require to be accompanied by a note that explained its effect. You suggest that, at stage 2, the explanatory notes that accompany the bill should be updated, and that the people who take responsibility for updating those notes should be from the Scottish Executive, if it is an Executive bill, or the member in charge, if it is a member's bill.
Yes, that is right.
We may have drifted slightly from the scope of our inquiry, but that was an interesting discussion in any event.
The time was needed. Given the three areas that the bill covered, it was almost like considering three separate bills that had been rolled into one. The note that has been prepared for the committee implies that, even though so much time had been allowed, speeches were cut to quite short lengths. Most members' experience of the stage 3 process has involved running out of time. I was a wee bit concerned about members having only 90 seconds, for example, to speak to their amendments. How could they possibly explain to Parliament, in 90 seconds, the amendment that they were moving? Perhaps we just need to get better at anticipating the length of time that we will need for each group of amendments.
Were you consulted about the proposed timetable for stage 3 and about what you thought the pressure points would be, as far as your role as committee convener was concerned?
No. Conveners are not consulted about that.
Do you think that that would be a useful addition to the process?
As convener, I am not consulted. It might be that the committee clerks are consulted, but I do not know.
I am flabbergasted by that. I did not know that.
I did.
My understanding is that most of the consultation takes place with the business managers—and presumably with the clerks. It would seem sensible for the relevant committee convener to be involved in that process, as they have a better understanding of the bill than others.
There should be more flexibility. Members who have an interest in the bill sometimes do not get an opportunity to say anything until stage 3, but when we are running out of time, priority to speak is given, rightly, to members who have been involved during the earlier stages. Members who did not have a chance to say anything until stage 3 sometimes do not get to say even a few words. If the Presiding Officer had flexibility, he could incorporate such members in the usual way—members would express their interest in a section of the debate so that the Presiding Officer would have an understanding of the time that would be needed.
How can we do that without extending the debates? In my experience, when time has been tight on certain issues, it has been tight throughout stage 3 and we have run out of time. For good practical reasons, we have a convention whereby we cannot extend the parliamentary day without previous agreement. From your experience, is there a need for more time for stage 3 scrutiny of bills such as the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill so that members have adequate time to put forward their views, have a discussion and make a decision? If there is not enough time, the members of the lead committee simply regurgitate what they said at stage 2, which means that we run out of time before other members get involved in the debate.
I suppose that there is a trade-off. If more members were to speak during stage 3, that would add time to the process; we are concerned about that possibility because it would mean that debates would go past the 5 o'clock deadline, for which we would have to make provision. As you say, perhaps members of the lead committee do not need to speak on every group of amendments, although it would be difficult to ask them not to speak. If the process were to change for the better, the culture might begin to change and members might, if possible, begin to take more part in the earlier stages of bills.
Would it be feasible to discuss a bill, if necessary, on a Wednesday and Thursday and on the following Wednesday, but to have a lodging deadline that related to the first Wednesday? Members would have to lodge amendments by that day, but amendments could be considered until 5 o'clock on the second Wednesday. In essence, we would just continue until we adjourned.
In principle, I do not see how having days in between the parts of a debate would be detrimental to it. However, the Executive might be concerned about that suggestion because it would eat into parliamentary time. In some cases, the idea might be appropriate.
Would it be helpful if the deadline for lodging amendments at stage 3 was extended so that the marshalled lists and the groupings could be published earlier? That would allow members more time to consider in which parts of the debate they wished to participate before the timetable was drawn up. At the moment, most members do not see the marshalled list, the groupings or the timings until the morning of the debate.
The same rules should apply at stage 3 as apply at stage 2, to give members a fair opportunity to see the marshalled list and the groupings.
I am sorry to rewind a bit, but I have been thinking about the issue of consultation on timings before stage 3. My impression is that in the first session, the Parliament often got the timings for stage 3 debates badly wrong. The situation has improved, although there are many bills still to be considered so we will find out how much better it is. I found the consultation process to be useful because it provided the opportunity to effect change and it helped my understanding of how much time should be laid aside. I understand why committee conveners are not asked about the timings—technically they are not part of the process at stage 3—but I cannot understand why there is not an informal process that would give the conveners input at that stage. Such a process would allow the timings to be tweaked and improved.
