I suspect that agenda item 2 will take a little longer than agenda item 1. Colleagues have a number of papers before them. The first is a summary of the evidence on non-Executive bills and is for information. Obviously, some of that evidence will be used in any report that we wish to produce. The main paper for consideration is the one that lays out the committee's options, but I draw members' attention to the paper on consultation methods, the letter from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, the copies of papers from Joyce McMillan and Barry Winetrobe and a note from the clerk that has just been circulated on party balance in House of Commons committees.
Will we come back to the issue of further consultation?
It would make sense to discuss that after we decide what we wish to do.
I am inclined to agree with the suggestion of a reserve mechanism. A system of prioritisation has not been needed so far—we are talking about a potential problem. That is why I like the idea of a reserve mechanism. Until now, we have not had a problem, although there may be one. There has not been a clear-cut proposal with which I would agree, but we need something that could be implemented if a bottleneck appears.
My perspective is slightly different. To some extent, we have had a system of prioritisation run by the corporate body and the non-Executive bills unit. However, NEBU has had to make a referral to the corporate body under the existing criteria on only three occasions. Given that, in the past, such referrals have been few, I agree that the system could be a reserve mechanism. However, it is worth considering the existing system of prioritisation to clarify how effective it has been. Part of the inquiry has been to examine what happens already.
I agree with much of what Mark Ballard says. I am not sure that the prioritisation system should be only a reserve mechanism. As he said, prioritisation already takes place, so the debate is about what procedure we should have for prioritisation in the future. Question 1 is answered by the fact that prioritisation already happens. Later in the paper we will discuss how we should go about prioritising in future.
I recall that at a meeting I attended previously, we had quite a discussion about bottlenecks in the system. It is clear that decisions are being taken at points within the system, so I suppose that our report should analyse whether we are taking those decisions in the right way.
I understand Jamie McGrigor's point about having a reserve mechanism, but I incline to the view that we need a mechanism that is clear and transparent. The mechanism could consider the situation simply once or twice a year. If it was decided that there was no problem, things could be allowed to carry on. If it was decided that there was a problem, decisions about prioritisation would have to be made. Setting up such a mechanism would not automatically mean that we would have to prioritise if there was no problem.
That is one model. Another model is the way in which we have worked until now. Rather than prioritising bills according to a set timeframe, such as annually or biannually, we have made prioritisation decisions only when a bottleneck has occurred. When that has happened, NEBU has gone to the corporate body to seek guidance on the criteria.
That suggestion would deal with NEBU's drafting resources, but NEBU does not consider what parliamentary time is available, which is an issue that is determined by the Parliamentary Bureau. The question is where we should have the forward look to ensure that there will be no problem with parliamentary time either in the chamber or, more to the point, in the committees. That is what concerns me. We need to be clearer about how such issues are resolved.
The penultimate paragraph of the text in the options paper dealing with question 1 states:
Mark Ballard makes a fair point, which I want to explore further. The problem with the present system for non-Executive bills is that, in effect, it requires committees to be reactive. The Parliamentary Bureau gives them a bill and, usually, a timescale within which they have to deal with it. If a committee ends up being referred three or four bills, it has no time to determine its own work programme. We need a process that provides committees with a forward look at what Executive business and non-Executive bills they are likely to be given so that they can work those in with what they want to do. The bit that is missing at the moment is how all those things work together.
My point is whether that decision making should be made by subject committees, by the Parliamentary Bureau or by another parliamentary committee.
That is the issue that we must determine.
The slight problem with Mark Ballard's suggestion is that it would allow a parliamentary committee to determine whether a member's bill proceeded. Some committees, such as the justice committees, have very full and difficult timetables. If we were to give such committees the power to determine whether a member's bill should be considered, that would set a dangerous precedent. The bill might not be considered for various reasons. For example, the bill might not suit the make-up of the committee at the time or it might be on a subject that the committee did not want to discuss. If a member's bill meets the criteria that the Parliament has set, why should it not be able to proceed through a committee? We need to be careful about allowing committees to decide where and when they consider members' bills. Strict criteria would be required for that.
I apologise for being a bit late. I feel a bit vulnerable at the moment, because I do not know what has been said already and I do not know where we are at. Convener, can you give me an update on what has been said?
We are considering the options paper, not the evidence paper. At the moment, we are considering question 1, which is the basic question whether prioritisation is needed. I am trying to get a general feel for members' views.
When we started this process, I was not entirely convinced that a prioritisation process was needed. Some of the evidence that we have received on whether there is a climate for prioritisation has been contradictory. Karen Gillon rightly suggested that whatever prioritisation process we are to have—whatever it might be beyond an agreed set of criteria—will create a level of tension. Some members will find the process difficult to accept if their bills are not allowed to proceed.
That is a point that Jamie McGrigor raised earlier and I would like you to develop it a bit further. Who would make the judgment as to when the reserve mechanism would kick in?
The only people who can make the judgment are the officials, as they are the people who are at the receiving end—they know the amount of work that they are having to deal with. That said, I do not believe that the officials can make a judgment about what should flow from the decision-making process. I assume that that judgment process would have to be triggered by a request from the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body following a request to that larger body from the officials.
Karen Gillon wants to come in, but I would like to follow up on one point before she does. Should we set up the mechanism in such a way as to enable whichever body we finally decide should come into play to review regularly the situation to determine whether it needs to use the reserve powers? That would remove the need for officials to make that determination.
Whatever we do, the information will have to come from officials. I do not think that it makes much difference whether we use the mechanism that either of us suggested. The difference is that your suggestion would give control to the committee or whichever body was to look after the process. That is probably the right place for the ownership of the mechanism. I agree that that is probably the better option.
I take a different view. If we are to have a prioritisation exercise, the same system would have to apply to every member's bill. If that is not to happen, we should not have a prioritisation exercise at all. We should look at our current mechanisms, which include the threshold for the number of supporters that a bill needs and the criteria that NEBU already uses. We could apply them in a more rigorous way and perhaps add to them.
Are you saying that there should be no prioritisation?
I am saying that I would rather that we had no prioritisation than that some bills had to go through a prioritisation process while other bills, whose promoters secured resources from an outside organisation, were prioritised in the parliamentary timetable regardless of their merits.
As Karen Gillon suggests, the reality is that, if the process is merely reactive, it will immediately kick in because everyone will try to get in under the wire by submitting their proposals early.
At the moment, apart from there being basic criteria, the system seems to be one of first come, first served. There might be a temptation for everybody to rush forward knowing that, if they meet the basic criteria, it is just a question of how quickly they get their bill on to the table. I do not know whether that is the fairest way of proceeding.
