Chamber and committees

If you are perfectly fit and able to come in, you should come in. That is the position.

I turn to the committee report. I am grateful to the committee members—

No, I will not take any more interventions—maybe I will do so later.

I am grateful to the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee members for unanimously recommending that Parliament supports the general principles of the bill. The committee report comments on all areas of the bill, but it is fair to say that it does not make clear the committee’s collective position on a number of the provisions. For example, I am not sure whether the committee is for or against my potentially confusing and expensive proposal for the recall of regional members.

I assumed from the committee’s evidence and from its members’ questioning that it would be against that proposal, so I wrote to the committee on the day that its report was published to advise that I am now intending, if the bill passes stage 1, to amend that process to reflect the simpler approach that is proposed in the Welsh Government’s new bill. That would remove the recall petition process for regional MSPs and replace it with a straightforward poll on whether to retain or remove a member, which would be decided by a simple majority across the region. If the member lost that vote, they would be replaced by the next person on the party list, in the usual way.

That change would deal with many of the concerns that were raised in the committee’s report, and I would welcome comments from members across the Parliament on that proposal during the debate. What I am now proposing is a Scottish system that models its approach to the recall of constituency MSPs on the UK Parliament’s system and its approach to recall of regional MSPs on the Welsh Government’s system.

On the provisions on disqualification for a lack of physical attendance in the Parliament, my starting point for the bill was the fact that any MSP could, in theory, not attend the Parliament, either remotely or in person, for their entire term. That is the fact of the matter, and it is the law that councillors cannot get away with that, unless they have a good reason to be absent. I am of the view that it is not unreasonable to expect a fit and healthy MSP to come into the Parliament at least once every six months, and most people would agree with that.

Throughout the bill process, I have been clear that people’s personal circumstances should be dealt with in confidence, and I am not really sure why there has been confusion on that point. The committee had concerns about how the process would work in practice. It took issue with the role that the committee is being asked to perform and the lack of detail in the bill as to how the process would work and the criteria to inform its deliberations on what is or is not a reasonable excuse. The committee was dead against imposing a physical attendance requirement on MSPs.

It has taken a long time to reach today’s stage 1 debate on the Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill. I first suggested that we should do something in this area in the previous session of Parliament, following a number of conversations with my then party leader, Ruth Davidson. I got things formally moving on the bill at the start of this session, the end of which we are perilously near. The bill was introduced in December 2024 and has been at stage 1 for 11 months. It should not take this long for a member’s bill to be dealt with. In the past, we have seen bills fall due to lack of time.

I can now, at last, say that I am grateful to the non-Government bills unit for its work on the bill so far. We still have a lot of work to do in a very short space of time. I also thank the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee for its report, which I will come on to. I also thank the former Minister for Parliamentary Business, Jamie Hepburn, who is sitting in the chamber, for his positive engagement on the bill.

If the Parliament does not get the bill over the line in this session, Scotland will be left as the only part of the United Kingdom without a recall system. That would represent a failure of Parliament that I do not want to see. We must collectively rise to the challenge. The Welsh are now edging ahead of us, having taken evidence from me as they thought about how they might tackle the issue. Last week, their Government introduced a bill that includes a recall process for all members of their Parliament.

My bill would improve democratic accountability by ensuring that MSPs can be removed more easily if our conduct falls short of what our constituents could reasonably expect. The first part of my bill would introduce a recall system for the Scottish Parliament, drawing on the Recall of MPs Act 2015, but adapting those provisions to ensure that they work with our distinct electoral system.

The bill sets out that any member will be subject to a recall petition if one of two trigger conditions is met. The first trigger is if the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee recommends to Parliament a sanction of 14 days or 10 sitting days, and Parliament resolves to sanction the member for that period. The second trigger is if the member is sentenced to prison for a period of up to six months.

The Presiding Officer would then begin the recall petition process. That would be a four-week process for the electorate to indicate whether they consider that the member should be subject to recall. For a constituency member, if a threshold of 10 per cent of the electorate in that constituency signing the petition were met, the member would be removed from office. They would have the option of running in the resulting by-election to seek to regain their seat. For regional MSPs, my original proposal—the one in the bill that is before us—was to have a recall petition process across the region, which would require 10 per cent of the region’s electorate to sign a recall petition. In addition, at least three constituencies within that region would have to reach the 10 per cent threshold.

I am afraid not, Mr Cole-Hamilton—perhaps I will be able to give way during my closing speech.

It could be that that element of the bill will be removed during stage 2, which would be a shame.

I will support Kevin Stewart’s interesting amendment. I do not see it as a wrecking amendment, as some have suggested. I will listen with interest to Mr Stewart, as I always do, and I look forward to his contribution at stage 2—if we get there.

