Chamber and committees

I invite you to go the other way on that. I imagine that I know what your answer will be, but the right to a fair trial might, in fact, apply if an appeal is successful and there is a retrial, and the public might be influenced and think, “Ah well, they’ve been kicked out as an MSP.”

That is all right. I just thought that it would be useful to have that on the public record.

Welcome back. Agenda item 3 is consideration of a legislative consent memorandum on the Absent Voting (Elections in Scotland and Wales) Bill, which is a private member’s bill that has been introduced in the House of Commons by Tracy Gilbert MP. The bill relates to absent voting at local government elections in Scotland and Wales and at elections to the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd. It will give the Scottish and Welsh Governments powers to introduce regulations that enable applications for postal and proxy votes for devolved elections to be made online using the online absent vote application—OAVA—service, which has been developed by the UK Government.

Members have a note from the clerk, which includes a copy of the memorandum that has been lodged by Shona Robison, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government. It was lodged on 12 June 2025 following consideration of the bill at committee stage on 11 June 2025. Consideration at report stage is scheduled for 4 July 2025.

The Minister for Parliamentary Business wrote to the relevant UK Government minister on 30 May 2025, before the date was set for the committee stage. In that letter, the minister noted that a date for consideration of the bill at committee stage had not been set, and he expressed his

“concern over the limited time now available for the Scottish Parliament to give its consent and also that”

he

“will now be obliged to ask it to do so to an expedited timetable”

in order for the Parliament’s consent decision to be given before our summer recess.

The Scottish Government recommends that consent be given. It is anticipated that the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee will consider the LCM at its meeting on Tuesday 24 June 2025.

If no members wish to make any comments or ask any questions regarding the memorandum, I propose that the committee writes to note the concern that we will have to expedite the provision of the LCM because of when our summer recess starts. When it comes to Westminster, the lodging of LCMs sits outside the control of the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament.

Are members content to support the LCM but to defer publication of the committee’s report until after the DPLR Committee has had the opportunity to consider it next Tuesday?

Members indicated agreement.

Excellent. We will now move into private session.

I absolutely concur with what Bob Doris has said. There are various ways of looking at post-legislative scrutiny, and the bill could perhaps be a vehicle for considering the matter more widely across the Government. He is right to point out that there is also a challenge in relation to the capacity in the Parliament to carry out post-legislative scrutiny successfully.

The cabinet secretary speaks to the challenging situation in which families found themselves, as they were trapped between two institutions that were unable to adequately compensate them for their losses. Her point about the challenge that exists for whoever is in government is pertinent, given the unforeseen consequences that can, unfortunately, arise very quickly.

Good morning. Before I start, I refer to my declaration of interests in the register of members’ interests in relation to wind power interests that rest on land, for those who know.

It has been an interesting opening to this group with regard to post-legislative scrutiny, which has been an important matter for the Parliament during this session. A number of the proposed amendments in this group take different approaches to the issue. I very much welcome Bob Doris’s comments and Mark Ruskell’s comments on behalf of Ariane Burgess with regard to the level and intent of reporting that we need. However, I feel that there is also a need to back that up with post-legislative scrutiny so that the Parliament can have a full and proper say, but only when there is evidence before it about how well or otherwise the bill is working.

My amendment 383 contains a very widely drawn provision that invites the Government to consider post-legislative scrutiny. Without trying to anticipate anything that the cabinet secretary will say, I have already had useful discussions with her and her advisers with regard to the right format that the proposed provision should take. Only once we know what the bill looks like post stage 2 will we be able to come to a view and determine what form of post-legislative scrutiny would be best.

Amendment 385 has its roots in the very unfortunate events, which are almost two decades old, relating to my constituent, Andrew Stoddart, who farmed at Colstoun Mains in East Lothian. When previous legislative amendments that were made in relation to how farmers could operate on land were held to be illegal, there were consequential financial losses that were truly devastating to, I think, nine farmers. The number affected was very small, but the consequences of those actions were enormous and are on-going. Therefore, there is an interest outside of this place in how legislation is scrutinised and in how we deal with how legislation will work in practice before it is progressed, and in whether there are any further challenges for our farming community and farming families with regard to tenancies and ownership.

A substantial part of the bill deals with tenancies and ownership, but as Andrew Stoddart has told me on a number of occasions, when the matter was last dabbled with, the effects for those families were catastrophic. I merely put that on the record as one of the reasons for lodging a number of my amendments. I also point out that the period for which my question to the Scottish Government about what the consequential costs of that action were has remained unanswered is the longest period for which a question of mine has remained unanswered—the question dates back to the first few months of this session—so I might renew my pursuit of details on that.

To sum up, my amendments invite a discussion to be held once we know what stage 2 produces by way of amendments to the bill, so that we can provide for effective and meaningful post-legislative scrutiny that is based on evidence that will be collected on how the bill operates in practice.

I will leave my contribution there.

I want to look into what should and should not be in the legislation and the suggestion that it should be iterative. The Government is content for the process to sit in primary legislation. The suggestion in the Government’s memorandum is that there should be provision to extend the occasions when it may be triggered and that we should leave an opportunity open for that to appear, presumably through secondary legislation. Is that correct?

I move on to a challenge that we have heard a lot about, which concerns the parity between the routes of being elected regionally and being elected as a constituency MSP. Graham Simpson has said from the outset that, under his bill, there should be parity between all MSPs, because there is parity when we come into this place and take our seats in the chamber, irrespective of how we arrived there. What is the Scottish Government’s view on that? MSPs are all the same when we are sitting in the chamber, but does parity also relate to the journey that we took to get here, via the regional list or the constituency list? Can we say that there absolutely is parity in the chamber but that there is no parity for the purposes of how we travel here—which there is not?

Does the Scottish Government have a view on the percentages that would occasion a recall? For a constituency MSP, the proposed threshold is 10 per cent. For a regional MSP, it is 10 per cent overall and 10 per cent in three constituencies in the region.