I want to take up Karen Gillon's point. If I understand the process correctly, previously a member had to get outside support in drafting a member's bill—NEBU was introduced to assist in the drafting process. At the moment, some bills are dealt with through NEBU and are subject to NEBU and SPCB criteria and others are not. The starting point was that all bills had outside support and we would be taking a big step from that if we moved from the current situation, in which NEBU provides support for some bills, to a situation in which no bills get outside support.
I am not suggesting that. I am saying that every bill should be treated equally. If a member is able to secure the support of an outside organisation for whatever reason—for example, the bill might tie in with that organisation's agenda—they should not get priority within the parliamentary timetable. However, under the proposals, the only bills that would be scrutinised and prioritised would be bills that required NEBU's support, which I do not think is fair.
If I follow your logic, that means that any bill that was prioritised would be eligible for NEBU support, so there would be no point in the member getting outside support. If the bill had met the criteria, it would get NEBU support, so why would the member bother getting outside support? Either their bill had met the criteria, in which case they could get NEBU support, or it had not met the criteria, in which case they would get no support. There would be no room for non-NEBU support for members' bills.
Members will still choose to use outside organisations for other reasons—for example, the organisation may understand a particular issue better or be more aware of the intricacies. It would be unfair of us to say that we had a prioritisation exercise, but it was only for people who required NEBU support.
You are talking about two different things. Are you referring to a prioritisation process applying only to bills that need NEBU support?
I thought that you were saying that.
I am saying that, but you are widening the question if you are asking whether bills that are getting support from outwith NEBU should be getting parliamentary time. That is a different issue, because it is not just about NEBU resources; it is about the resources to get through the committee stage and the plenary process, which is down to the bureau.
I do not think that it is down to the bureau; it is down to us as a committee to determine whether in the course of the inquiry we have found that the parliamentary system is robust enough to cope with the current member's bill system and whether it allows committees to take forward their own agenda as well as considering members' bills and committee bills. I have learned from the inquiry that, if there is to be a prioritisation exercise, it should be about more than just NEBU; it should be about the parliamentary timetable.
That will lead us into another argument later.
That is fine.
We need to decide now.
You asked for views. If the prioritisation exercise is not about the parliamentary timetable, I would rather that we did not have one. I would rather that we made the current criteria more robust than that we got into a situation in which some bills had to go through a process to get support whereas others did not.
I realise that the question about what the prioritisation process is for comes later in our questions, but it is material to the discussion that we are having. Karen Gillon makes a good point, although I agree with what she is saying for a different reason from the one that she gave. She said that the prioritisation process should be about not only NEBU but the allocation of parliamentary time. If the new body to prioritise proposals, whatever it may be, is not part of the bureau—and I do not think that it should be part of the bureau—the process would bring it into conflict with the bureau, which is responsible for timetabling business in the Parliament.
Although the extent of the prioritisation might be a matter of dispute—and we shall come to that in later discussions—there is a general view that there should be a process in place, either permanently or in reserve. We need to decide whether that process is just a matter of approving or strengthening the current criteria for NEBU. However, I think that we are agreed about the need for a clear set of criteria for prioritising non-Executive bills in the Parliament. We just need to decide how that is done.
From what I have heard, convener, I do not think that you can make that statement yet.
I was saying that no one has yet argued that there should be no change to the present situation.
No, but prioritisation—
Everyone on the committee has said that there needs to be something in place.
Yes, but I am treating prioritisation and criteria as different things.
The threshold—
The threshold may need to be adjusted, but that is a different thing from putting in place a prioritisation process.
I am trying to move us on to some of the other questions, so that we can perhaps reach some conclusions on the extent of the prioritisation process, if we can use that at the moment as a broad term to cover all the issues. I am not saying that there will necessarily be a clear prioritisation mechanism; it might just involve a tightening up of procedures. At the moment, however, I think that we are agreed that something needs to be done. We now need to consider what that is.
I have made my views clear. I think that it should apply to everybody and to the whole gamut and that, if it does not, there should be no prioritisation. If we are to have a prioritisation exercise, we can set up a process to determine which members' bills receive support from NEBU. For me, the more important question is which members' bills have the support in terms of parliamentary time. Having listened to the evidence and having had experience of the process, I think that the issue is much bigger than just NEBU, albeit that NEBU is an important part of it. Members' bills put pressure on the committees, on Parliament and on the members who have to consider the bills. If we think that a prioritisation exercise is necessary, it must involve every member's bill that is on the table, because the issue is about more than just NEBU's resources.
There is something that I have difficulty with. If the bureau does not decide such matters—and I shall argue strongly that it should not—is there the potential for conflict between what the committee handling the bill sees as a priority for parliamentary time to secure a successful conclusion to the member's bill, such as a vote at stage 1 that determines whether the bill fails or goes ahead, and what the bureau might think?
If you assume that the body is not the bureau, yes there is.
It seems that what we are looking for is a system that is fair, open and transparent and that is not subjective, to take account of Karen Gillon's concerns. Could those difficulties be resolved if we raised the threshold? If we did that, there would not be a problem with the bureau and a committee or other body coming into conflict. It would also avoid the problems that can be caused by subjective opinions on the committee, which, with the best will in the world, can be an issue. If we raised the threshold, the decision would be made at an official level, so it would become non-partisan. Might that be an appropriate way in which to proceed?
I am worried that if we follow Karen Gillon's logic, we will create a body that is so powerful that it will become a major force in the Parliament—it could outrank the Parliamentary Bureau. The proposal seems to be out of kilter with the scale of the problem. I say again that we should examine what happens at the moment to see whether it needs to be tightened up. I agree that there is an opportunity to consider the threshold, but we ought to reflect on the effectiveness of the current process. In particular, we should consider whether it is appropriate for NEBU to refer decisions to the corporate body.
Before we go any further, we need to make a fundamental decision. Do we have enough evidence to suggest that the extent of the problem is such that another body is needed to consider priorities, or will an increased threshold deal with the problem, as Irene Oldfather suggests? If the latter, much of the discussion that will follow and the questions that will be asked will be superfluous.
Having considered what happened in the previous session and what might happen in the current session, I believe that there is a potential problem with the process. I would rather put in place a robust set of procedures to address that potential problem. If the problem does not arise, people's concerns about the procedures will be irrelevant. If the problem arises, I would rather that Parliament had thought about it in advance and put something in place to deal with it than that we had to take panic measures.
