Committee Substitutes
We come to the paper on substitution on committees, which was produced late in the day—we apologise for that. The remit to come up with a paper on substitutes was given last week, although we knew it was coming. A paper has been circulating, but it was cleared by the various parties that had to be consulted only yesterday, hence its late arrival by e-mail yesterday evening.
A number of issues have been discussed previously, although by only three of us. The paper asks us to take a view on a narrow range of issues for decision. We were slow to come in this morning because we attempted, as we normally do, to have a little chat before the meeting about how we might take the discussion. We found that many issues arose on the matter that were not covered in the paper. For example, what happens if we have one named party substitute for a committee and two party members are sick? If a committee of seven members was dealing with a bill, that would raise a material issue. Is a party prepared to have amendments or motions defeated in committee because it is unable to cover for someone who is ill or otherwise absent? Does the one named substitute automatically get the papers, including the private papers? Does that person have the right to come to the committee without notice? Should that person be allowed simply to opt in and out of committee work? In my circumstances, I can imagine dividing the work of a committee between me and a deputy, who would replace me for certain items of committee business.
Many such issues that were not addressed by the paper arose in the course of our discussion. We find ourselves in a difficult position, because the Parliament is keen to agree on and establish substitutes quickly. I remain nervous that we have not consulted particularly widely. I referred to the paper having been circulated internally—I meant by that that it had been circulated within the directorate of clerking and reporting. We do not have views from other members on how substitution will work. We do not have an especially clear steer from anyone, because there has been no official consultation response from anyone.
Although it is difficult to give the committee a comprehensive list now, we thought that we might usefully talk through some of the issues, including any that members want to ventilate. We could devise some kind of questionnaire, which we will circulate among all our colleagues, to seek their opinions. As part of that process, the views of business managers would be canvassed. The questionnaire would result in the publication of a summary that would not identify the views of any individuals. However, in addition to individual input, we would want the business managers to speak for their parties. The conveners group might reasonably have views on substitution as well.
I am not anxious to hurry on this and to get it wrong. I would rather take the necessary time—if that means that the Parliament has to work for a few weeks without substitutes, so be it. We have done it for a year and a half and we have survived. We would be better to take time, to consult and to come back with a considered report, which reflected the views of as big a majority as we can assemble behind the suggestions. I throw that suggestion to you for your consideration, ladies and gentlemen.
A questionnaire is a good idea, but we should perhaps include a tick box so that members can say whether they are a front bencher, a back bencher or a committee convener. In the short time that I have had this draft report, I have made a few notes. For example, given the powers invested in subs, why do we not make them full members? Frankly, it seems silly to call them substitutes in the first place.
Let us take the Local Government Committee, whose membership has been reduced to seven, and which will have one sub. That committee has to consider the Kerley report, conduct an inquiry into local government finance—the committee has to conduct that inquiry because the Executive will not do it—and consider a local government bill. In all, it will have to consider five or six big chunks of legislation. A substitute in that context would have to keep themselves up to date—they could wander in the door some day and participate in a vote. It has been difficult enough for members of the committee to keep everything in the air, particularly over the past six months. It would be impossible for a substitute to understand everything that was going on at the drop of a hat, as it would be for a member who attended meetings only when their direct interests came into play.
I find it difficult to get my head round how the system would work. God forbid that each party's substitutes walk into a meeting on the same day—that could happen. Do parties get two substitutes each? Where would that leave Tommy Sheridan or Dennis Canavan?
There is also the idea of a proxy vote. If that were accepted, it would pay members to stay in bed and send somebody else to a meeting. They would in effect have two votes.
Or four.
Yes. We are skating on thin ice. The substitutes proposal has been made for committees that have recently been chopped in size. It is a mechanism to take care of what is, quite frankly, a stupid change. The proposal on substitutes is just window dressing to make the reduction in the size of the committees work. I do not think that it will work, no matter what we do.
The suggestion at our previous meeting was, on the whole, reasonable: that there should be named substitutes, and that a party's business manager or whip would produce a chitty of some sort, saying that A N Other was substituting for J Smith. I do not accept what the report says about what happens when two people in a party are ill at once. They merely nominate two substitutes. If a party wants to say that a certain person will normally be the substitute—they have first call—and that person tries to keep abreast of developments in the relevant committee's work, that is fair enough. However, I think that substitutes ought to be nominated on individual occasions. That would mean substituting a member for another member and allowing the substitute to vote; it would not be like swapping voting cards.
