Chamber and committees

I was just about to talk about that. It is no secret that my party and I have a particular perspective on the House of Lords, but I am conscious that there is a range of views in this Parliament. I am also conscious that we have had the experience of MSPs who have served in the House of Lords. We have one such member now, who operated a self-denying ordinance and took a leave of absence. That demonstrates that that is possible, but I do not know whether that meets the requirement from public expectation.

I completely concede that the 77 responses were helpful in informing our perspective, but there was not a huge upsurge of people responding to the consultation. The responses that were received suggest that respondents did not think that a leave of absence fulfils the requirement.

I am still considering the matter, and I would be happy to hear about it from the committee. Notwithstanding the point that you will scrutinise the regulations—I understand why you gave that qualification—the committee’s perspective would be helpful.

Not at all. That is where our thinking is for MPs.

For peers, I do not think that the period is required to be that long. That could lead us to a much quicker process, which might be more in line with the eight-day period that I mentioned, because peers do not have publicly funded offices in the same fashion as MPs do.

That is balanced against the question whether it would be more straightforward for the public to understand that there is equivalence for peers and MPs. We do not have an absolutely fixed view on that. However, I do not think that the period for peers would need to be long, so I certainly would not suggest anything longer than we had for MPs. If anything, we could do something shorter, but we might conclude that the most straightforward thing to do is to have the same period for a person to consider their position as an MP or a peer.

For councillors, I am increasingly drawn to the idea that, although we are not required to, we will lay regulations, because Parliament should have the ability to consider the issue. I was struck by a comment that one participant in the second round-table discussion made; it speaks to wider issues of parity of esteem, which we have touched on today and which we discussed in relation to the bill. If we are suggesting that an MP or a peer should not have a dual mandate, the same should be true of councillors under parity of esteem. That is a fairly persuasive argument—at least, it is enough for me to bring forward regulations for Parliament to consider.

That said, there are practical issues. In our experience, the most significant cohort of people who have been elected with a dual mandate have been not MPs or peers of the realm but councillors. A practical issue is whether we want to force a raft of by-elections in a fairly short period between one fixed election and another.

Similar legislation that was enacted in Wales prescribed a period of 372 days—if I remember correctly—to account for the fact that local authority elections were scheduled not long after a Senedd election. Although Wales has now moved away from that approach—I am not quite sure of its rationale for doing so—I am probably drawn towards that being sensible, with the exception that we should have the ability to vary the period, contingent on when a person is elected. If someone was elected at a by-election, it would not be sensible to say that the period should be a year, so maybe we could tie it to the period that there is for an MP or—potentially, depending on where we land—that for a peer.

Yes—I suppose that that was the point that I was making. If we were to bring forward regulations for councillors—as I am giving a fair indication to the committee that we are likely to—we would have different trigger points.

If someone was elected at the general election and we knew that council elections were coming up within a year, we would not require them to stand down until the next series of ordinary council elections. However, if someone was elected outwith that period, I do not think that we would have a year’s grace period; we would have something shorter. For consistency’s sake, that would probably be akin to the period for MPs.

—and becomes an MSP. Subsequent to the next round of ordinary council elections, I do not think that it would be sensible to say that they would have to wait a year—

We cannot do that, because we cannot prescribe the rules for MP’s salaries. I understand why the public response has been that someone should be entitled to draw only the MSP salary in that instance, but we cannot do that. What we could do, and what we are exploring, is whether, for that period—let us remind ourselves that that would be very short—until you have given an indication that you are standing down as an MP, you are not entitled to draw down your MSP salary. We could do that.

We could also do that in the instance of councillors. Right now, an MP is entitled to only a proportion of their MSP salary. If someone was a councillor, we could, for example, prescribe that they are entitled to only a proportion of their MSP salary, taking account of their councillor salary. We are grappling with these matters, but we need to be clear—it is important that we are clear with the public—that the only things that we can legislate for are the issues around pay and salary entitlement, privileges and rights in this place. We cannot determine them for other places.

I will give another example. Again, I understand why people made the point that there should be a limitation on the rights of peers and MPs in relation to their participation in the Lords or the Commons, but we cannot prescribe that—it is not within our gift—and we need to ensure that everyone understands that.

Let us not overly complicate this.

Just to clarify, it would not be after the summer recess. It would be up to the point of the summer recess, so we are really talking about a six-week period.

To put it in really simple terms, the regulations will prescribe a time period. It will not matter which came first.

I go back to the point that I just made. The Parliament has asked the SPCB to undertake a piece of work to make recommendations. I think that that was largely what the question was predicated on. We await to see what it recommends. There is that element of it, but when it gets to the process of a recall petition, it becomes much harder to do that, and we should be realistic enough to recognise that.

We have been talking about the recall mechanism, but that might come into play more in relation to the other part of the bill and the attendance requirement. That is probably where the issue will need to considered further.

Ultimately, the way that I read Mr Simpson’s bill—no doubt he will explain his rationale when he comes to give evidence to you—is that an MSP would be able to give reasons why they were unable to attend. They may be legitimate reasons, but questions could arise about them. The person might feel that they were private matters—despite being elected and in the public eye, we are still entitled to a level of privacy in our personal lives—but people would inevitably speculate about what the reasons might be.

On the recall process, it is an interesting question, but I struggle to see circumstances in which the personal matters would outweigh the reason for the recall process being triggered in the first place. It might be possible to build that into the system, but the committee would have to consider that.