That is useful to me, convener. I was hoping that the Procedures Committee could find a unanimous position. The matter will be important in the future and we should strive to ensure that we reach such a position, even though it will take us longer to do so. However, I can see some fault lines developing already that will be difficult to overcome.
I do not think that anyone is implying that that should happen.
You implied that bills will be subject to prioritisation in terms of parliamentary time rather than in terms of NEBU time. It will be difficult to get a consensus around that. In terms of parliamentary time, the proposed body, rather than the bureau, will decide the allocation of resources that a bill will get in committee or in a plenary session. That is a difficulty for me.
What I was saying was that bills, whether drafted internally or externally, should meet the same basic criteria before they can be introduced.
That is the first threshold.
That is a threshold issue.
Fine. I understand.
If that threshold is set high enough, it will stop some bills from going that far, because people will not want to make the effort.
You were not saying that in such circumstances all bills, including those from outside, should necessarily be subjected to a NEBU-type prioritisation process.
I am suggesting that all bills should meet the same criteria that NEBU would use to determine whether a bill should receive resources. That is not saying that people cannot use external resources.
That has clarified the matter nicely.
Some people may wish to have a draft bill as part of a consultation, for example, but that might have to be drafted externally, because NEBU does not have the resources to produce draft bills.
That is entirely fair and transparent. If we set up a system, it must be fair and transparent, because bills have a knock-on effect on committees and the Parliament. The proposal is perfectly reasonable.
I accept that, but the issue is our different use of language. That is why I was trying to ensure that we used the same language.
I fundamentally disagree with Bruce Crawford. We are in danger of saying that if you or somebody else has an idea for a bill, and they are prepared to give you the support to draft that bill to get it through the Parliament, regardless of whether or not—
That is a different issue.
But it is not a different issue. Why should a bill by a member on an issue that deserves to be legislated on but which is not sexy and does not attract the support of some outside lobbying organisation not be able to get through the parliamentary process in the same way as a bill that does attract the support of a lobbying organisation? We are in danger of creating a two-tier system for members' bills, which would not be fair. Bills that are supported by lobbying organisations will have a head start on bills that are not. That is not the kind of system that I want to see in the Parliament.
You use the term "lobbying" pejoratively. There are many organisations out there that would wish to be involved in drafting legislation—and not the lobbying-type legislation that you suggest. There is also an argument that if people are able to secure resources from outside, that will give NEBU more space to support other bills, which will allow other bills to come through that would not have made it otherwise.
But one of the issues that has arisen is that some of the bills that come in are so badly drafted that it takes resources within the Parliament to sort them out.
The issue is whether members should support a bill at stage 1 if it is badly drafted. Frankly, if it is a bad bill, it should not be supported. MSPs considered elements of Mike Watson's Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Bill to be badly drafted. That took a lot of sorting out, but one way in which it could have been dealt with would have been to knock it out at the very beginning. As politicians, we are here to take those hard decisions.
If every bill is not subject to exactly the same criteria and prioritisation—
Criteria, yes.
We should go back to the criteria and consider whether they are robust enough and whether we should raise the thresholds. If you are saying that you are not prepared to include every bill in a prioritisation process, and the committee cannot reach a unanimous conclusion on that point, we would be as well going back to the drawing board and considering the criteria under which a bill can be submitted in the first place.
All bills should be subject to the criteria—we are all agreed about that—and those criteria can be discussed and adjusted as required. However, we have a difficulty on the issue of prioritisation and the body that will carry out that prioritisation.
Will you clarify something for me Bruce? You seem to be suggesting that the Parliamentary Bureau can effectively prioritise bills as part of its work on the parliamentary timetable.
That is its job.
You believe that that is satisfactory.
That is the bureau's job and its raison d'être. It does not matter whether that is satisfactory, because it is the reality. I do not like everything that goes on in the bureau.
No. I have been there and I know what you mean.
The bureau does not have that power.
It does.
If a bill goes to committee and reaches that stage—
No. I mean that a bill has been introduced and a committee can decide not to do anything about it. It can just sit on its hands until the bureau tells the committee that stage 1 must be completed by a certain date. At present, that is in effect the prioritisation process.
That is correct in terms of parliamentary time.
At that point, the committee has to do something with the bill. I am not putting forward a position; I am simply trying to explore the idea. Let us take the hypothetical example of a school meals bill. It might have some support, but it also has a political element. The Executive parties on the bureau decide that they do not want the bill to go any further, so they refuse to set a stage 1 timetable for it. The Executive then uses its majority on the committee to ensure that the bill does not appear in the work programme. In effect, the present position is that the bureau could see to it that a particular bill does not proceed and that decision is not transparent.
First, it is the bureau's job to timetable the business of the Parliament and it has a responsibility to timetable members' bills. That is how the Parliament was set up.
There is nothing in standing orders that requires the bureau to fix a date for a bill once it has been introduced.
That is the same for Executive bills. There is nothing in standing orders that says that the bureau must fix dates for those either. At the end of the day, the power is in the hands of the members of the Executive parties. If it came to that, a vote in the chamber would be pressed by the other business managers. That would be the democratic process.
I am not necessarily taking the line that there should be a body that is separate from the bureau—
There is no democratic process that such a body could follow. If the Opposition business managers are unhappy, they have a democratic process to follow.
With respect, a committee reports to the Parliament and the Parliament approves that report—
That happens only if the bureau allows it to happen. What happens if the bureau does not allow it? We could put those questions for ever.
One of the suggestions is that the bureau should be responsible for prioritising non-Executive bills. You are suggesting that there should not be a prioritisation system but that the bureau has responsibility for timetabling.
The bureau should be deciding the parliamentary time and committee process and what goes to which committee. It should not be deciding what resources are applied from NEBU. There is a distinction.
I see the distinction that you are making.
I strongly believe that this issue is important for the future of the Parliament and democracy.
I want to explore this issue a little more before I bring in Jamie McGrigor. If, for example, three non-Executive bills have to go before the Education Committee at the same time that it is considering a piece of Executive legislation and some subordinate legislation and having an inquiry into something or other, would it be up to the bureau to determine which of the non-Executive bills the committee should deal with first and which should be left until later?
That is the bureau's job. It was designed to refer different pieces of legislation to different committees and to reach an accommodation with them. A separate parliamentary body that would deal with the process would have no such power.
That is very helpful.
On question 2, to which we are supposed to be finding an answer, does the potential problem that has been identified relate to NEBU, to time constraints or to both? If the answer is both, it does not matter whether we bring in extra help; we will always have only a certain amount of time in which to consider a certain number of bills. I believe that someone has suggested that there should be a cut-off point towards the end of the parliamentary session.
