We read that someone with testicular cancer who has surgery to have one testicle removed will not be affected by that. There are also ways of storing semen, should someone have to have both testicles removed. The long-term effect of the surgery is that it keeps the person alive. Does Mr Sweeney agree that we ought to discuss that and make it clear that treatment is better than nothing at all?

One thing is clear: testicular cancer often runs in a family. Is there any way, therefore, that the minister could direct the health service to alert people who have testicular cancer in their family to carry out the checks on a regular basis? That may be one way of reducing the impact quite quickly and simply.

I thank the committee, its clerks and all the people who gave evidence, because the report is excellent.

Having been used as a role model by Lorna Slater, I am nervous now; if my parliamentary career was not coming to an end next year, it would have been ended by those remarks.

Let us see whether I can build on some of the comments that have been made. Developing legislation is rather like a journey that someone goes on with their family: they work out why they are doing it, where they are going, how they will get there, what they will do when they get there and what the costs will be. It is exactly the same when setting out to do something in business: the person works out why they are doing it, what they are going to do, when they will do it and how they will deliver it. It is the same for legislation.

I do not agree with the Minister for Parliamentary Business that there has not been a proliferation of bills with little detail in them; I believe that there has been. In the eight years in which I have been a committee convener, I have seen more bills come through with less detail in them.

Jamie Hepburn: [Made a request to intervene.]

That, of course, Mr Hepburn, could be one of the failings of the report. If members read the report in detail, as I did, they will see that the number of shell bills or skeletal bills in the United Kingdom Parliament has gone up threefold in the past seven years, and that the number in the Welsh Parliament has gone up by 43 per cent. What we have not seen is a figure for the Scottish Parliament; that is one of the failures of the report, and I wish that we had seen that. Perhaps the committee has details on that which were not included in the report.

I have to ask myself why we have these bills. The committee identified that they are used when there is a need for flexibility and the ability for co-design, and when there is a lack of policy development in the subject area when the bills are developed. It seems to have come on the back of a lot of the Covid legislation, which was fairly wide ranging.

My response to that is the example of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. There has been a lot of criticism that the lead committee is being asked to design the bill as it goes through the committee stage. We will have to see what happens at stage 2. If policy development has not been carried out before legislation is introduced to the Parliament, that is a failure in the legislation. We ask too much of committees, which are heavily committed, especially in the final year of a parliamentary session, to get all the legislation through.

As I have said, I believe that those bills need to be much more tightly drafted. It shows weakness on the part of Governments to argue that they need to co-design legislation as it is going through the Parliament. To me, that shows that there is a lack of detail in the information that they put forward. Frankly, it is bad for parliamentary scrutiny

We have little time to carry out that scrutiny. I am grateful to Lorna Slater for highlighting the time and trouble that I took to go through the deer management consultation, but it should not have come to that. That should have been discussed long before the secondary legislation was introduced to the Parliament. When the issue was debated, I think that I was entitled to a three-minute slot. It was hardly enough time for something that I considered so important and in which I had invested so much time.

Also, when we talk about the scrutiny of legislation after it has been introduced, we talk about the super-affirmative procedure. I think that we should say the super-affirmative procedures, because the procedure that is laid out in legislation can be considered for up to 60, 90 or 120 days. Does it require consultation? Does it require to come back to the Parliament to be approved? Can it be approved by the committee? There is no standard way of doing it, which makes it really difficult for committees to understand and to get those levels of super-affirmative scrutiny detailed out.

My belief is simple. If we are going to have these skeletal, framework or jellyfish bills—whatever people want to call them—they should have a mandatory sunset clause, and they should allow a super-affirmative procedure that requires the legislation to go back out to consultation to all those who will be affected by it. We should make it as difficult as possible for the Government to introduce such bills, so that the detail is there in the first place. If we get that detail right, we will not face the problems that we had with the deposit return scheme.

In a minute, Mr Hepburn.

I looked at the names that the committee identified as being given to such bills; they include headline bills, shell bills, enabling bills and framework bills. Those are all great names, and they are used by people to promote the bills for what they are: skeletal bills and jellyfish bills.

Sarah Boyack will ask the next question.

That is very helpful and insightful, thank you.

Mark Ruskell has some questions.

Sarah Boyack would like to come in at this point.

Welcome back. I should have said at the start of the meeting that we had received apologies from Bob Doris, who is unable to attend.

Before we continue, Kevin Stewart would like to make a declaration of interests.

It is funny—in the 10 years that I have been sitting on transport committees in the Parliament, I have heard the exact same thing about declining bus use and how we have to integrate transport to make sure that it works. Unfortunately, it appears that it is still the same story 10 years on, and you are telling us the same story that I was told in 2016. It does not appear that we have come very far.

My question is on the concessionary travel scheme for under 22-year-olds and antisocial behaviour orders. Are the two linked? In the previous panel, we heard from an MSYP who said that it is not young people who are causing the problem. Is antisocial behaviour a problem? Has the level of antisocial behaviour changed as a result of the concessionary bus scheme or not? Is there also a problem with young people on trains? I am sure that Douglas Lumsden will refer back to his earlier questions.