As a convener, I would certainly be content to have an input on the timing of stage 3. At the moment, conveners are not asked to make any input. I am certain that, if I were to have some input, I could identify groupings in which there was likely to be greater interest. Like most members, I could have told you that, when we were considering the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill, it was pretty obvious that there was going to be more interest in trial in the absence of the accused. I think that that was allowed for, but there might have been one or two more technical areas on which there was more debate than expected; I might have been able to anticipate that. Our having an input would add to the process.
I can think of an example of that from last week, when we were considering the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Bill at stage 3—the debate on talons and beaks versus soft, fluffy pigeons. If politicians had been more involved in the decision-making framework, they might have allowed a bit more time for that debate. It was obvious that many members who wanted to speak were not able to do so. That is a comment rather than a question.
I want to follow up on that. One of the factors involved is the timescale for those consultations. If committee conveners were to be involved as well, that timetable would have to be pushed out, to allow the system to function. That is another statement.
Are there any more questions for Pauline McNeill?
Another witness to the committee has suggested that, to give members a greater opportunity to participate in stage 3 debates, we could consider extending the parliamentary day on a Wednesday by an hour or two, when that was deemed necessary. Do you have any views on that in the light of Karen Gillon's point about the Parliament's family-friendly aspect? Should we extend proceedings although that would mean giving up some of that family friendliness?
I think that such extensions should be avoided, where possible. If we are able to run our Parliament such that decision time remains at 5 o'clock, we should do so. However, there have been occasions on which that has not—and could not have—happened. We have probably got the balance right.
Do you think that holding the debate on the motion to pass the bill and the consideration of amendments at stage 3 on separate days would have any positive advantages? Should there be a gap between the two processes—for example, to consider whether any of the amendments that have been agreed to at stage 3 have unforeseen consequences?
I cannot think of any advantages because, if we discovered during the stage 3 debate that there was some terrible flaw in the bill, it would not necessarily be possible to put that right.
Under standing orders, the member in charge of a bill can request that part of the bill be referred back to the lead committee. The question is whether there would be sufficient time in the process of considering the stage 3 amendments to spot whether any issue had arisen from them that might require the member in charge of the bill to exercise the power in standing orders to refer part of the bill back to the lead committee.
In that case, I suppose that there would be merit in your suggestion.
That proposal is probably more pertinent to a non-Executive bill than it is to an Executive bill. I am convinced that with an Executive bill, the Executive would know the purpose, intention and ramifications of any amendment and would know that, if a non-Executive amendment were agreed to, it would be necessary to refer back a particular section of the bill. It would do that automatically.
We have had a submission from another witness, saying that their experience of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was that there was some very negative questioning from some members and that some witnesses seemed to be given carte blanche to say whatever MSPs wanted to hear. Do you have any comment on that?
It does not strike me that that issue is relevant to the timescale.
It is—the witness says that that was not the best use of time and that the approach took up time that could have been better used for direct questioning.
Throughout the process of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, in which you took part, I as convener was aware of the tensions. However, as far as I am concerned, I ensured that I conducted the meetings properly and that everybody got their say. If anybody made a statement, I ensured that you in particular got your chance to reply to it.
Ought there to be any guidelines about how MSPs question witnesses?
We are moving well out of the scope of the inquiry.
I am sorry, but the matter was raised in one of the papers.
I appreciate that, but that does not mean that it is within the scope of the inquiry, which is about timescale and timetables.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
The next panel of witnesses comprises Dave Morris, director of the Ramblers Association Scotland; Dr Maurice Hankey, the director general of the Scottish Rural Property and Business Association, which was formerly the Scottish Landowners Federation; and John Mackay, who was formerly the national strategy manager for Scottish Natural Heritage. All the panel members were involved in the passage of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill.