We will discuss that a bit later.
Surely the answer to the question is that the situation affects both NEBU and the amount of available time.
Of course both are affected. However, we have a body that deals with parliamentary time, which is already a problem.
That is not a problem; it is a fact.
Yes, it is a fact. However, the question now is how we deal with the NEBU prioritisation issue that has been raised. Do we simply go with Irene Oldfather's suggestion of raising the threshold?
I have not been on the bureau very long, but it seems to take decisions about exactly the scenario that the convener outlined in which we have to consider whether a committee is being overloaded with Executive bills, subordinate legislation and secondary inquiries. I have not even mentioned non-Executive bills. As a result, the bureau already has to juggle the time commitments that it is giving to committees.
It does not work well if there are hundreds of members' bills to deal with. I have been in that situation. When I was a committee convener, the bureau gave me a member's bill to deal with in a timescale that was not achievable. The bill was introduced too late for us to deliver it, but we still had to go through the stage 1 process, which took up time—
But it was a committee bill.
No, it was not. It was a member's bill that did not finish its course because it was introduced too late. The committee could have been doing something else in the time that it was spending on a bill that was never going to reach stage 3. The bureau gave that bill to the committee.
On the bureau, we get lots of requests from committees for extensions to deal with—
That is a different point.
I take Karen Gillon's point that the bill to which she is referring ran out of time. However, no one can tell whether that will happen before a bill is introduced. It might have an easy passage, or it might have a difficult one if people do not agree with it.
You would have known that that would happen with that bill, because it could never have fulfilled the criteria in the standing orders that were in place at the time. The Gaelic Language (Scotland) Bill could not meet the timetable set out in standing orders; it was not possible.
A number of bills fell into that category at the end of the previous session of Parliament.
The bureau might not have done a good job, but that is where the job should have been done.
Mark Ballard is saying that there are no problems, but I am saying that there have been problems in the past.
We might be coming to the conclusion that the bureau should be more rigorous in how it considers the timetabling of non-Executive bills. Perhaps it should be more rigorous in saying whether a committee will have time to deal with a bill. In the previous session of Parliament, a number of bills that had no chance of reaching stage 3 came to committees for consideration at stage 1.
It is up to members to press that point internally within the bureau and ensure that the bureau is more rigorous.
That is also something that we could recommend.
Parliamentary time is the most precious parliamentary resource for bills—members' bills in particular—so to have a prioritisation process that does not include that resource seems to be ridiculous. It is not fair to allow some bills to outflank that process by getting additional support from outside. That should be part of the debate.
Karen Gillon talked about the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Bill. Are you saying that from the moment that it started on its stage 1 course there was not time to finish it?
It would have required a suspension of standing orders by the Parliament to allow it to get through stage 3.
However, that is not from the time the bill was introduced. You are saying that there was not enough time from the beginning of stage 1.
The bill was introduced in October. Let us be honest—it could not make the timetable. We all know the various reasons why that was the case. It could not meet the timetable, but it was still given to the committee because it would ultimately have been the right of Parliament to decide that there should be a suspension of standing orders to allow the bill to go through stage 3. That is right; it should have been a matter for Parliament.
I presume that if progress had been quicker in the consultation period prior to stage 1, there would have been time for the bill to go through.
The issue is about when the bill is introduced in Parliament; I do not know what the timetable is before that.
The bill seemed to be hanging around for an awful long time.
The point is that the bill was given to the committee by the bureau on a timetable that was not achievable, although it could have been achievable if the Parliament had decided to suspend standing orders. Ultimately, it is necessary to give a bill that chance, but that brings us back to whether there should be a cut-off point in the session after which it is not possible to bring bills in.
We will come on to that point in one of the later questions but, as I say, the situation that has been highlighted occurred in respect of a number of bills in the previous session of Parliament. The Prostitution Tolerance Zones (Scotland) Bill, which has been reintroduced in this session, went through stage 1 and was rejected by the Parliament, but had it been approved by the Parliament, there would not have been time for it to complete stage 2, which calls into question whether that was a good use of parliamentary resources.
I suppose that I should declare an interest as the convener of a committee that brought forward a committee bill in the previous session. It is very difficult—I would say impossible—for the Parliament to stand in the way of a committee. I would have pulled out every dirty trick in the book if it had tried to do so. Bruce Crawford asked how another committee would make its views known if it could not get to the parliamentary timetable. That would be done in the same way as the other members of the bureau made their views known about this exercise—they go to the media and the media tell people what has happened and what has been decided. That is what would happen with committee bills. It is not the way to do business, but that is the reality. To be honest, committee bills will always be on an unstoppable rollercoaster once they have been produced. We are not being realistic if we think that anything else will happen.
A more procedural argument would be that approval must have been received for a proposal before it can become a committee bill. There is an argument to say that the Parliament has already approved it and that, therefore, it should automatically receive priority.
So, we can get unanimous agreement that committee bills should not be part of our consideration but should be treated as they are at the moment.
Okay. That is fine.
That is a different issue from the first issue under question 3. Are we not going back there?
We have had a lengthy discussion on that, and I am not sure that there is anything to add.
The one question that came up in some of the evidence that we received was whether we should have a list of approved draftspeople who have to meet strict criteria, as in other places. That would avoid some of the problems that came previously—which could occur again—when somebody who did not have the expertise said, "I will help you to draft the bill." It is a precise science and there should perhaps be a list of approved draftspeople that is clear, transparent and open to anybody to apply to. That would help to alleviate some of the potential problems that could occur.
How would the panel judge who would be on that list?
It happens at Westminster, but I do not know how. We could perhaps get more information on that.
When the non-Executive bills unit was being set up, a system was devised for having a panel of draftsmen to whom NEBU would contract specific pieces of work. The exercise involved some sort of open competition and a test for people who were interested. To do that more generally, you would have to explore issues to do with who would set the criteria and do the testing; however, that could be explored. The general point is correct that drafting is a fairly sophisticated skill. Many good lawyers may not necessarily be capable of drafting.
We should perhaps explore that a bit further. I need to know a bit more about it. It might end up being quite a bureaucratic and costly exercise.
That does not always happen.
We vote it down. That is politics. We may be in danger of inventing a system to examine who should go on a list because they can draft a bill when all that we should be doing is getting it to stage 1 and saying, "Toss it out. It's a load of nonsense." That would save a hell of a lot of time.
