Chamber and committees

As members will know, a number of colleges have undertaken restructuring exercises, including the one at UHI North, West and Hebrides. What engagement has the Scottish Government had with the college and its staff throughout the on-going dispute, particularly given the impact that the loss of even a small number of jobs can have in a rural community?

Will the member give way?

Douglas Ross might have forgotten but, when I attempted to intervene on him some minutes ago, he was making the claim that I had never raised the issue of a member of the committee having tweeted about matters in advance. I was not going to say this, but I did privately raise the issue with the convener of the committee. That was supposed to be in private—not that everything from the committee was in private.

Will the member give way?

No, thank you.

As our committee report mentions, it is disappointing—to put it mildly—that the committee’s deliberations were in the papers before they were even finalised. All that needs to change. The bigger picture—I appreciate that the question is separate from, but related to, the specific case—is that the Parliament has to have better systems in place for the future. As our report indicates, the committee has an appetite for helping to review some of those issues, going forward.

In the first century AD, the Roman satirist Juvenal famously asked:

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

or,

“Who will guard the guards?”

In other words, whose job is it to police those whose job it is to police the rules? That has never proved to be an easy question for anyone to answer.

What can be said is that the answer that we have come up with to that question in Holyrood is open to improvement. In fact, it is ripe for reform. Other legislatures do not ask a room full of politicians to reach a non-political view about an allegation against another politician. They certainly do not ask them to do so in the run-up to a national election—yet, our Parliament likes to do exactly that, as Patrick Harvie has rightly said. Nor do a number of other parliaments ask such committees to impose penalties without reference to any clearly understood scale of severity, under rules that are not always clear and do not include a right to repeal, or ask parliamentary staff in such investigations to be put in the unfair position of writing binding reports in which their colleagues are mentioned.

To anyone who is looking in on the debate, I frankly admit that there has been a lot more political heat than procedural light in the chamber. I will conclude by simply saying this: I believe that it is now time for a proper review of how the Parliament deals with allegations against its members. The public have a right to know that such decisions will be reached according to the highest and most objective of standards.

We should learn from the example of other legislatures, where the investigation is handed over to a person from outside both the political sphere and the parliamentary staff, with that person’s recommendations being put to Parliament or its committees for a recommended sanction that is based on some kind of logical scheme. I think that that would be a good place to start, and it would be an approach that the public would expect of us in the future.

Will the member give way?

I extend my thanks to Jamie Halcro Johnston for securing the debate. I also declare an interest, of sorts, as someone who cuts peats for my own use.

There is no doubt about the importance of stoves in those areas of the country that are off the gas grid, and in housing types where there are few workable alternatives to choose from as heating sources. Those are, of course, the same areas of the country, and the same housing types, which currently endure some of the worst fuel poverty.

First, however, it is vital, in the interests of accuracy, to recognise that there is not, and never has been, a proposal to ban stoves in any existing house, nor—despite some efforts to sow confusion on this point—is there any proposal for an effective ban on peat cutting.

Nonetheless, all that said, very many reasonable questions have been asked, by me and many others, about what the new regulations on new-build houses actually mean in practice. Currently, the proposed guidance would allow people to install a stove as an “emergency” heat source in a new house, provided that

“the size, complexity or heat demand ... makes portable solutions”

unsuitable. As I understand it, it would be down to local authorities to decide whether a potential property meets those criteria.

While I remain confident that rural local authorities would understand the unique requirements of rural heating solutions, I was very pleased to hear the minister indicate in the chamber in recent days that the Scottish Government will be reviewing and reassessing those criteria in order to make them more readily workable, in particular in rural and island areas. I thank the minister for her correspondence with me on these issues in recent weeks; I know that many of my constituents are also grateful for her engagement on the matter.

I think that most members in the chamber accept that decarbonising our homes is an essential part of ensuring a greener future. However, the importance of ensuring the suitability of these policies for rural and island communities is paramount in order to ensure that they are workable and do not have the unintended consequence of increasing already high rates of fuel poverty. Many of the houses in my island constituency differ radically from urban homes in their type and construction. Land ownership types vary, as does the prevailing local climate, and the energy infrastructure also varies widely from that in other parts of the country.

Only 22 per cent of Western Isles homes—all of them in one town—are connected to gas, with the rest currently relying on heating oil, solid fuel, air-source heat pumps and electric heating. Unpredictable power cuts are part of island life and, in many parts of my constituency, solid-fuel options are often essential, at the very least as a back-up.

While I understand that most people will use the stoves to burn wood, peat remains one of the most common fuel sources in the Western Isles. Peat cutting remains a culturally significant aspect of island life, as well as being an affordable option for many.

All of that said, nobody—including me—is suggesting that either peat or wood should be the only or even primary means of heating new homes in the future; the point is merely that there should be provision for the use of solid fuels where that is appropriate, and the guidance should accommodate that and do so more simply.

The perfect can be the enemy of the good in writing guidance, and I welcome the fact that the Government is willing to recognise that.

As a recently conscripted member of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, I will not take the bait of some of what the Tories have said in their motion. However, I will make two or three separate and—I dare to hope—useful points.

I stand by the view that I expressed in the public session of the committee last week. The committee did not—and I do not—dispute the need for a sanction in this case. However, I still struggle to see the logical basis for the figure of a 27-day ban on sitting in Parliament—the sanction that three of the five committee members eventually supported—and how it was arrived at. Whatever members’ views about the case, it is factual to say that the sanction is exceptionally high, compared with any comparable incident on which the Parliament has imposed a penalty in the past.

No, thank you.

Although there is a need for a penalty in many cases, including this one, there has to be some logical basis for the sanctions that we impose.

I share the astonishment that has been expressed by a number of members that it is possible for anyone who is sitting on a committee of that kind to tweet extensively their views about the individual whom they are about to investigate, before they have heard the evidence about him or her. The real world has been mentioned a fair bit in the debate, but that would never be allowed to happen in any industrial tribunal and, if it happened in a jury, it would land someone in serious trouble. I therefore sympathise with the sentiments on that point in the Green amendment.

Both Jackie Dunbar and I recognise the need for a financial penalty in this case. In an effort to reach consensus within the committee, we support the figure agreed, although we take the view that it is certainly at the high end of the range of available sanctions.

Likewise, on the issue of suspension from the chamber, we recognise the need for a penalty of that kind but we voted against the figure of 27 days, given that it was, in our view, extremely high compared with any sanctions in previous cases.