Thank you, convener. I have just one point to make. The Ramblers Association Scotland was very well geared up to respond to the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. We had some experience of the National Parks (Scotland) Bill and considered that we had been pretty ineffective in influencing its progress. By the time that we came to the land reform legislation, we ensured that we were geared up for the process. For more than two years, we employed a staff member whose job was more or less entirely focused on the bill. That meant that we were able to operate efficiently in making responses to amendments and getting briefings to members of the Parliament. I make that point as I think that those circumstances did not apply in quite a few other organisations that wanted to respond to the process.
I should explain that I recently retired from Scottish Natural Heritage. However, because I was seen to have the best bit of the corporate memory of the process, I was asked to come to the committee on behalf of the organisation.
I simply remind the committee that, although Dave Morris dealt only with the access aspect of the bill, our organisation dealt with all three aspects, which put a heavy burden on us.
Thank you. We have found it helpful in our consideration of the evidence to consider the process stage by stage. That allows us to try to focus on the issues that arose at the pre-legislative stage and stage 1 and between stages 2 and 3. I propose to do that again today.
Previously, I have asked questions about whether the process at stage 1 could be speeded up a bit if the lead committee became involved in the pre-legislative scrutiny stage, which the Executive is trying to improve in any case. In your experience of giving evidence at the pre-legislative stage and at stage 1, did you find that you were having to make the same points time and again or was the evidence that you were giving at stage 1 different from that which you gave at the pre-legislative scrutiny stage?
No, there was not much duplication. From our point of view, the pre-legislative process was incredibly important. When the draft bill was published in February 2001, we were very unhappy. We felt that the Executive had sabotaged many of the agreements that had been reached between the landowning and outdoor recreation interests through the access forum. Initially, there had been a strong consensus, but that broke down when we saw the draft bill.
To be fair, the minister was making more general points about the scrutiny of legislation. You are saying that the bill changed quite a lot between pre-legislative scrutiny and stage 1. There seems to have been an effective consultation. Although I take your point that nobody wants a committee to be leaned on, you will find that the committees are very good at not being leaned on. If the committee had been involved earlier in the process, there might not have been the need for the same evidence to be given again at stage 1.
Of the two evidence sessions that SNH attended at stage 1, the second was the more useful and effective. The committee had identified an issue on which it wanted to probe the witnesses for their perceptions—in that case, on the law of access. SNH found itself on the other side of the debate. Nevertheless, the proper role of the Finance Committee inquiry is to have witnesses illuminate issues rather than restate evidence that they have already presented in one way or another in writing.
In my submission, I make the remark, which John Mackay has repeated, that the process leading up to the publication of the draft bill was stop-go. At one stage, the access forum was under huge pressure to get something done by a certain date because of the timetable that the Executive had set. Everything was going hell for leather and the deadline was met, but then nothing seemed to happen for an awfully long time afterwards. Questions were asked about whether the process needed to be timetabled as rigidly as it had been at that stage.
My question relates to timing. Mr Morris, in your submission you say that the outdoor access code "will define ‘responsible' access". Would things have been speeded up if responsible access had been defined before part 1 of the bill was introduced?
No. Before the beginning of the legislative process, I was involved in discussions about revising the countryside code, which SNH was considering. It would have been difficult to do it at that stage, because we needed to be informed by the legislative process. The bill, which is now an act, needed to be in place so that we could see all the statutory details. From that, people can build up the content of the outdoor access code, as is now happening. The code is currently with ministers, but from discussions that we have had with SNH and officials we think that the content is pretty satisfactory—it is 90 or 95 per cent right. The outstanding problem is the difficulties that we are having with Network Rail and the issue of how people cross railway lines. However, that is not central to the legislative process.
I take a different line on that issue. The legislation should have started from the premise of an understanding of what constitutes reasonableness. It was a fault in the process that the draft of the outdoor access code by SNH that we were awaiting appeared only two days before we were asked to give evidence to the Justice 2 Committee.
SNH has provided an interesting piece of evidence on stage 1. In paragraph 4 of your submission you say:
It might have. We cannot be certain that we have made the right call, because matters are handled in only one way and we are not sure what the alternative might be. It was irritating that we lost momentum in some respects, but the process provided a lot of space for debate about the issues, which is important, and it worked out okay in the end. I think that it might also have worked if we had taken the other approach that I have suggested. I cannot predict what the delays might have been, but I expect that to a large extent they would have arisen from pressure on officials and the committees.
