Procedures Committee,

Meeting date: Tuesday, May 23, 2000

Official Report 195KB pdf

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Oral Questions (Presiding Officer)

Item 5 is on the issues raised in correspondence from Donald Gorrie and Margo MacDonald on oral questions to the Presiding Officer in his role as convener of the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. It also relates to two other points that Donald raised.

I think that Margo MacDonald went out to try to cool off.

Meeting adjourned.

On resuming—

The recommendation in the report was that we should receive papers on the various issues in the fullness of time. The clerk, Janis Hughes and I had a chat about those matters this morning. I am of the view that there is an opportunity within standing orders at the moment for the Presiding Officer to take oral questions.

The standing order in question deals with exceptional circumstances. I imagine that when the standing orders were devised, it was envisaged that exceptional circumstances might arise once in a blue moon in relation to something specific that happened in the chamber. We have fairly significant exceptional circumstances at present in that the Presiding Officer is effectively heading up the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body in a major procurement exercise. If this Parliament runs for 300 years, that might never happen again, so it might reasonably be seen as an exceptional circumstance.

I am concerned that there is no facility at the moment for a question-and-answer session. While I would be reluctant to see the Presiding Officer harried to death on oral questions routinely, there is a justification for inviting the Parliamentary Bureau, the Presiding Officer and Deputy Presiding Officers to consider whether, when and how frequently it might be appropriate to take questions on the procurement. If it is not done by that method, it will be done by press attack, sporadic questioning and points of order. I do not think that any of that is efficient.

I am not sufficiently close to these events to know when and how often such question sessions should be arranged, but there must be an opportunity for members to ask questions. We would be seen to be in dereliction of our responsibilities if we did not.

We also talked about whether we could ask such questions through the SPCB, because all the political parties are represented on the SPCB, with the exception of the single member parties. We came to the view that the SPCB collectively is procuring the project, so it is not for the party representatives on the SPCB to ask questions; if anything, it is for them to be questioned. The best way for questions to be asked properly would be through questions to the Presiding Officer.

I am not sure that any change to standing orders is necessary, as this seems to be a matter of interpreting existing standing orders. If members are happy to do so, we could quickly make an appropriate inquiry to the Presiding Officer and the Parliamentary Bureau to find out their understanding of the current position. If we indeed have to change standing orders, we will at least know, and we can decide whether that has to be done urgently. I hope that the fact that this issue has been raised will have concentrated everyone's mind on how we can build such questioning into a regular pattern of work.

I throw that point out to members as an extension to the report. As I say, we had a briefing this morning and a further chat about the issue, and I wanted to set my thoughts out to you.

I would have to question who should decide whether something is extraordinary. We are talking about the Holyrood project. No matter who is heading a project or a programme—whether it is the Presiding Officer or anyone else—the democracy of the Parliament comes first, and that person has to be questioned. I got the feeling that Sir David thought that he did not have to answer any questions.

I feel that there is a deficiency in the standing orders. When a controversial issue—or any issue—arises, it should not be extraordinary for MSPs to ask questions; that should be their right. We have to be able to get answers—if not from Sir David then from someone else.

Standing orders allow the Presiding Officer to be questioned in exceptional circumstances. Ordinarily, he would be the judge of that; ordinarily, those circumstances would be when a member felt that an instant answer was required on an issue and the Presiding Officer agreed. The procurement of the Parliament building is not a bolt from the blue; it is an exceptional process. Under existing standing orders, it ought to be possible for the Presiding Officer to agree to answer questions and it ought to be possible for him to agree the timetabling with the Parliamentary Bureau.

I suggest that, rather than change the standing orders to invent a new procedure, we invite the Parliamentary Bureau to consider whether the standing orders would allow the timetabling of a question-and-answer session in the relatively near future so that the matter could be explored. As events required it thereafter, that exercise could be repeated. There would always be accountability to the Parliament. The alternative is to conclude that the current standing orders do not permit such questioning. We would then have to decide whether we were going to recommend a change. That would be a more protracted process.

If we leave the matter in Sir David's hands in this instance, he may decide that there is nothing special about it; however, if an Exocet missile happens to hit the site and brings on additional costs, and we—

That might reduce the costs, Gil.

Yes, things might end up cheaper, but we would be within our rights to ask questions if something extraordinary happened.

I would be unhappy about a situation in which the person who decided whether a question could be asked was the person who was being asked the question. The Presiding Officer is not refereeing on whether a minister can be questioned; he is refereeing on whether he himself should be questioned. That is a deficiency.

If members felt that the Presiding Officer was not making himself answerable in an appropriate way, I think that there would be legitimate concern about accountability and there would very possibly be a requirement for the committee to consider changing the standing orders. However, at the moment, I think that this situation can be accommodated without changing the standing orders.

