Chamber and committees

Will you allow me to finish, if that is okay? I am trying to explain.

Well, come back in Ms Webber.

Essentially, a poll and a petition are the same thing. We are asking voters in a constituency or in a region to say whether a member should stay or go.

I will take one more, because I know that we need to make progress.

Should the amendments be agreed to, we will get revised costings. I do not have revised costings yet, because the amendments have not been agreed to. If they are agreed to, we will get revised costings ahead of stage 3, because Parliament needs to know.

The value for money question is difficult to answer. This is a bill that I would hope we would never need to use—I hope that this never happens. It probably will, but I hope that it does not. It would be very rare, and it would be just one of those things that you would have to do. Therefore, I think that if you are asking about value for money, you are possibly asking the wrong question.

I will make some progress, convener. Amendment 61 seeks to remove section 16 of the bill entirely. That section sets out my original process for a poll to determine whether a recalled regional member would fill the regional vacancy following a regional recall petition. Amendment 56 seeks to remove the provisions that would have been required to be reflected in the Scotland Act 1998 to enable my original poll process to be completed.

Amendments 47 to 50, 53, 60 and 62 seek to remove references to the recall process being “successful”. The word “successful” is used in the Recall of MPs Act 2015, and the drafting of this bill is based partly on that legislation. However, in this series of amendments I have sought to remove all references to success. In my view, the wording in the Welsh bill is preferable, as it makes no reference to success and because such references do not sound like entirely neutral language. After all, it might not be deemed a successful outcome by the MSP in question. My amendments seek to strip back the language to refer simply to “the outcome” of the petition or the poll process.

Amendments 64 to 66 have been covered, in part, in my previous general comments, but I would like to set them out in a little bit of detail. These will be the last amendments that I will explain in this group, as I appreciate that I have already spoken for some time.

Amendment 64 seeks to create the new provision for the recall process in a distinct new chapter that is separate from the recall petition process, and it would apply only to regional members subject to a recall initiating notice. The purpose is set out in the bill. It would be the returning officer’s duty, after receiving a recall initiating notice, to make the relevant arrangements for a recall poll to be held in the region of the member subject to the notice, in accordance with the regulations to be made under section 21 of the bill. Moreover, in the absence of the bill setting out the specific questions that are to be asked of the electorate in a recall poll, the provision sets out what the recall poll is and, in general terms, how a person may vote for or against the recall of the member.

Amendment 65 requires that Scottish ministers make regulations to provide for the conduct of the recall poll under section 21 of the bill. That includes provision about who is entitled to vote in a recall poll and how and by whom the date of the recall poll is to be determined. It sets out that the poll will occur on one day and that the poll date must fall within a particular period, which ends 34 days after the issuing of the recall initiating notice that gives rise to the poll.

I am getting there, convener.

That is for reasons of parity between the constituency and regional recall processes. It would yield a period that generally matches the period in the recall petition process for a constituency MSP between the initiation of the recall process by the notice and the close of the recall petition.

The remainder of amendment 65 will mean that the regulations must also make provisions to reschedule a regional poll in the same circumstances in which a recall petition may be rescheduled, and that that will be subject to the same requirements for consultation with the returning officer, the Electoral Commission and the convener of the Electoral Management Board. I appreciate that amendment 65 does not stipulate that the Presiding Officer would be the person setting the date for a rescheduled poll. However, that is what I would envisage for the constituency MSP recall process, as is reflected in amendment 29.

Needless to say, if there are any specifics that committee members consider should be in the bill but that I have left to regulations in my amendments, I ask them to please highlight those in their contributions. I am happy to work on providing additional detail through further amendments at stage 3.

Amendment 66 will make provision for the new recall poll process. It deals with the determination of the poll and how the outcome will be notified. As soon as is practicable after the poll closes, the returning officer will be required to determine whether the member has been recalled. That will be determined on the basis of whether there has been a majority vote for the member to lose their seat. When there is a tied vote, the member will not lose their seat. After that, the returning officer will have to notify the Presiding Officer of the outcome and give public notice, in accordance with regulations made under section 21. The Presiding Officer will then be required to lay the notice of the outcome of the poll before the Parliament.

The amendments to section 14 and the associated amendment to the schedule—amendment 59—work with the creation of the new section on the determination and notice of the poll outcome in amendment 66. Collectively, those reflect the introduction of the recall poll, meaning that there will be two routes for the Presiding Officer being notified of the outcome of a recall process.

I am sure that the committee will be as relieved as I am that I have finished.

I move amendment 1.

Will you take an intervention?

You are such an interesting character, Mr Stewart, that people will want to intervene on you.