There was pressure on draftsmen. The ability of the drafting team to advance all three parts of the bill in tandem was a constraint on progress.
Can we go further and say that it caused wicked issues that might otherwise have been avoided to enter the system?
I want to answer yes, but I cannot give an example.
If you had said yes, that would have been my next question. I ask you to think about the question. It might help us to reach conclusions if later you could provide us with examples of wicked issues that arose because there was not enough time.
I will ask about the stage 1 process generally, rather than just for the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. It is for committees to determine from whom to take oral evidence but, when a committee issues a call for evidence, is sufficient time available for organisations that may have an interest in the legislation to submit written evidence? If not, should standing orders or guidance stipulate a minimum time for consultation?
We were not concerned about that part of the process. We were quite satisfied with it.
The organisations at the centre of the debate were well aware of the process and the timings, so they had no problem. However, organisations on the fringe may not quite have caught up on what was happening. If there were problems at that stage, that might have been simply because of the sheer volume of evidence that the committee received as a result of its call for evidence.
Indeed. There was a lot of pre-legislative consultation on the bill, so anyone who might have had an interest in it may already have been aware of it. However, if there had not been that level of pre-legislative consultation, a longer period might have been needed for people to submit evidence.
That is true. The extent to which a bill might have changed by the time it suddenly appears should be considered. We heard from the previous witness that the bill changed quite significantly at the draft stage. Moreover, some elements in the bill changed quite significantly at the final stage, which meant that people had to stop and think and not simply assume that they knew what was in the bill. It had to be revisited.
Obviously, there was quite a lengthy gap between the conclusion of stage 1 and the start of stage 2 with the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. Before we move on, is there, in your experience—perhaps with other pieces of legislation—sufficient time in general between the conclusion of stage 1 and the start of stage 2?
That depends on whether one sees Christmas as getting in the way. There was a major break with that bill, but Christmas was a big part of that interval.
Dave Morris's submission mentions site visits, but I am slightly confused about the point that he is trying to make. I thought that site visits should be for members and not for lobbying by witnesses. I believe that his suggestion could devalue site visits, which could become political scoring grounds. If someone is trying to get a perspective, there can be more than one site visit, but I would be reluctant to have witnesses going on site visits.
Are we talking about stage 2?
No, I am talking about stage 1.
Evidence was given to the Rural Development Committee at an afternoon session after the committee had been on a site visit in the morning. I was conscious that questions were likely to be raised in the afternoon session that related to what people had seen in the morning and therefore had a bit of a tussle with the clerk about the matter. In the end, it was agreed that the witnesses should be allowed to be present in the morning to see what was to be seen. That was extremely useful, particularly as we were shown how a farmer was managing access in a farmyard in which there was a diversionary path.
How can a balance be achieved between site visits and evidence sessions? The difference between a site visit and an evidence session is that the evidence from an evidence session will be in the public domain and the public will be able to see what has been said, whereas they will not be able to see what has been said on a site visit. If people are having a dialogue, it is important to have that in public session rather than in an informal setting.
From our perspective, the difficulty was that, although the Rural Development Committee had decided to go on a site visit, it was not going to look at locations where outdoor recreation organisations had access problems—it was primarily going to look at the problems that two farmers faced, which we thought was biased to a degree. It was inevitable that, although what the farmers said would not be in the public domain, it would significantly influence committee members who were on the visit. The site visit took place over three or so hours, so I do not think that the process would have been greatly disrupted if I, or the other two or three witnesses who were there, had been able to comment here or there. There would have been no question of our dominating or interfering with the process; we would just have been able to make one or two points of useful clarification.
That issue is not really one for this inquiry—we have aired it, but it is up to committees how they consider their evidence. Our inquiry is about timetabling, so I would like to move us on to discuss the stage 2 process.
I was at that Aberfoyle meeting, convener, and I would have liked to make some comments on it. However, I understand your ruling and will move on.