That is nice in theory, but—
There was no way that the Parliament was going to chuck out the bill that you mentioned because it was badly drafted. That is the political reality.
I would not necessarily say that members' bills must be drafted by someone from an approved pool of draftspeople. Nevertheless, there may be an argument that members' bills should be checked by someone from an approved pool of draftspeople before they are lodged.
That would become another criteria-setting exercise.
It would not be greatly different from what you are suggesting. If a member drafts a bill, getting it checked out by someone with experience might be helpful.
Drawing on the previous discussions, I got the impression that there are two ways of doing that. The first is the threshold approach, which provides a hurdle that a potential bill has to cross. That is one use for a set of criteria. The second is a ranking exercise to see how well individual bills measure up against a set of criteria, after which we would take the top four, 10 or 20 of those bills. What we have at the moment is a hurdle that bills have to cross. If a bill meets the criteria that NEBU and the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body use at the moment, it can go on to the next stage; if it does not meet those criteria, it cannot go on, irrespective of the numbers. That is an important philosophical division that we ought to bear in mind. The word "prioritisation" is being bandied around. To me, prioritisation is about ranking and not about thresholds. If we want a fair system that allows all members to submit bills, all bills will have to meet the same criteria and we will have to consider thresholds and hurdles rather than a ranking system.
I also have some difficulty with the concept of ranking. My difficulty is that there could be a bill at number 6 that all the politicians want but is never reached. Politics is about the politicians being able to decide what they want. With ranking, Mike Watson's bill might never have been passed. It is true that it started off in a bit of a mess, and it might not have ended up as tidy as some would have wished, but it was a bill that the Parliament wanted. However, because of its nature and the way it was drafted, it might never have got to the stocks if there had been a ranking process. Ranking bothers me. I think that we are talking about the criteria and not the prioritisation process. We are talking about the hurdle that the SPCB currently sets. Once someone is over that hurdle, they will get the same resources as everyone else and their bill should have the same chance as everyone else's of becoming law. I find ranking difficult because bill number 10 would have less chance than bill number 1, but bill number 10 might be the one that the politicians want.
Is there any need to rank? If a bill reaches the threshold and gets through, does ranking lead to any advantage in terms of parliamentary time and resources? I do not know the answer to that, but it is worth thinking about.
The process is different from the one at Westminster, where ranking gives people guaranteed time for the second reading in the Parliament, which is necessary before a bill can proceed. In our process, committees consider bills at stage 1 before they come before the Parliament. In a sense, the ranking is done by a different method.
It is a sifting process and it works. That is why we do not need ranking, as all the bills are considered and sifted before they come before the Parliament. That is a more robust process than ranking.
A key area to consider is how we define issues such as whether there is a proven need for legislation or whether a bill's aims can be achieved in other ways. We should ensure that bills are not being presented simply for political purposes or for show; we should ensure that there really is a need for a new piece of legislation. An issue that clearly causes concern is whether legislation is likely to be coming from Westminster or the Executive in any case.
Is there a general agreement that we have to examine the criteria and perhaps increase the threshold? Is that what we are saying? At this stage, we are not discussing what the criteria should be.
I think that that is probably right. Apart from hearing NEBU's presentation, we have not really examined the criteria in detail. We will have to do that.
Regardless of what we decide, we will have to raise the threshold.
Can we just be clear: are we all talking about the criteria or are we also talking about the number of signatures required?
The threshold is the number of signatures required.
We are talking about both.
Yes, both.
We are talking about the number of signatures and about the boxes that have to be ticked to ensure that a bill can go on to the next stage. We need to examine the criteria carefully. Without commenting or reflecting on what Iain Smith has said, I would have agreed with some of them, but not others. We need to discuss that.
I think that we ought to be tightening up and clarifying the thresholds, rather than having any expectation that the thresholds will be raised. When I say "thresholds", I refer to the whole thing, from the criteria to the numbers.
If we do not raise the hurdle, this is a pointless exercise. If we are saying that the current system raises a potential problem, we must change the current system. This is a hard thing to say, but we have to make it more difficult for people to introduce proposals that, in reality, will never see the light of day. Alternatively, we would have to have a prioritisation exercise. Committee members seem to be saying that they do not want a prioritisation or ranking exercise that gives priority to, for example, bills 1 to 6. Therefore, in the cold light of day, we have to make it harder for bills to get over the hurdle. If we do not do that, this is a pointless and worthless exercise, as I said.
The criteria cannot just be about numbers. We could say, for example, that any bill that got more than 67 supporters would get over the threshold.
I do not think that anyone is suggesting that that should be the threshold. The highest number that I have seen, somewhere in the evidence, is 30.
We need to have a debate about that. We are generally agreed that the threshold needs to be examined. It needs to be tightened up, and some areas need to be elevated, although the level of elevation is up for debate.
We need clear criteria, and we need to have a discussion about the existing criteria to ascertain whether they need to be tightened up.
I am not happy, because the evidence that has come out of other inquiries is that not all the information that is passed to the corporate body is necessarily the right information. Because the corporate body does not meet in public, it is difficult for us to know why it has made certain decisions. We might wish to explore the matter further with the Presiding Officer or with other members of the corporate body before we come to a firm conclusion on the matter.
I do not think that the SPCB was the right body to set the criteria in the first place. That decision should probably have come to this committee in the very beginning, so that we could come to a view as to what the criteria should be. After all, this is the committee that looks after procedures. I understand why the question started to be discussed at the SPCB, in the sense that it was purely a resource issue and the SPCB is responsible for resources.
The reason why the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body got involved was to do with the issue of the Parliament's resources.
I understand that—that is why the matter was considered there first.
The matter was not raised from a procedural or political point of view; it was raised from a resource point of view. Perhaps it should have been put to the previous Procedures Committee, but those decisions were taken before my time. Are there any other thoughts on question 5?
I rather agreed with Patricia Ferguson's comments:
That raises the question: if not the bureau, then who? We do not need an immediate answer to that, but I invite members to share their thoughts on the matter.
I have expressed my view of the matter a number of times. If the business managers were to make those decisions, that would fundamentally undermine the democratic principles of the Parliament. The bureau is not the right place for such decisions, because of its political nature.
Bruce Crawford and I come to the matter from different positions. I do not share his concerns about referring part of the process to the Parliamentary Bureau. I think that the parliamentary time that is given to bills should be part of the prioritisation process. As he said, the bureau determines the time that is allocated to bills, so it is logical for it to recommend their prioritisation to Parliament. At the end of the day, the recommendation that is made by the bureau will come before the whole Parliament. That will alleviate some of the problems that Bruce Crawford identifies—the matter will be open to much greater scrutiny, because everyone is accountable for their vote. I share Jamie McGrigor's scepticism about setting up a new committee to deal with the issue.