I do not believe that it can be accommodated within the standing orders. I think that there is complete incompatibility between the Presiding Officer being, on the one hand, supra-party, supra-Executive and supposedly the protector of the back bencher but, on the other hand, the executive authority. He has such authority for this, the biggest and most obvious project that the Parliament has.

I do not blame David Steel personally; he has been put in an impossible position. Last week, the Presiding Officer explained that the corporate body had been very surprised at the amount of money it would cost to disassemble, store and reconstruct the temporary Parliament and that the decision had been landed on it. As a back bencher, I have every right to ask who landed the corporate body with that decision and whether they are still part of the project team.

I have experience of trying to cut through this matter and have tried questions and letters—I have a selection of them here if anyone wants to look at them. We are asking the Presiding Officer to act in a political way in answering me or any other back bencher, but that is not the Presiding Officer's role. We have to re-examine how this project is handled and how it is accounted for, although I accept that it is extraordinary.

You are asking us to readdress a decision that the Parliament has taken. I do not say for a moment that your diagnosis is wrong—it may be absolutely right, but the project has been given to the SPCB and Sir David is answerable for it. We cannot go back and unscramble that decision, but we can examine how accountability can be built in. It should be possible to interpret or, if necessary, amend our practices to allow that to happen. We need to find the quickest and most efficient way in which those questions can be asked. I agree that they should be asked, but I do not think that we can reopen the question of who has responsibility for the project. The Parliament can do that if it wishes, but it has twice decided that the SPCB will head up the project. Ultimately, that decision will be the responsibility of the Parliament.

What do we do about the role of arbitration and whether an issue is sufficiently extraordinary or enough of an emergency to be taken as an emergency question? That matter, too, cropped up. We had the difficulty of the Presiding Officer being unable to answer verbally. I would maintain that there was an emergency, in that the main Parliament project was left without a project head and without a head architect. That is the situation in which we have been for several weeks.

That is why I would like there to be a question session. I do not think that we can address this matter by nailing Sir David down to answer questions almost daily, whenever something happens.

I do not want us to do that; that would be dreadful.

It would be better to have a proper timetabled question session in which these matters can be explored, and for the Presiding Officer and the bureau to have the sense and judgment to programme such sessions as often as they are required to deal with genuine questions and concerns. We have to move from the present situation, in which things are clearly not being handled properly, to the point where they are built into the timetable.

Can I ask for guidance on this?

Let us assume that your advice is followed and that there is a structured accountability session in which the Presiding Officer answers for the project: what happens if the answers do not satisfy the Parliament? Would a vote of no confidence be moved against the Presiding Officer as the Presiding Officer, or the Presiding Officer as the head of the project?

I do not know the answer to that—I will think about it. I cannot work out the answer to every conceivable situation. We have to tease out such questions as we encounter different circumstances. The very fact of discussion, dialogue, questioning and accountability would move us a long way forward and would be a useful start.

The best we can say about the Holyrood project is that the progressing committee is being progressed. I think that there is some movement on that committee and I hope that it will be in place reasonably soon, as the Parliament instructed. The Presiding Officer is keen to give a new progress report on Holyrood to the Parliament, and he is keen that there should be regular progress reports to the Parliament. A question time could be scheduled for a few days after any progress report is issued, so that questions can be asked about the report.

There are some peculiarities to deal with. The SPCB is set up in statute in a specific way and is not a very easy body to understand. It is not directly accountable to Parliament, because it has its own statutory powers. Although that might be a deficiency in the Scotland Act 1998, the position is that the SPCB is responsible for the Parliament and has its own statutory status.

There are two issues to address: first, as Margo MacDonald highlighted, the debate about the Holyrood project; secondly, Donald Gorrie's more general point about how back benchers can question the Presiding Officer in any of his capacities. The convener has made a helpful suggestion of a regularly scheduled question-and-answer session to the Presiding Officer. However, in the meantime, rule 13.9 of the standing orders states quite specifically that, in exceptional circumstances, the Presiding Officer should answer oral questions that are put to him. I hope that if the Presiding Officer receives that message from the meeting today, he will understand the importance that we attach to the issue. Although it is not for this committee to discuss the ins-and-outs of the Holyrood project, there will always be such exceptional circumstances and we should remind the Presiding Officer that we expect him to use rule 13.9 of the standing orders.

I do not want this committee to discuss the Holyrood project; I merely used it as an example.

It would be fine if we could construct a viable system of oral questions without changing the standing orders. It is slightly stretching the English language to have a facility for regular emergency questions, although I am all for stretching the English language if it helps.

