Standards Committee, 29 Sep 1999

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 29, 1999

Official Report 111KB pdf

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Code of Conduct

Members of the committee will have received all the relevant papers. The committee is invited to consider the attached drafts of the introduction and key principles of the code of conduct for members and to agree texts.

Remembering that we shall come back to this when the whole code of conduct is written, I want to go through the introduction and key principles. Do members want to do it page by page?

Members indicated agreement.

On the first page of the introduction, we can see the amendments that have been made. Are there any points that members want to raise? If not, let us move on to the second page. Is everybody happy with the introduction as amended?

Members indicated agreement.

We have accepted the introduction to the code of conduct.

We now move on to the key principles of the code of conduct. The first page deals with public duty and duty as a representative.

Is it necessary to include the oath of allegiance in a code of conduct? We have already taken the oath, so why are we putting it in the code of conduct? What we are really talking about is the conduct and behaviour of MSPs; we are dealing with an on-going code of conduct, so I do not see why the oath should be included?

There was genuine disagreement about that.

We have had a long and full discussion on the wording of that point. It is there and it is a statement of fact. At the previous meeting, members agreed that it is appropriate for it to remain in the code of conduct. We reached agreement on that at our previous meeting, so I think that we should move on, convener.

Your objections were noted, Adam and Tricia.

Yes.

We move on to duty as a representative, and then to the headings of selflessness, integrity and—

Let me first read the paragraph on duty as a representative, as the wording has changed.

Are we happy to proceed?

Members indicated agreement.

Karen, are you happy to proceed?

Yes.

The next page includes the headings of selflessness, integrity, honesty, and accountability and openness.

We have always had the problem with overlap, but perhaps good things bear repetition.

I do not want us to strike out honesty, accountability or openness.

We should reorganise the accountability and openness section slightly. The opening sentence should be the one that states:

"Members are accountable for their decisions and actions to the Scottish people".

That should be sentence one.

Sentence two should be:

"They have a duty to consider issues on their merits, taking account of the views of others."

Sentence three should be that they also have a duty to be as open as possible about those decisions and actions.

Those are the three elements and that would be consistent with the language that we are using.

I believe that that third sentence was struck out, do you want it back in?

This is the second part of the second sentence.

Are you saying that we should reverse those two points?

I am suggesting that we start with accountability and go on to a duty to consider issues on their merits, taking account of the views of others. The third sentence should be that they also have a duty to be as open as possible about those decisions and actions. That would remove the part that states that members are responsible for the decisions that they take, which is superfluous as it is obvious.

Okay, we will do that. We will now move on to leadership.

The only point that I will make on leadership is that we have consistently changed everything else to say that members have a duty, so to be consistent we should say that members have a duty to promote and support.

That is a fair point. We will do that.

Thank you very much. If members could remain behind for some housekeeping matters, we will close the meeting at this point.

Meeting closed at 10:57.