It would just be impossible for the substitute to keep up to speed. Some European institutions have substitutes, but they have no other job, so they get all the papers. I think that the Committee of the Regions has involved substitutes, certainly in the past. Because the substitutes had nothing else to do, they could read the papers and keep up to speed, but that is not the reality here. The best that we could expect would be for the person who must be absent to brief the substitute on the line that he or she would take.
Given the party political tensions that arise, substitutes must probably be agreed. What we recommended last time is fair enough, but if other members want to discuss it further, that is fine.
I want to clarify something. The suggestion was that we should have a named party substitute for each committee. The point was made that we should try to identify a regular substitute, who would have a better chance of knowing about the issues that a committee was dealing with and of being able to contribute from a relatively informed position.
Our difficulty this morning has been that we are trying to graft on the idea of additional replacements if the substitute could not attend a meeting. In discussing that, you appear to be talking about a two-tier substitution system, but I am not sure that that is necessarily what you mean. I am referring to the idea of having a named substitute and, in addition, the ability to bring in other people as and when necessary—for example, to preserve the voting balance on a bill. It would be accepted that those people had not followed the consideration of the bill and that they were not up to speed with the work of the committee, but were there simply to vote.
Such a situation is inescapable if we seek to have substitution. The principle of having a person on standby in each party to fill in for any colleague who might not be able to attend gives the substitute a chance of developing a reasonable degree of knowledge and continuity.
I acknowledge that point, but the point that is made in the paper is that people such as you or me, convener, who are the only members of our respective parties on a committee, would have a named substitute. What if the substitute and I were both in a car crash and neither of us could come? The party should be able to nominate somebody else. If Labour's representation was too light in number for whatever reason, the party should be able to nominate two people. The idea of having a reserve is reasonable. With the reduction in the size of committees, I think that one or two people in our party will be asked to attend committees fairly regularly, although not as voting members. Ultimately, it must be open to the party whip to nominate a substitute on each occasion, although the substitute would regularly be the same person.
I agree with Donald Gorrie that we covered some of the same points at our previous meeting. I was happy enough with them then. I do not understand some of Gil Paterson's comments: I think that he is getting confused with the debate that we had recently on committee restructuring. He should bear it in mind that we have been discussing substitutes on committees for a long time. That discussion predates by far discussion of committee restructuring.
Does it?
I am not sure whether last week's debate has left Gil with a sour taste in his mouth—there is perhaps a bit of that creeping in. I do not understand what the issue is. Two members of my party are not at this meeting, for different reasons.
The question of substitutes is well recognised. We must be careful. I refer members to our previous discussions about a named person being allowed to substitute. If that person wants to keep up to speed on the issues that a given committee is considering, so much the better. We need to be careful about whether we are simply allowing people to be chosen to go to a committee.
The convener mentioned the possibility of a member using a substitute from their party for part of a committee meeting. I have concerns about that. That is in no way the spirit in which discussions on substitutions have taken place. I believe that a list has been produced of the reasons that could preclude a named person from being at a committee, which include, I recall, sickness and emergency constituency business. A substitute would be able to take that person's place in such circumstances. We must take care in deciding why we use substitutes. We are getting away from the original arguments that were proposed.
That said, I understand Donald Gorrie's point about there being one or two members of his party who will be asked to attend committee meetings, presumably because the party's spokesman has an interest in the discipline being discussed, or because it is felt that the work load is best managed by two people.
I can understand the justification for a party being entitled to only one vote on any matter. One of the distinct advantages of the revised smaller committee structure is that members will have time to go to other committees. There have been occasions in the past year and a half when members have gone to other committees and have not felt entirely welcome; they have felt like outsiders—that they are extraneous—and conveners have given them short shrift. If we are genuinely saying that additional people should go to committees, we should perhaps be more flexible. A party may have only one vote and the official member of the committee may be the person who votes, but is it unreasonable for a couple of people working together to split the work load between them?
I find having to read every paper on every issue and being a spokesman a heavy burden, especially as I am on two committees. I do not know how Labour members organise their work load, but if there are four or five of them on a committee, it is more realistic for them to divide up any research or background work that must be done to advance a particular argument. We must examine the process from everybody's point of view and appreciate that different groups of different sizes might have different ways of looking at things. That is another reason why I want to progress on the basis of a survey of opinion.
