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Under agenda item 4, we must decide whether the committee's draft reports on the 20-day rule and the SCPA will be considered in private at future meetings, as is normal practice.
Yes.
Is that the normal practice?
It seems to be.
Before we continue in private, I refer to an issue that has been raised, which we will have to address at a future meeting. We have received correspondence from Rosemary Byrne and the Health Committee about the amount of time that is available to consider members' bills and the pressure on committees being too great for them to consider such bills adequately. I think that there is an issue to consider. Chris Ballance has also circulated a view. I think that we should consider the matter properly, with an issues paper, at our next meeting.
I ask that consideration be given also to the deadline for the submission of members' bills. This is the first year in which a deadline has been set. I am aware of that because I, too, was going to submit a member's bill. It is becoming apparent that submitting a member's bill at the end of September raises substantial concerns about the ability of committees to undertake adequate consideration of the bill if it is a serious and lengthy piece of draft legislation. If the committee needs to put the bill out to public consultation for 12 weeks, it will be Christmas before it can even consider it.
The timescale is a bit longer than Karen Gillon says. After a member's bill has been lodged, it must be referred to Parliament to decide which committee will be the lead committee before it can be referred to that committee. By the time that the Health Committee came to consider the Treatment of Drug Users (Scotland) Bill, if we had issued our usual 12-week call for evidence—we do that for all bills—that would have taken us up to 18 January. The process would have taken even longer than Karen Gillon says. A member's bill is not sent to the lead committee on the date on which it is lodged; sometimes, the first consideration of the bill by that committee will not take place until three or four weeks after it has been lodged.
There are some important issues that we must consider in balancing the requirement for the committees to have sufficient time to scrutinise Government bills or members' bills; the right of members to lodge bills; and the right of the Government to get its bills through the system. There is also the issue of whether the Government is trying to get too many bills through the system. All those issues are bound up together. We will put the matter on the agenda for our next meeting, if that is agreed.
We will now consider in private the committee's draft reports on consolidation bills and our review of parliamentary time.
Meeting continued in private until 11:37.
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Scottish Commission for Public Audit