Procedures Committee, 12 Sep 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 12, 2000

Official Report 227KB pdf

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Committee Procedures

The next item is paper 5 on committee operations. Elizabeth Watson will remain for this item in case members have any points or suggestions. The report requests a further report on issues that are specified in the annexe. The list is not exclusive. If members want to bring further aspects of committee work before the officials with a view to having their points included in the final report, they should do so in the near future. The work is at a fairly advanced stage.

I will ask the clerk whether there is anything that we need to say about the report before I open up the matter for discussion.

The report gives members a chance to endorse the line that we are taking and to add to or comment on the points that have been made in the annexe.

We do not want to go through the points one by one, but there may be areas of clarification or omission.

I have two quick points. First, under item 12, on the removal of conveners and motions of no confidence, the paper suggests that that is

"a genuine omission from standing orders",

given that the procedure is included in respect of the Presiding Officer and Deputy Presiding Officer. I am sure that such a procedure would be used sparingly, if at all. However, we are currently without a procedure and the committees are faced with a difficulty. This is a matter of urgency. If there were a dispute that involved a motion of no confidence, a committee could find itself in great difficulty.

My second point is an issue for the committees and the chamber. The inclusion of emergency items and motions has caused some concern. The procedure for committees will be different from that for the Parliament. There is a procedure in the Parliament, but many members believe that it is not operating at all, let alone effectively. We must ensure that something is done about that.

There has been considerable correspondence on this matter between the convener and the Presiding Officer, between a number of individuals and the convener and between the Presiding Officer and me, but still we are making no progress. The flexibility of Parliament to consider genuine emergency items is very much curtailed, as was shown last week in the debate on the Scottish Qualifications Authority and may be shown this week on other matters. We have to address that problem in the context of both Parliament and the committees. There are difficulties with raising emergency items in committees. Some committees are operating flexibly, but possibly outwith standing orders, to ensure that issues are grabbed hold of immediately.

It is perfectly fair that the way in which committees handle late or emergency items should be part of the review. It might be useful for the clerks to review practice, given that there seem to be inconsistencies.

Item 5, regarding substitutes, raises a substantive point. If required, I could give a brilliant speech on either side of the argument.

You often do.

A lot of these technical issues are important, but the question of substitutes goes to the heart of the matter. This committee or the Parliament should have a debate and we should make up our minds on the matter. The issue of substitutes is of a greater order of importance than some of the other issues and it merits proper discussion.

I will speak on the same point. I cannot remember discussing substitutes; perhaps I was late. I am a wee bit concerned that substitutes are being considered. The number of members of a party is just how the cookie crumbles in the election. If we agree that substitutes should be allowed for bigger parties that are unable to get their members to a committee, that would knock Tommy Sheridan out of the equation. That goes against the grain of the Parliament. Sometimes it happens that we have to miss meetings, because we are going somewhere else, but that is the luck of the draw. We have no business addressing that.

I have been a victim of this, because I had to miss a Transport and the Environment Committee meeting. I do not remember what it was doing, but I think that it was work in connection with a report. I had amendments for an environment bill that was before the Rural Affairs Committee. I could not be in two places at one time. As I am the only representative of my party on those committees, I take a different view on substitutes. It would have been reasonable for me to be allowed to put someone into the private meeting of the Transport and the Environment Committee for the purposes of representing a point of view and letting me know what happened.

I appreciate that Tommy Sheridan has a difficulty, but it is up to him to resolve that by getting another MSP elected at the next election so that he can enjoy the right of substitution. I would not agree with someone who held the view, "I can't come to a committee, therefore somebody else will go in my place." There would have to be proper reason for substitution, such as a clash of two committees conducting parliamentary business.

We will come back to this issue when we look at the report. Donald Gorrie is right; we have not had a discussion on the issue, or indeed on others. They are simply points that have been raised. The intention is that the report will be produced and the committee will then be in charge of deciding which changes to standing orders or other procedures it wants to recommend.

Convener, you have made my point for me. With all due respect, if you want to do something about the problem, your party should do something about it, just like Tommy Sheridan. All members have the opportunity to attend all committee meetings. The difference is that the substitution proposal effectively means that someone could attend and vote. An MSP has a right to sit in on this meeting and deliberate.

Not if we are in private session.

Okay.

That is the point. The difficulty was that a committee of this Parliament met in private, and one of the political parties—I suppose for that matter that the three individual members could not have gone either—was denied the opportunity to participate and any knowledge of the outcome of the meeting. That is a democratic deficit.

I am not proposing voting rights for substitutes; I am not proposing that substitutes be able to do anything other than simply attend, so that parties—in the non-political sense—to a discussion and to the evolution of an issue know, and have the opportunity to know, what is happening at the meeting. The alternative is to make private meetings public and produce an Official Report of them.

I do not like to disagree with my colleague, but there is a precedent in the Parliament for both substitution and voting. In the Parliamentary Bureau, there is both a business manager and a deputy business manager. If the business manager is not present, the deputy business manager both speaks and votes.

I am not sure that we should go that far, but we are often in genuine difficulty when meetings clash. The scheduling grid, as Elizabeth Watson never tires of telling people, is immensely complex, with issues of committee membership to be sorted out. It is almost impossible when members have to choose—this has happened to me on one occasion—between four meetings taking place at the same time.

I am not committing myself to supporting substitutes, but the matter needs to be discussed carefully, as it is causing considerable difficulty. In the case of the bureau, an arrangement exists and has existed since day 1.

Mike Russell has more problems than most, as he is so popular and is a member of four committees, but we all have such problems and people have indeed had to miss committee meetings. Surely, however, this whole matter will be superseded by what happens on committee restructuring, which is exactly why this discussion is taking place. The underlying reason is the huge work load, the onus on members to attend committee meetings and the necessity for committees to meet simultaneously for space and other reasons.

The sooner the restructuring process is under way, the sooner we will remove a lot of the problems. If we still have to consider the question of substitutes after that, fine.

Yes—that may well resolve the whole issue.

On committees meeting in private, the practice—indeed, the legal precedent—in local government is that, if a member can show a need to know, they are entitled to remain when the meeting goes into private session and the public are excluded. A similar practice could be adopted by the Parliament: if the member can show a need to be present at the private meeting of a committee of which they are not a member, they could be allowed to do so. That would solve the problem.

That is a constructive suggestion. Those are the issues that we will consider when we come to resolve this matter and make recommendations to the Parliament. It may be that those suggestions will be preferable to an official policy on substitution. We have had a good discussion on this matter; there is no requirement on us to come to a resolution yet, although ultimately, when all the issues are reported on, there will be.

As there are no more comments on this item, I thank everyone for their contributions and we will move on.