Chamber and committees

As I have said, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. If you are asking my view, on balance, I think that the approach that we take is slightly better. Although it is a slightly more onerous process, which we must constantly revise because of the points that I just made, I think that there is an advantage in having the specific details of who is disqualified.

Yes, convener, and my thanks to you and the committee for the opportunity to discuss the order.

The order is an established item of business in advance of each Scottish Parliament election. Section 15 of the Scotland Act 1998 sets out the circumstances in which a person is disqualified automatically from membership of the Parliament—for example, by virtue of their being a judge, civil servant or member of the armed forces. In addition, section 15 provides an order-making power to disqualify specific office-holders from membership of the Parliament, thereby allowing for separation between the legislature and the holders of various public offices. That serves to reinforce their independence from one another.

In preparing the draft order that disqualifies specific office-holders, we consulted widely with policy officials and sponsor teams in the Scottish Government and with Parliament officials on the entries for offices supported by the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. With the help of officials in the Scotland Office, we gathered responses from the United Kingdom Government and the other devolved nations through devolution leads in each UK department.

The draft order that is before the committee updates the list of disqualified offices to reflect relevant appointments that have been abolished, renamed or created since the making of the Scottish Parliament (Disqualification) Order 2020. A total of 30 new disqualifications were added, 21 were removed and 28 amendments were made to existing disqualified offices. I highlight the fact that 12 of the amendments simply reflected changes in the names of bodies from “Her Majesty’s” to “His Majesty’s”. For example, HMRC has now changed from being Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

To give you an example of an addition, we have added the new Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland, following the Parliament’s decision to establish the role earlier in this parliamentary session. Given that the commissioner is supported by the SPCB and is expected to be politically impartial, it is important to ensure that an individual is not able to hold that role while being an MSP.

This list is extensive, given the breadth of the public body landscape across the UK, but members should not see the order as a constraint on the wide talent that is available to the Parliament, as people in a disqualified office can, of course, opt to step down from such a position and seek to bring their experience to the Parliament if they wish.

As the committee will be aware, the order was originally withdrawn and relaid. That followed the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee highlighting some bodies in the list that had changed name and so were no longer correctly captured. Those amounted to less than 1 per cent of the overall list, and it is important to recognise that the errors highlighted did not relate to Scottish bodies or office-holders, so the chance of such individuals seeking to become an MSP were slim. Regardless, I am grateful to the DPLRC for highlighting those errors so that we could make the necessary corrections in advance of coming to this committee.

Ailsa Kemp, Kenny Pentland, Jordan McGrory and I are happy to take any questions that you might have.

It is updated in advance of each and every Scottish Parliament election. The last update was done in 2020.

I would need to check whether we would be able to do that in the first instance. I see the advantage in doing that if we are able to. If we are not able to, we might make that clear in another way, by directing people towards other information that we make available.

I have the list in front of me—it is extensive, so I do not intend to read it out in its entirety. Thirty entries were added, 21 were removed and 28 entries were amendments of name, designation and so on. We could perhaps look into the matter. The fact that I have the figures in front of me suggests that we could probably do that fairly straightforwardly. I do not know whether we could specify that information in the order, but I am happy to take a wee look at the matter.

The Government does not have a specific perspective on that, but I certainly think that it is an intriguing proposition. If the committee is inclined—it is not for me to tell the committee what to do—to explore it further, I certainly think that it would be interesting to have a wider discussion on that issue. The Government does not have a perspective on it beyond my observation that it is certainly worthy of consideration.

Yes, that is right. The arbiter in the current system is the Parliament. By and large, that process has served us for a long time and, more often than not, it has served us well. Given that we are accountable to the public, in the sense of being elected here in the first place, if we are going to introduce a system of further deliberation on the standards of members of the Parliament, the same principle should apply that, ultimately, that should be in the hands of the public.

We would need to look at it in relation to the bill as it advances, and consider how we might deal with it. I can safely say that the Government would be concerned about those areas. We should have a line of transparency about how much is being spent, who is spending it and where that money and expenditure is being derived from. These are important parts of our democratic system and we recognise that it is important when people are elected to the Parliament or in other parts of our democratic system. We should also recognise that it is important in relation to any recall process too.

It might be. It is one of the challenges that we face; it is probably less of an issue here, although we would need to explore it further. A recall mechanism is a fairly clear and distinct process, but it is something that we would need to consider. If there were an election here and a general election for the United Kingdom Parliament in the same regulated period, expenditure in both those elections would start to interact, so the question is what would happen if there was a recall petition in that period.

There will be a cost to all that. The Presiding Officer has already indicated that a financial memorandum would be required if this were to proceed into law so, yes, there will be costs throughout. If there is to be an education campaign—for want of a better term—that is a cost, and we will have to consider it.

You made the point that the additional member system is a facet of our electoral system here. In 1999, that was new, but people are largely used to it now and understand that they have two ballots to cast at the Scottish Parliament election. In 2007, we introduced the single transferable vote for elections to local authorities; I think that people are becoming used to that and understand the process of ranking candidates. What I am speaking to is that people are well used to becoming acquainted with developments in our electoral system.

I absolutely concede that, when this is introduced and if and when a specific petition comes in—although we all hope that it will not be required—part of the process must be about ensuring that people understand how it works precisely. By and large—and rightly—that work must be done through an external agency in the guise of the Electoral Commission rather than put in the hands of Government or Parliament, which might be perceived as being less independent.

That is a question for the Parliament. That goes back to my perspective, which I think most of us would agree with, that members are still entitled to a degree of privacy in their personal lives, provided that the matter concerned does not relate to their public conduct and their work in the Parliament. The fact that we are publicly elected representatives does not completely do away with that right.