Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 03 June 2020
I thank the clerks, the committee, the officials and witnesses as well as the advisers for their work on the bill. The minister is right in what he has said about the 2021 elections: we need to be cautious and we should not be too self-obsessed about the matter.
The minister has indicated that the time for making a decision would be October. To try to project what will happen in a month’s time is difficult enough and to do that for six months ahead will be even more problematic. We might need to be even more flexible in the current circumstances, because it would be wrong to be cavalier in the event of a second peak, should it come at the time of the 2021 elections. We need to be mindful that these are unpredictable times and that we might need to be agile in those circumstances.
I am pleased that we have returned to the subject of council ward sizes. The issue was debated when the bill was originally introduced and we were in favour of greater proportionality for some wards, in urban areas particularly, to reflect the size and coherence of communities. We also wanted to reflect that, in some rural areas, particularly those such as Caithness, the Highlands and other parts of Scotland, the distances are huge and the number of parent and community councils that all need to be serviced is even bigger. Having that bit of flexibility needs, of course, to be fully justified, but it is a wise thing to have and we support it.
With regard to voting pilots, we need to be careful with our democracy. People have confidence in the processes, even though we rely on people’s good faith and honesty to maintain that integrity. We support a cautious approach to electronic voting pilots, particularly for people with sight loss, as that would aid access to democracy, but we need to be careful.
It is also sensible to have declarations on internet adverts. We have seen greater transparency on that front with Facebook. On the Facebook ad website, it can be fascinating to see exactly who is paying for what, and which communities. Greater transparency of adverts on the wider internet would be a great thing.
It is right to transfer the responsibility and accountability for the Electoral Commission from the Scottish Government to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. That transfer emphasises the need for the corporate body’s independence, which we should not jeopardise in the future with political stunts.
I think that Adam Tomkins is right—there is no clear answer on the issue of having four-year or five-year terms. We need some stability, and it is not a futile debate. For years, we survived with four-year terms, which allowed a renewal of our democracy on a frequent basis. Sometimes, five years seems a very long time, especially in the rapidly changing world that we have just now due to a global pandemic, the trauma of Brexit, the EU referendum, and having several Prime Ministers come and go. We have had a lot of change, so it would be sensible to have a fixed term of four years in the future. I see the possible revision of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 as an opportunity to consider whether we can change back to having four-year terms in this Parliament, which would give us the frequency of democracy that would help us all.
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