I support Pauline McNeill's view that Thursday afternoon should be the target date. What I found most difficult during consideration of the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Bill and other bills is that, unless one has been cutting and pasting during the week and trying to keep up, Monday morning at 10 o'clock is really the first opportunity to see what is on the agenda for the following afternoon. That makes a mockery of good legislative process. I appreciate that bringing things too far forward can mean getting into another week's processes. However, the Thursday afternoon deadline would be useful. If the marshalled list came out on Friday morning, people would at least have the weekend to digest what the amendments mean. I support the idea that amendments should have at least a paragraph of explanation of what they seek to do. Sometimes we sit and stare and wonder where amendments are leading.
Five days is the time that I have in my head. If a committee meets on a Wednesday, all amendments for the meeting should be lodged by the previous Thursday evening. We need a bit of a gap—say 24 hours—after the committee meeting, because some amendments may take account of discussion at the meeting. If all amendments are in front of us by the Thursday evening, we would then have Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. We would plan to get all our briefings in to MSPs and their researchers by first thing on Tuesday morning, before the debate on the Wednesday.
That works for a Wednesday committee meeting; it does not work for a Tuesday committee meeting. That is the pinch.
If a committee meets on a Tuesday, Wednesday night would be the deadline.
The convention is that the Executive attempts to lodge its amendments for stage 2 five days in advance, but the actual deadline is two days in advance. Allowing for the fact that—as has been mentioned—some members will want to see whether the Executive has lodged an amendment before they lodge their own amendments, is it reasonable for the deadline for amendments to be three days in advance rather than the present two? That will tighten up the timetable while allowing the Executive to operate without having to lodge amendments for the following week before the previous week's meeting has been held.
That does not seem unreasonable. As a minor point, I endorse what Pauline McNeill said about support in having a running list of amendments.
That is another way to help.
Around the nation, lots of people are doing the same thing, especially before stage 2 and stage 3, and they run the risk of missing something or making small errors.
I support the point about the need for notes to go with the amendments. I can think of an Executive amendment that was lodged at stage 3 to remove the word "unsown" from a reference to unsown field margins. In part, that was because photographs had been shown to the minister to explain the difficulties with access along field margins. However, the rest of the world did not realise the significance of the amendment because there was no explanation of it.
I agree with the Ramblers Association on that.
Additional notes are more of an issue for outside agencies. I have seen the notes that accompany the brief when ministers speak to amendments and I am sure that there would be no problem with getting a five-line explanation of what the amendment is about. That might be an issue for outside bodies such as yours, but you are good at explaining the policy intent behind amendments. You might want to consider what the measure would mean for you.
It would also be helpful in later interpretation. At stage 3 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, the Executive lodged an amendment to widen access rights for educational purposes. That proposal was subject to a major change by other amendments to make the wording more open, but those amendments were not spoken to for even the 90 seconds allowed. We therefore have only the words that are in front of us. We do not have any clues in the Official Report to indicate why the amendment was lodged or the reason for the policy shift.
Is the gap between stage 2 and stage 3 sufficient for you to consider what has happened at stage 2 and what amendments you want to lodge at stage 3, or do you see a need for changes?
The gap was fine on that occasion.
There was no problem.
The timetable for amendments at stage 3 is similar to that at stage 2. Do you think that changes are required to extend the lodging deadlines for amendments?
Yes. The same points apply. In support of Maurice Hankey, I add that we would like to see the groupings, because watching the proceedings from the gallery without them can be incredibly confusing.
They are published, but not in advance. For example, they are not included in the Business Bulletin.
Another issue is the order in which the Presiding Officer deals with the amendments. When you sit in the gallery, you try to follow a process that is meant to be transparent, but it does not work.
It can be confusing for us, too.
God knows how the people up in the gallery manage. Every day, there are people there in droves watching what is going on. As a member, I would find it useful if we published a user-friendly document that listed the groupings and the relevant amendments below each group. That might encourage people to become involved. Such a document might be more voluminous than the existing groupings paper, but it would bring together the two documents that we have at the moment. Was that your point?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I wondered about that as well. In addition to the marshalled list—which is required for the purposes of voting—we could have a grouped list that would show all the amendments in each group. That would be useful when we were dealing with complicated bills, as it would save trying to find an amendment 20 pages on from the others. We should perhaps consider that suggestion.