The most important element of the bill is recall, and I am absolutely determined to see a recall process being introduced during this parliamentary session. To that end, I also accept that introducing a change in the length of prison sentence that is required to lead to a member’s automatic removal from the Parliament might not carry the overall support of the Parliament. If those provisions were removed, the recall process would still kick in for members who received a prison sentence of less than 12 months.

I am interested to hear the views of members from across the chamber.

I move,

That the Parliament agrees to the general principles of the Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill.

I start by welcoming Ruth Maguire back. It is wonderful that she is back, and she gave a very reasoned speech, which I thought was excellent. I fully understand that she was not on the committee for most of the evidence, and we know why. The provision in the bill, as it stands, on non-attendance was certainly not aimed at people such as Ruth Maguire—definitely not.

I have enjoyed the debate, and have not intervened on members, because I have been listening. There have been excellent contributions that show how the process could work effectively. I know that I have not presented a perfect bill, and there are serious questions to be answered about it. The committee has done a great job in raising concerns about it.

My reflection on the debate is that members want a recall system that works—perhaps not the system that I originally proposed but one along the lines that I now propose, which is a much simpler and less expensive system for the regional element of the poll. I get the clear message from members that they do not like the non-attendance element of the bill at all, so perhaps we should just be pragmatic about that and get rid of it.

Members do not seem to like the suggestion that we reduce the jail term, if I can call it that, from more than 12 months to six months. If that is members’ position, why do we not get rid of that? Why do we not make this a recall bill and get it right? [Interruption.]

I hope that the minister is okay—I see that he is coughing.

If we concentrate on recall, the job becomes much simpler. We could do as I suggest and base the constituency element on the Westminster system and simplify my proposal for the regional element, because we have to have a regional element—there is no getting around that. One of the difficulties that I had was wrestling with our electoral system. I do not like our electoral system, and I think that it should change, but we are stuck with it. If we are going to have a recall system, we have to come up with a system to deal with regional members.

Graeme Dey and I are both former newspaper journalists, so we both know about the process by which pieces of work are honed, shaped and checked. That is the process that we are now going through with the bill. I am not going to be precious about that, but it would be a very bad look indeed if the bill does not pass in some form and we end up not having a recall system in Scotland.

I thank Alex Cole-Hamilton for making that interesting point again. I do not know whether he intends to lodge an amendment to that effect at stage 2, but the issue should certainly be considered. I was just recalling that, when I was a councillor, I had to have those checks done, but we do not have to have them as MSPs. That seems to be an oversight that should certainly be addressed.

Martin Whitfield, the convener of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, gave, as he always does, a very good speech, and he referenced the ancient Greeks. I cannot remember what he said about the ancient Greeks, but there it was. It was a bit of a history lesson, as was Richard Leonard’s contribution.

I am just pleased that we have got this far. There will be big changes to the bill, and there should be, which is part of the process. I will work with anyone who has sensible ideas and who wants a recall system in Scotland. I have always worked that way, and I hope that members will be constructive.

I do not wish to embarrass the minister, but I have enjoyed a friendship with him for a number of years. It is an enduring friendship, and I hope that he can work with me on that basis. I have also worked with Kevin Stewart and will work with him at stage 2. His amendment is cheeky and he has given the Scottish Conservatives a reason to abstain, which is regrettable. Perhaps he will reconsider, because I would rather members did not have a reason to abstain. The public will expect us to work together on the bill, which is what we should do. We cannot be left as the only part of the United Kingdom without a recall process.

In closing, when Jamie Hepburn appeared before the committee, I asked him whether he agreed with me that we can have the best system of recall in the UK, which he did. Let us rise to the challenge, support the general principles of the bill, and work together to get it into a shape that all members of the Parliament can agree on.

If I get the time back.

In the submission from Colleges Scotland on the budget, which I am sure you have seen and which Jamie Greene mentioned earlier, there was a paragraph at the start about the reduction in funding. It says:

“The Scottish Funding Council ... has also recently set out the stark reality of the impact of this continued reduction in funding in a report which concluded ‘most colleges are not sustainable’ under current funding assumptions, and there is ‘an imminent risk of some colleges becoming insolvent by the end of 2025-26’.”

Do you agree with that?

We know that the number of people receiving the benefit will go up. Edel Harris tells us that, and the Scottish Fiscal Commission also predicts that costs will rise quite significantly over the years.

I will go back to one of the recommendations in the report, which is that the Government should

“set out how the ... financial gap”—

because there is one—

“will be managed over the medium term, including analysis of how this will impact on wider outcomes for disabled people.”

Do you accept that recommendation?

Following on from what Joe FitzPatrick asked about courses, do we have any analysis of which courses have been cut so far? Colleges are vital for providing the skills that Scotland needs. Are we at risk of reducing the impact that colleges can make?