Bruce Crawford's central point was that, if we want a prioritisation process, it has to be detailed, fair and transparent. I do not believe that the Parliamentary Bureau can be transparent; it is not designed to be transparent. I do not believe that it is fair to ask the whole Parliament—all 129 of us—to undertake the amount of investigation that would be required. The issue will come down to a vote in the Parliament on a recommendation from the bureau. That recommendation will start a war, because matters will become intensely political. The bureau's decisions will be opposed from every direction and that will undermine what the bureau is there for.
There is an assumption that the bureau's decision will not be the right one and that the bureau will not prioritise—
I never said that.
Mark Ballard is saying that there will be a fight from the start. There is an assumption that the proposals of the people who shout the loudest and kick up the biggest row would not be prioritised, but I do not think that that is necessarily the case. As a Labour member, I want to scrutinise in detail proposals that Opposition parties put forward. That is how the problems are aired. I think that the biggest problem with the present political system is that minor Opposition parties' proposals are not the subject of scrutiny in the same way that those of major Opposition parties are, so I welcome the opportunity to discuss in detail any bill proposal from any Opposition party—I do not have a problem with that. However, the assumption is that that will not happen.
The fundamental difference is that the bureau would have to make a decision after all the bills have got over the hurdle of meeting the criteria. On what grounds will the bureau make those decisions about prioritisation?
We could set the prioritisation criteria.
So we would have a hurdle—a set of criteria—that people had to get over. Are you saying that, if 20 bill proposals got over the hurdle and there were 10 too many, we should have another set of criteria on top of the first set, to decide which of the proposals should go forward?
A beauty contest.
We would have a beauty contest—that is exactly what would happen.
Why?
It would not necessarily be a beauty contest.
We have one set of criteria and we are talking about forming another set of criteria on the basis of which the bureau could make decisions. There would be two sets of criteria.
Why would that result in a beauty contest?
Are you saying that, once bill proposals have reached the stage of having got through the first hurdle, there will be another rung of criteria for how the bureau should prioritise them?
I was sure that that is what the bureau paper suggested.
No—the bureau paper suggested the use of the corporate body, once the process had been fleshed out a bit more. The bureau's paper was about getting over the first hurdle.
We could do that. We could raise the threshold for the number of people who have to sign the proposal and we could flesh out the criteria.
If 20 bill proposals get through yet there is time for only 10 bills to be considered, how will the bureau decide which 10 should get time?
We will have to prioritise them.
In what way?
On the basis of which bills the bureau thinks should proceed. The Parliament will have to decide whether to endorse the bureau's decision.
That means that the decision will be entirely political.
We are politicians. We make political decisions every day.
When there is a waiting situation at the bureau and there is no process such as one involving a committee of back benchers, it is inevitable that the Executive will have the whip hand. As Mark Ballard said, it is inevitable that there would be a fight on the floor of the chamber about which bills should get support. That would be entirely the wrong process for the Parliament to employ.
I ask you to tell me honestly; if the Procedures Committee—
I do not think that this committee should be involved.
Say it was the Procedures Committee—
I am not answering that question.
Say it was this committee, which is a committee of back benchers who were endorsed and elected by the Parliament—
We were not elected by the Parliament.
We were elected by a motion that was agreed to by the Parliament.
I do not think that the Procedures Committee should be involved.
So who should be?
I have told you—a committee of back benchers.
But we are a committee of back benchers.
It should be a committee of back benchers, elected directly by the Parliament, not one that is put in place by the business managers. As all of us know, the business managers discuss behind the scenes who goes on which committee.
Tell me what happened when we elected the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The SPCB is elected by all members of the Parliament in a secret ballot and yet all of its members are members of the four main political parties. The reality is, no matter how the voting system is constructed, it will always be that way.
That is why I said that I wanted to talk about that issue separately. We could have a process in which the constituency that the committee of back benchers represents—because of the way in which it would be elected—would have more authority, democratically speaking.
So you are suggesting a voting system in which I should lose out. I assume that you are suggesting that you take the Executive ministers out of the vote.
You are making a lot of assumptions.
Well, no, let me explore—
That is why I said—
Order.
That is why I said quite clearly that we have to decide what the process is before we can proceed. We have to get the principles sorted out.
Can we have—
You referred to the constituency of members who are able to take forward members' bills. That is what you said. The only members who would not be eligible to take forward members' bills would be the party leaders—
I did not say that.
You did. You said, "the constituency"—
I did not. I referred to the constituency from which members would be elected. I did not say who those members were. Do not put words in my mouth.
So who is the constituency?
MSPs.
Every MSP?
Obviously, every MSP would get a vote. We can discuss exactly how that would be done. I suggest that it should be done through a proportional representation system. That would allow the members who would sit on the back-bench committee to have some authority to proceed in their own right and not be subject to the parliamentary authorities.
One of the key issues is the fact that meetings of the bureau are neither open nor transparent. In many ways, given that its meetings are not open to the public, it is right that that is the case. If the bureau were to take the decisions that we are talking about, its meetings would be longer. Rather than take about 20 minutes, they would take as long as Procedures Committee meetings take; the bureau would be able to investigate witnesses and so on.
With respect, as Bruce Crawford suggested, we might at some point have a situation in which there were proposals for 20 bills and yet the Parliament had parliamentary time and clerking resources to cope with only 10 bills. If that were to happen, someone would have to make a decision as to which 10 would proceed and which 10 would not. That is not to say that, if no other bills were proposed and if the unsuccessful 10 bills met the criteria, they could not proceed at a later stage.
Arguments about which bill is more controversial will inevitably involve guessing about what will happen in future, which is something that we cannot tell. Also, we do not want to see competition between bills. If the problem is that too many bills cross the threshold, I would reluctantly agree with Karen Gillon that the threshold should be raised. That would be a fairer way of dealing with the situation than ranking different bills, which would inevitably involve subjective decisions on the merits of the bills that were being compared. If the threshold is too low, I would reluctantly agree with Karen Gillon that the proper way to manage the work flow is to raise the threshold. We should not rank bills after they have crossed the threshold, as that will not be seen to be fair and transparent.