The marshalled list shows all the amendments.
The marshalled list contains the amendments in the order in which they would appear in the bill, but the amendments are not necessarily grouped in that way. It can be difficult to find a particular amendment in the marshalled list because the amendments are not listed in numerical order or in the order in which they appear in the groupings.
If you are sitting in the gallery you cannot follow the debate when the group involves 12 amendments, as sometimes happens. I will not even pretend that we were able to follow it.
Members may not have taken that important point on board. The information that we receive is not necessarily helpful for those who are sitting in the gallery. We need to consider that.
Members do not find it easy to follow things either.
I am not saying that they do, but we need to ensure that clear information is published in advance of a debate.
People would have more confidence in the process if it were transparent and if they were able to follow it, regardless of whether or not it was difficult to do so.
Do members have any other questions about stage 3?
The concluding paragraph of Dr Hankey's submission states:
That follows on from what we have been discussing. Perhaps I am too naive, but I do not understand how the integrity of the package as a whole comes through stage 3. The process can be difficult to understand at stage 2, but it is even more difficult in a stage 3 debate that involves groupings. I take my hat off to the MSPs if they understand what the bill will look like by the time that they have finished amending it.
I think that I understand what you are trying to achieve and I endorse your statement that it has to be right, but I just wonder whether we are at the right end of the process for what you are trying to achieve. By the time we get to the end of stage 3, we are at the end. Would it not be better if that sort of detailed work—and I realise that it can be changed by amendments at stage 3—and that walking through of issues were done much earlier in the process to iron out such difficulties, rather than finding ourselves hard up against a wall at stage 3? I am not sure about your forestry example or whether your interpretation is accurate, but that is really irrelevant. What you are saying is that a wicked issue that no one could have anticipated can be brought into the system late on. Is there no way in which that walking through can be done earlier in the process?
It is something that should be done earlier in the process to some extent anyway, but that is part of the process by which organisations such as ours interact with MSPs and introduce amendments, saying, "This is a nonsense," or whatever. What I am really asking is that, before the Parliament signs off a bill and it gets royal assent, you should know whether it flies or not and whether there are any fatal errors in it. When you are discussing amendments until 4 o'clock and passing the bill at 5 o'clock, the two parts of the process are too closely coupled for anyone to know that.
I have some sympathy with what Maurice Hankey is saying, but you could say that about any legislation at the final point. He cited the example of the amendment on forestry, and we are conscious that people did not realise that it might have the effect that it did. However, I do not think that that matters. It is not a fatal error; we have all gone on to discuss the outdoor access code on the assumption that the right of access applies to all forest land. We do not see a problem there. Ultimately, in some court case, there might be a problem a few years down the line, but you have to be aware of the fact that, when the consultation started on the outdoor access code, there was a lot of pressure from land management interests to rewrite the legislation. There is a danger of exposing that sort of process if you start to have a technical reappraisal after stage 3.
If we attach a policy intention to an amendment, it might help to iron out some of those potential issues, because there would be an explanatory note beside the amendment. You raised the key issue of how we make the legislation work. My experience of controversial bills is that the issue is not about how we make a bill work, but about how we stop it working.
I make it clear that I am not in any way trying to reopen policy. I am talking about a process that would allow unintended drafting anomalies to be addressed before a bill becomes an act.
How would you sort that out? We do not have a stage 4, so there is no process to sort out drafting anomalies after amendments have been approved at stage 3. The Executive or the member in charge of the bill would have to refer parts of the bill back to the lead committee. I am not aware that amendments may be changed after they have been agreed to by the Parliament, even if they have unintended consequences.
I admit that I do not know about that either. I am here to talk about the timing and time phases of bills. Stage 3 is extremely rapid. The record of stage 3 proceedings of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill shows that a given number of amendments were passed in fewer seconds. I suggest that the procedures need to be examined in such a way as to allow something to happen between stage 3 amendments and the vote to pass the bill, which would pick up the sort of things that I am talking about. That does not mean revisiting policy and it does not mean saying, "Well, we didn't quite mean that," and so on. There are examples from different pieces of legislation where what has come out of the process is a nonsense and needs sorting out sooner rather than later.