I simply want to point out that my work on the bill started almost five years ago, and the review to which you refer had not started at that point. That is why we have not got the review before the bill.

I thank Mark Griffin for engaging with me. We had a useful discussion, and I agree with his amendments—that is what happens when people co-operate. He has obviously co-operated with the minister as well. I agree with the minister that Mr Griffin’s amendments should be supported.

I also agree with what the minister said about Ms Webber’s amendments, for the reasons that we covered earlier. I am not sure that Ms Webber understands what remand is, because you can be remanded even if you have not been convicted of anything, which is a key issue.

I support Mr Griffin’s amendments and reject Ms Webber’s amendments.

It is just to allow enough time. If the Presiding Officer is having to call a halt to the process, we need to allow extra time. That was it, really.

Where a day is designated under the provision, the returning officer may exercise the functions set out in section 6 in accordance with the regulations to be made under section 21, to designate places for signing and the days and times of day during which the petition may be signed. That provision is modelled on provisions in section 2 of the Scotland Act 1998 that allow the Presiding Officer to postpone a Scottish Parliament general election.

I turn now to amendment 52. As the petition process now applies only to constituency members, the definitions specific to the petition process, which were previously found in section 24 of the bill, have been moved to sit with the new chapter of provisions specific to recall petition processes. That change aids readability and shortens the list of definitions in section 24. A further detail of the amendment is that the bill as introduced has a recall petition signing period defined as ending

“at the end of the day that falls 4 weeks later”

but the definition of “signing period” would be amended to refer to

“at the end of the day that falls 20 working days later”.

That means that the signing period would not be shortened if it fell across public holidays.

10:00

I actively considered Sue Webber’s policy position in amendments 97 and 52A during the policy development of my bill. As I understand it, the intention is to enable the petition process to end at the point at which the 10 per cent threshold is reached as opposed to running for the full four weeks, as the bill sets out. That change would be on the grounds that it would limit the work required and prevent the petition process from running on for a long period without strong reason in circumstances in which the threshold was reached within a few days.

There are a number of reasons why I did not include that policy in my bill on introduction. The first is the practical challenge of conducting regular counts to establish the point at which the threshold is met. The returning officer would be responsible for co-ordinating up to 10 signing places in a constituency, and the process for establishing whether the 10 per cent threshold had been reached would presumably involve regular counts of all signatures at all designated places. Also, as the committee observed in its stage 1 report, postal contributions would be a complicating factor. These are just some of the considerations to think about. The electorate would also have been informed that they had four weeks in which to express a view and then could be denied the opportunity to express it if the petition process ended early.

In addition, it would be challenging to describe clearly to the electorate the approach that is suggested in the amendments. Saying that you can sign a petition and that it might be four weeks long but could be a lot quicker if a 10 per cent threshold is reached is a more complex message than saying “sign the petition by X date”.

Another issue is that the MSP who is subject to the recall process might want to get a sense of the strength of feeling among the electorate, to inform a decision on whether to run in a by-election. The difference between 10 per cent of constituents and, say, more than 65 per cent of constituents turning out to sign a recall petition could lead to a different decision on whether to run in a resulting by-election.

Finally, someone who votes in a by-election could consider the percentage of people in a constituency signing a petition to be a relevant factor when considering how to vote.

That was the basis for my decision, on balance and in consultation with key stakeholders, not to include the policy proposed by Sue Webber in my bill, so I suggest that the committee reject her amendments.

I move amendment 17.

Amendment 57 would fix a minor error in the schedule. It would mean that the schedule would be amended to refer to the correct point at which the inserted text is to be placed in the Scotland Act 1998, as the word “Parliament” appears twice in the same subsection in section 13 of the act. The amendment clarifies that the wording in paragraph 1(3)(b) of the schedule is to be added after the second occurrence of the word “Parliament” in that provision.

I turn to amendment 58. The schedule to the bill currently amends section 13 of the Scotland Act 1998, “Term of office of members”, by adding a list of the ways in which a member can cease to be a member between elections—for example, the death of a member—including the new ground of being recalled. The purpose of amendment 58 is to add a further ground, for completeness, which is that a member may lose their seat for failing to take the oath under section 84 of the Scotland Act 1998.

Amendment 78 would remove an incorrect reference in the bill at introduction that refers to a provision under the Government of Wales Act 1998, replacing it with the correct reference in the Government of Wales Act 2006. Section 23 of the bill clarifies that references to an appeal in respect of the criminal offence ground for recall include, among other matters, an appeal under the specified legislation, which is an appeal to the Supreme Court, for the determination of a devolution issue or a compatibility issue.

I move amendment 57.