Bruce Crawford made the point that, if such decisions were made by the Parliamentary Bureau, they would be bound to be seen as political. However, I cannot see what difference it would make having the decisions made by a committee of back benchers. The back-bench committee's decisions would be equally political. The only difference that I can see is, as Mark Ballard mentioned, that the bureau operates behind closed doors whereas, in theory, the other committee would not.
The back-bench committee would not be made up of party managers.
The problem is not simply that the bureau is made up of party managers. I am a member of the bureau not as an individual but as a representative of my party. That is quite different to my membership of this committee, on which I sit as an individual and can legitimately go against my party's line. On the bureau, I represent only my party, so it would not be right for me to go against my party's line. I am not open to convincement in the bureau in the same way as I would be in another committee. The same person might sit on both the bureau and the back-bench committee, but there would be a key difference in what they were invited to do.
I want to try to move things on slightly. We are considering three different processes. The first is the straightforward threshold that a proposal for a bill must reach before it can proceed to the next stage. The threshold is clearly an objective measure and perhaps we can discuss the various options, such as whether the threshold should be raised.
We have never been in that third situation, although we have had three occasions on which we have had problems with the second situation.
With respect, we have been in that situation. Parliament has sent bills to committees for stage 1 consideration that could not get through Parliament because of insufficient time. Parliamentary time and resources were wasted because there was no system in place. We could perhaps say that a system was in place, because the bureau should have done that prioritisation exercise, but that is contrary to the arguments that both Mark Ballard and Bruce Crawford have made about prioritisation.
The bureau should have made those decisions. It might not have done a very good job, but that is a different issue entirely.
The reality is that nearly as many members' bills have been proposed during the past year as were proposed during the first four years. That is why there will be a problem. Members have suddenly got to grips with how important the member's bill process can be and have decided to exploit it. We need to recognise that fact. The pressure will come not because anything else has changed but because members have decided to use the process more often than they did in the past. That is why we will face a problem, not necessarily this year but certainly in years 2 and 3.
We should try to get some agreement on what the process should be. Perhaps we could agree to do what the convener suggested and try to find more successful ways of using the criteria and the threshold in a way that deals with the problem that exists. We are never going to come to an agreement in this meeting about exactly which body of politicians should do the job, but we have to decide whether we are prepared to press on or not.
Let us consider the other questions in the paper. We might not come to a preferred bid, let alone a definite conclusion, in this meeting, but we should move on.
I think that the threshold should be 25 members and that they should be from more than two parties that are represented on the Parliamentary Bureau.
That is even higher than what is being suggested in the paper.
Yes.
Of the eight proposals introduced as bills and enacted in the first session of the Parliament, only three would have met that threshold.
That is assuming that people would not have worked a bit harder to get the required number of people to sign their bill proposal.
That is a valid point. When I lodged my bill, I made sure that I got cross-party support from all the Mid Scotland and Fife members and enough additional Liberal Democrats to ensure that I met the threshold. If I had required more members, I would have got them. You cannot draw conclusions from the number of signatures that were gathered for members' bills during the first session because once people had 12 signatures, they did not need to get any more.
Under the current criteria, there is a threshold issue and a support issue. The paper says:
Any threshold in the standing orders has to be in raw numbers. Whether we then put into that criteria a threshold that is not in the standing orders—
The thresholds in the matrix are: 11 supporters from three parties; 18 from two parties; or 25 from one party. That is much fairer on the smaller parties in the Parliament.
If a bill is going to get support and get through the parliamentary timetable, it will have to attract support across the parties. If it is not able to do that before it is lodged, how will it ever achieve that?
It will do so because, I hope, people will become convinced of its merits as it moves through the process. That is the reason why we have consultations and stage 1 inquiries. That is an important point. You are assuming that there is going to be no process of convincement between the initial draft bill, the bill's introduction to Parliament and stage 1. However, the purpose of the bill process is to convince people.
I would hope that there would be a process of convincement before people signed a member's proposal.
A good example of the process that Mark Ballard is describing is the Leasehold Casualties (Scotland) Bill, which became law despite being supported by only one Labour member, three Liberal Democrats, one Scottish Socialist Party member and 11 Scottish National Party members. It did not have a great deal of support when it started off, but must have attracted a heck of a lot of support by the time it got to stage 1.
The reality is that the bill's proposers got the number of signatures that were needed and no more. If more signatures had been needed, more would have been found.
More could be found only if there were no political move against the bill by a political party. A number of bills were introduced but not enacted, and where such bills were missing big chunks of support to enable them to become law, that is quite noticeable.
But you are assuming that members are not here with a mandate from an election. We should not forget that members were elected with mandates and that members stood on manifestos that were not always party manifestos—there were also individual policies. If we say that the threshold will not be raised to anything that is meaningful—if it is raised to 15 supporters, for example—there would still have to be a prioritisation and ranking exercise, because there would be too many proposals.
I am reflecting on what you said. If what you said was an opening bid, that is fair enough, but if your suggestion of 25 supporters and three parties was real, those figures are far too high. That is the point that I am trying to make. I accept that there must be some movement, but to go to that level would be to go further than is required. I would begin to feel that people were trying to exercise some control.
Why? Twenty-five members is not even a quarter of the total number.
It is, if you are saying that there must also be support from three political parties.
More than two political parties.
More than two is at least three.
No bill has progressed with support from fewer than two parties.
But that is not the question.
Many more political parties are now represented in the Parliament—there are seven—and there are many more opportunities for other parties to talk. Therefore, I do not see a problem with the threshold level that has been suggested.
We should consider not only the situation in the current session, but what new sessions might bring. Circumstances might not always be thus. We could decide on a process and end up going back to having a three-party Parliament, although that is unlikely.
Impossible.
It is not impossible. No one foresaw the level of support for the parties that are currently represented in the Parliament, although perhaps we should have done. We should not build a system that is appropriate only for the current session—we should try to build a system that will stand the test of a number of parliamentary sessions. I am not sure that what you suggest would achieve that.
Are there any other proposals? We might want a further paper on threshold options for consideration.
Options are given on page 9 of the paper. The suggestions that are shown there combine numbers of supporters with numbers of parties—from 11 to 25 supporters and three to one parties, respectively.
That is the current system, which does not work. That is why we are in this position.
That is not the current system.
Eleven supporters are required under the current system.
But that is not what Mark Ballard is saying. He is saying that 11 supporters would be one of the criteria, provided that three or more political parties supported the bill.
So the number of supporters that would be required would not be increased at all.
No, but a system would be introduced in which more parties would have to be represented, so the threshold would be raised, but not the number of supporters. You can shake your head if you like, but the threshold would be raised.