For those of us who worry about the words, there are some bits of the 2003 act that prompt us to ask what the words actually mean. I am not certain that a detailed process of scrutiny would quite help that, however, and I am not certain that we can always be wise enough and quick enough to spot defects at the time. My colleagues are currently looking at bits of the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000 and asking what they actually mean. That was passed several years ago, but we are now increasingly thinking about its implications. I understand that the Executive might be thinking how to address the forestry issue through its order-making powers. There is a mechanism to allow for some degree of correction in the bill.
Perhaps the points that you make could be better addressed by elongating the stage 3 process, so that there is a fuller discussion of the stage 3 amendments over a longer period and so that members do not have only 90 seconds to speak to their amendments and are not prevented from speaking to amendments. Some of the issues that you have highlighted—although not all of them—could be resolved if we elongated stage 3 and if members had a better opportunity to consider what was being proposed and to debate it.
We are in danger of getting too complicated here. I do not think that any Parliament anywhere in the world has passed a perfect piece of legislation, and they never will. That is not feasible. The legislative programme will catch the little anomalies and sort them out. I understand what Dr Hankey is getting at, but we should address those issues earlier in the process. Sorry—that was a statement rather than a question.
The standing orders allow for the member in charge of a bill—normally a minister—to move a motion without notice, after the last amendment has been dealt with and before the motion to pass the bill is moved, to ask for a suspension of the remainder of the stage 3 process to allow them to lodge amendments at a later date to clarify uncertainties. The standing orders actually use the words "clarifying uncertainties". Given that that process exists, would it be beneficial for us to consider the standing orders with a view to separating the stage 3 debate to pass the bill from the stage 3 amendment stage, even if it were for only half an hour? The member in charge of the bill would have some breathing space, during which they could look at the bill as amended to find out whether they had to make such a request for a suspension in which to lodge further technical amendments.
I think that that would be helpful. May I ask a question of the committee, or would that be out of order?
You can make a comment and we will decide whether we want to answer it.
Here is my statement, then. I find it difficult to believe that, as MSPs go into stage 3, they know where things are going to go and what the legislation is going to look like at the end. Do you have confidence in that process?
We expect the member in charge, normally a minister, to have sufficient briefing to allow him to understand the consequences of any amendments that might be passed at stage 3, and so to be confident that when they move the motion to pass the bill, there will be no unintended effects. I accept that not every single member will be able to give that guarantee, but the member in charge should be able to do that.
Whether or not we know how the legislation will turn out depends upon the interest of the member. I had a huge constituency interest in the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, and I had loads of correspondence from my constituents, so I took a real interest in what was happening, although I was not on the committee. Because of the time constraints, I did not get an opportunity to speak in the debate but I was still interested to find out whether the points that my constituents had raised were being supported or otherwise. At the end of the day, most members are knowledgeable, although some might go away with a worry. You can rest assured that we take an interest in the briefs that we receive from different organisations. We find them useful because they help us to understand the legislation that is going through and, perhaps, to see another side of the argument.
I am not sure that there is a question in there.
No, I was answering Dr Hankey's point.
I accept that. Does anyone have any further comments to make on those points?
Your point is fair and we would be kidding ourselves if we said that it was not. I would like to get to the stage where every amendment is moved, spoken to and responded to by those on the opposite side of the argument. At least then I would have an idea of what the amendment intended and what the opposing views were. We have to get to that stage so that I do not have to vote blind, or on five words that are not clear in their intention.
There was a point made about an opportunity for the member in charge of the bill to come back at the end with something like mopping-up amendments or corrections. If there were a gap overnight, that would be really helpful because we could all sit back and understand where we had reached.
Consideration could be carried over to the next sitting day.
Putting my citizen's hat on for a moment, I must say that I was quite impressed with the process. Stage 2 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was particularly well ordered and managed and it deserved all the time that it got.
The convener of the committee responsible left before she heard that comment but I am sure that she will see it in the Official Report.
I will pass your comments on.
I suggest that we have a brief comfort break at this point.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
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