The idea that all MSPs will be dead happy with everything that the SPCB does once the Holyrood building is built is an illusion. Although there might not be the same exciting rows, there will be great angst about such issues as the use of the carpark or the cut in our writing paper allowance. MSPs will continue to ask the SPCB questions. If there is some reason why it is considered indelicate for the Presiding Officer to step down from his pedestal and answer questions, it might be possible to appoint someone else as spokesperson for the SPCB. I would not find such a suggestion unacceptable.

I should make it clear that Margo and I were suggesting that there should be questions to the Presiding Officer only in his role as convener of the SPCB. We could not have an arrangement in which MSPs could ask the Presiding Officer why, for example, he ruled their amendments out of order. As with a lord provost or a speaker, a Presiding Officer makes his decisions and we have to live with them.

As Iain Smith pointed out, perhaps the Scotland Act 1998 was not so cleverly drafted as it has the curious effect that the Presiding Officer and the person who is effectively the managing director of Scottish Parliament plc are the same person.

The word used in the standing orders is not "emergency" but "exceptionally". It is important to make that distinction. You are discussing how the Presiding Officer can be questioned. It is likely to happen only in exceptional circumstances because most questions to the Presiding Officer would be along the lines of, "You ruled me out of order—why?" and the Presiding Officer cannot be held to account on that basis.

The word "exceptionally" applies in circumstances that are exceptional. We have an exceptional situation, in that the Presiding Officer, as head of the corporate body, is responsible for a major building project. Other matters may come up that involve the SPCB, but I doubt that it will ever again be responsible for a project as big as this one. I would be interested to establish whether the standing orders allow us to timetable questions to the Presiding Officer, which he could answer in his capacity as head of the SPCB. If the Presiding Officer's interpretation is that that would not be acceptable under the existing standing orders, we will need to re-examine them. However, I believe that there is a shortcut here that enables us to deal with this issue satisfactorily. Sorry, Andy, I seem to have cut across you.

That is fine. I wanted to say something very similar to that.

Do we agree to proceed on that basis?

Members indicated agreement.

We will report back on the responses that we receive. At our next meeting, we will have an opportunity to come back to the issue if we are unhappy about the way in which it is developing.

I think we should have a shot at doing what you have suggested, convener, but it is untidy.

Two other issues were raised in Donald Gorrie's letter. One related to the content of members' motions; it would be appropriate for us to bring that to the attention of the bureau. Last week, for example, we had a very good debate on Barlinnie, which raised a number of interesting issues and received a reasonable amount of coverage. As it happened, the debate was initiated by a Glasgow member. It would be a pity if it were impossible for that issue to be raised except by a Glasgow member.

If we were to trawl through all the members' debates, we would probably find plenty of similar examples. Had John Farquhar Munro or another Highland member not wanted to raise the issue of the Cuillins, would it have been impossible for us to discuss it? The bureau should be reasonably flexible when deciding whether debates should be limited to specific constituency matters or whether they can include more general policy issues. I do not know what Iain Smith can tell us about the private meetings of the politburo.

Guidance for members' business has been issued and is based on the consultative steering group's report. It does not exclude consideration of wider issues. Indeed, if we carried out an analysis of members' business debates we would probably find that the majority have been on general matters, rather than specific local issues. We are reasonably flexible in this regard, although the intention is to give members an opportunity that they would not otherwise have to raise matters of concern to their constituents.

Is that sufficient, Donald?

If a member wanted to lodge a motion on youth clubs, for example, the chamber office would advise them that if they mentioned a specific youth club in their area they would have more chance of getting it debated. That seems rather silly, but it is what the chamber office understands the bureau's attitude to be.

We will ensure that the chamber office sees the relevant extract from the Official Report of this meeting. Members do not have to mention a specific youth club or whatever in their motion because the chamber office says that that is a good idea.

Our aim in members' business is to select motions on which there will not be a division. If they relate too closely to policy, people are more likely to submit amendments because they do not agree with a particular policy. If they relate to items of particular local concern, they are more likely to be regarded as a general debate on which there will be no division at the end. If a member insists on lodging a motion that does not exactly meet the criteria laid down by the bureau, the chamber office will still put it forward for consideration for members' business. It is not excluded.

The final point in Donald's letter is about changes to the committee structure. I wonder whether to some degree it has been overtaken by events. It would be useful for the committee to have advice on the implications for standing orders and procedure of any changes to the structure and remits of committees, as those are defined in standing orders. Any changes would be likely to involve work for us.

You are right. Changes to the statutory committees would have to come before the Procedures Committee, as they would require changes to standing orders. Changes to other committees can be done on a motion of the Parliamentary Bureau under existing standing orders.

Those things can be included.

The issue will arise again at some stage.

I do not know that we will put a report on the agenda, but if the clerk could consider the matter, we can circulate an interpretation by e-mail so that it is set down and we have all seen it if it needs to be put on a committee agenda in future. Is that fair enough?

Members indicated agreement.