Chamber and committees

Good morning and welcome to the first meeting of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee of session 7. We have received no apologies.

This committee has a unique role in the Parliament. We are guardians of the Parliament’s standards, as set out in the code of conduct for MSPs, and of the Parliament’s rules, as set out in our standing orders. This is a privileged place and, no doubt, we will have some substantial issues to discuss. Party politics will never be fully absent from our work, but there is a special responsibility on all of us to leave our party hats—if I may put it that way—at the door. I hope that we form a collaborative and trusting relationship; I am committed to doing so.

Our first agenda item is a declaration of interests. Each member of the committee must make their declaration of interests relevant to the remit of the committee. As the clerk’s paper explains, if you think that you have relevant declarations to make, you should do so in a reasonably clear and transparent manner. I remind you also that this is a general declaration of interests—we also have a duty to make declarations where necessary in relation to specific items of business that we may have in future.

I will start. Per my entry in the register of members’ interests, I have no registered interests to declare. However, I have made declarations of voluntary interests, which include that I am a member of the Islay Energy Trust and RSPB Scotland, and a trustee of the Museum of Islay Life. I do not derive any financial benefit from any of those. I also have a shareholding in the Islay Energy Community Benefit Society, which returns, on average, 4 per cent interest per year.

I turn to committee members, in alphabetical order.

I welcome Tim to the role.

Our third agenda item is a decision on whether to take items 4, 5 and 6 in private. Item 4 is consideration of correspondence from the Presiding Officer about his guidance on conduct in the chamber. Item 5 is consideration of whether to modify the party representation requirement for cross-party groups as set out in the code of conduct. Item 6 is consideration of our work programme. Do members agree to take those items in private?

Our fourth agenda item concerns a recent letter from the Presiding Officer. It is about two documents, both of which have the word “guidance” in the name, so I will try to keep my comments as clear as I can. First, there is the PO’s new “Guidance on Conduct in the Chamber”, which was issued earlier this month. Secondly, there is the “Guidance on the Code of Conduct for Members of the Scottish Parliament”. Our committee owns, as it were, the guidance on the MSP code of conduct, and it is for us to decide on any revisions to it. The PO’s letter—sorry, the Presiding Officer’s letter—asks us to consider how best to incorporate reference to his guidance in our guidance.

This is a good early reminder of the committee’s role as guardian, in effect, of the code of conduct and its interpretation through documents such as our guidance.

The clerks have set out two proposals for updating our guidance. The first is to follow precedent by summarising, within the guidance on the code, some of the key information that is in the Presiding Officer’s guidance. In annex B of paper 3, the clerks have set out how we could do that by using tracked changes to show the changes that are being made. The clerks acknowledge that working out which paragraphs of the PO’s guidance to highlight in that way is somewhat arbitrary, however helpful it is to do so. They have sought to exercise judgment on which paragraphs seem to be more important, but other choices could have been made.

The second proposal is to simply provide a hyperlink in the guidance on the code of conduct to let the PO’s guidance speak for itself, rather than to extract bits of it. That approach is shown in annex C. Do members have any comments on their preferred option?

Great. To confirm, we will get clarification on the requirement to seek authorisation from the Presiding Officer or others to vote and attend remotely, and there is general consensus that providing a hyperlink in the guidance is the right approach.

Agenda item 5 is consideration of a committee paper on party requirements for cross-party groups. Section 6.9 of the code of conduct for MSPs explains that a

“CPG must have at least 5 MSP members including at least one MSP from each of the parties or groups represented on the Parliamentary Bureau.”

Our paper speaks for itself, but it discusses the need to strike an appropriate balance between ensuring that, on the one hand, the “party representation requirement” is not too onerous and, on the other hand, is strong enough to ensure that all CPGs are genuinely cross-party.

My suggestion, which is based on our paper, is that we use the committee’s power to require new or re-registering CPGs to have members drawn from at least four groups represented on the bureau. The requirement to have at least five members overall would remain unchanged.

I seek your views on that proposal.

Thank you for your comments. There are other ways of looking at how we ensure that we have the right number of CPGs—another suggestion is to limit the number of CPGs of which an MSP can be a member.

I feel very strongly that we need to ensure that we have a broad range of CPGs in the Parliament that cover difficult topics that perhaps not every party supports. Given the balance of the Parliament, and—as Jackie Baillie mentioned—the smaller size of some of the parties, enabling members to attend different CPGs could become even more onerous.

My view, therefore, is that the starting point should be representation from a majority of parties on the bureau. That is the right way to go.

From experience, I would say that the most successful cross-party groups have been those that involved members from the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the SNP—they worked together on a cross-party basis.

10:30

Good. I started my opening remarks by talking about collaboration, and that was a very helpful example of where we can openly discuss decisions that we have to take.

Do members agree that CPG membership should include at least one MSP from five of the parties represented on the bureau?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you, Jackie. That is a fair point well made. As there is no dissent in the committee, we will take items 4 and 5 in public and item 6, which is the consideration of our work programme, in private.