You said that there would have to be unanimity. We will not achieve unanimity if all that people want is a process in which back benchers from Executive parties have no real role. That seems to be where we are going.
No—I am saying that what you said was wrong. More than 11 supporters would be needed, and support from three political parties would be needed. It might not be thought that that is enough, but it would increase the previous threshold.
When has a bill or a proposal that has not attracted support from three political parties—
That is not the question.
It is. If we are saying that the current system does not work—
I am simply stating a fact.
Hang on. Mark Ballard is making a proposal that does not fundamentally change much. Which bills did not attract signatures of support from members of three political parties?
I am not commenting on who is right or wrong. I am saying that when we make statements, we must ensure that they are right and what you said was wrong.
From a quick look, it seems that at least four bills in the first session would not have matched those criteria.
Which ones?
They did not become acts, but they were bills. I presume that they were bills that went to stage 1.
Yes—the proposals were on residential fire sprinklers, home education and bus re-regulation.
They did not go to stage 1.
We are all agreed that the threshold needs to be raised.
The Gaelic Language (Scotland) Bill—
I rest my case.
The Gaelic Language (Scotland) Bill would have been stopped by the threshold that is proposed in the paper.
It should have been—the threshold should have been introduced much earlier.
Order. We should not get into a discussion about the merits of individual bills. We are considering whether the threshold should be raised. There is general agreement that it should be, but we need to thrash out possible options for how to do that. Perhaps we should come back to the matter at a later date.
Perhaps the party managers who are here—
Are we going to discuss consultation?
We have agreed that we will consider the criteria, one of which is that either consultation must be undertaken or the member must show that consultation is not required because it has been done previously. The fundamental point is that proposed bills should conform to certain rules on consultation.
The importance of consultation is that it shows whether the bill will be short or long.
I agree. Consultation is fundamental to the criteria that will be considered.
I remember Keith Harding saying that he thought that his Dog Fouling (Scotland) Bill would take a short time and have about two sections, but it ended up with 18 sections.
I thought that my member's bill would have only one line, but it turned out to be a page and a half long.
The point has bearing on the amount of parliamentary time that is required.
Absolutely. We need to ensure that one of the criteria is that the consultation should cover those issues.
That is unanimous. At least we have agreement on something.
Yes they do. Members get support from NEBU in drafting consultation papers.
They use up resources.
How would members get publicity for proposals?
A number of the bills that are being considered in the current session were proposed in the previous session and most of the consultation on them was conducted in the previous session. For example, the Breastfeeding etc (Scotland) Bill started in the previous session.
Members can submit proposals, but that does not mean that any work will be done on them. There is no reason to have a constraint on proposals.
We must be clear about what we are saying. Once a proposal has gone through a consultation process and is seen to be popular, pressure is put on the Parliament—people ask why the Parliament has not done anything about the proposal. We are in danger of creating a rod for our own backs. If we set a cut-off point but still allow members to introduce proposals that might be popular and receive huge support in the consultation process, pressure might be put on the Parliament from all the bodies that support the proposal to ask why parliamentary time is not being found for a proposal that the people of Scotland clearly want.
That is what the system is all about.
I am just saying that we should be very careful. I have seen the pressure.
Ninety per cent of the responses to the consultation on my proposal for a litter bill in the previous session of Parliament were favourable. Eventually, the Executive implemented much of what I was trying to achieve. However, that proposal could not proceed because the Executive was carrying out a consultation process.
I am not saying that we should not be allowed to make proposals, but members must be clear that if a proposal is made after the cut-off point, they will not get a bill into the parliamentary timetable. That must also be made clear to the outside world, because we might come under intense pressure to find parliamentary time for a popular proposal that is made in the final year of a session.
If a proposal is made after the cut-off point for introducing bills, we will get nowhere near the stage of a bill being lodged in that session of Parliament—
Plenty of folk lodge bill proposals at the very beginning and never do any work on them, because they never intend to. How does one judge whether someone is serious at the beginning of the process?
At the same time, in terms of the overall parliamentary timetable, some members' bills are on the shelf. If such bills were to proceed earlier in the new session, that would help to relieve some of the pressure. For example, the Prostitution Tolerance Zones (Scotland) Bill is the only member's bill that has been introduced in this session.
That is a good point.
As long as we do not raise false expectations.
I agree.
Perhaps we should impose a limit. I am just throwing this on the wall. We could limit the number of proposals to five, which would focus proposals and minds, and have an effect on the number of proposals that members will never work on and which will never see the light of day.
The CSG report referred to two bill proposals, not two bills.
We have not taken evidence on proposals at any stage. We have talked only about bills.
This is part of limiting the pressure on the system. I am asking the question to find the answer.
Members do not lodge proposals to put pressure on the system; they do it for publicity purposes. It is a mechanism.
In that case, if we limit the number of proposals, that will help to focus minds and stop NEBU time being used to support consultation on bills that will never be introduced.
But NEBU told us that that is not the nub point. The nub point comes after the consultation is finished.
I am not saying that it is the nub point. I am just saying that it may be another tool in our toolbox that will help us to focus members' minds so that they are doing things not just for publicity, but because they want to introduce a bill.
Do we have any data on how many bills members proposed in the previous session? I cannot spot the data in the paper.
I am sure that there was information about the number of proposals and the number that did not proceed.
But I cannot spot anything that lists—
It is not laid out member by member.
Yes.
That should not be too difficult to find, because there was a limited number. We can produce a list of the bill proposals and who made them. The information should be readily available.
I know that Robin Harper had a problem with the first proposal that he introduced for a bill on organic food and farming targets. He had to introduce a second proposal, because his initial one had problems. Giving members the flexibility to withdraw and then reapply will mean that we will get better legislation, instead of forcing members to go ahead with proposals that are problematic, because the slots have run out.
We can look into that in detail at some point.
I imagine that the end of September would be about right. Do members agree that that would be a reasonable cut-off point for the introduction of a bill?
We move to the four options on the way forward. Do members want to make a decision on those four options today? Do we agree to re-examine the criteria issues before doing so?
If there are options that we are definitely ruling out, it may be worth our doing that now.
As soon as I suggest something, someone else will disagree with me. There is no point in our having that discussion.
If there is unanimity about ruling out an option, that will be fine, but I do not think that there is.
I was agreeing only to leave the discussion until later.
I was saying that if there were unanimity about ruling out an option, we could have done that, but I do not think that there is.
It all depends on what other decisions are taken.
At a future meeting, we will report on issues to do with the criteria and discuss those in more detail. We will also consider options for thresholds.
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