Gil Paterson made a point about differentiating between conveners and ministers and so on. I do not know whether that is valid, but it might be reasonable to differentiate by party affiliation. I am extemporising as we go through. I have a way of looking at this, which is dictated by my party's circumstances—not by my political viewpoint. We have one member per committee, so I look at this in a different way from Janis Hughes. Her viewpoint is not political either; it is just that the Labour party has a different perspective because there are more Labour members and there are many of them on each committee.
It might be pertinent for us to examine the issue on a party basis. If it emerges that a majority of MSPs take a view on a particular aspect, and that the Labour MSPs take one view and, say, the Liberal and Conservative MSPs take another, that will give us a basis on which to ask, "Are we trying to share the power? Are we trying to come up with a decision that respects everybody's interests and points of view?" I do not know what the committee thinks of that suggestion, but I offer it to members.
It is fairly reasonable. I am asking that the views of back benchers in particular be identified. Not only are most of them on the back benches, but they are on the back burner. It is reasonable to suggest that there may be a party political element to people's views and it is fair to register it. The more information we gather, the more we will benefit from the exercise.
We would have to promise that it would not be possible for anyone to cross-refer, and that nobody's views would be distinguishable. We would present views only as being those of a party or of back benchers as a group. We would not identify back benchers from a party, because that would narrow down the results too far.
Such a survey would be helpful. You have persuaded me that a sort of job share is worth considering. Previously, I would have thought that it was out of the box, but it is worth considering. The one thing that is not worth considering is proxy votes. The idea that one person can come along and cast two votes is absolutely out.
Six members of a committee could take a decision, with a four to two vote, but it would not be valid because the committee was inquorate.
Or a member could turn up and vote on behalf of everybody. I have been consistent since the start; I do not hold with Janis Hughes's view that the proposals on substitutes and committee restructuring are unrelated. This is the selling job on the restructuring that we undertook last week. I will wait for the results of the survey.
The general view is that a survey would be a good idea, but I remind members of what we said:
"We think a substitution system should probably be used sparingly. The members of committees should aim to attend all or the vast majority of their committee meetings. It is important to maintain a stable committee membership."
I am concerned that the discussion is moving well away from that. We must be careful about how the questions in the survey are phrased. I want to ask questions on the original concept of a substitute, which was that substitutes should be used when members cannot attend committees for emergency reasons. The discussion is now going in a completely different direction.
You say that that was the original concept, but whose original concept was it? The report is credited to the clerking and reporting directorate, but that might mean a single official of the Parliament. The committee's role is to consider the issues and, as we discuss them, to tease out other points. What we have discussed this morning may include a lot of stuff that is off the wall, which we will consider and knock back, but we must proceed on the basis that everything is considered.
The survey will detect what members think. I do not feel overly constrained by the report. The theory is that such reports are mine and that I present them to the committee, but I do not know one thing about them until they arrive by e-mail. That is a wee fiction that we should perhaps strip away. Perhaps there should be a named person on reports, rather than the directorate name. We will blame Carol McCracken, but it may well have been Elizabeth Watson—who knows?
I wish to respond to Janis Hughes's point. I agree entirely that substitutes should be used as sparingly as possible. I thought that whips would write a chitty—which is in effect a sort of parental sick note—saying that because J Smith is unable to go to a committee meeting, due to a family bereavement or the fact that he is in hospital or whatever, R Brown is nominated as a substitute. It is up to the whip to testify that the substitution is a genuine necessity. That would address the point that was made.
That brings back memories of years of staffroom humour at the various ways in which diarrhoea is spelled, or at least begun to be spelled and then scored out to be replaced by something more graphic.
God forbid that I see a good use for a whip, but it may be a good idea in the situation that we are discussing. There is a serious point: our job is to scrutinise. Do not forget that substitutes will have commitments elsewhere. If substitutes are doing their job correctly, they will be busy people, which might mean that they do not pay as much attention to their substitute committee as they should. The whips might be a useful beast—I will take a raincheck on that.
You cannot take that comment out of the Official Report, I am afraid.
That is why I included the raincheck—as a health warning.
We have agreed that we will identify a grid of reasonably appropriate questions. We will issue a survey early in the new year and will try, in presenting the findings of that survey, to tease out the views of back benchers and to get different perspectives from the various political groups. Our ultimate recommendations will try to balance everyone's interests and points of view as best we can, bringing to bear the magisterial sagacity for which the committee is justifiably famed—it is too near the end of the year, is it not?
I hope that the survey will be done as timeously as possible, because I am conscious that this issue has been on the go for some time and that committee restructuring is about to happen.
I agree absolutely.
Substitutes and committee restructuring are not connected.
Behave, children.