Meeting of the Parliament 22 April 2015
I want to start by quickly reflecting on the background to the committee’s work on updating the members’ interests statute. The committee should be commended for moving quickly to utilise the powers that arose from the implementation of the Scotland Act 2012, which gave the Parliament the ability to review the terms of the members’ interests framework in full.
We now anticipate that the Parliament will soon be responsible for all matters that are relevant to its internal operations, which is something that we have argued for since the first session of the Parliament and which this Government has advocated since coming to office. It is good that there is a general consensus that that is an area for which the Parliament should have responsibility. That default position—which is the normal position for Parliaments around the world—is only right, so I welcome the opportunity that the debate gives us to consider the substance of the proposals that are contained in the committee’s report.
The subject matter of the debate is clearly a matter for the Parliament, but I wish to take the opportunity to put the Government’s views on the record, which I hope will be helpful to the committee and to the Parliament as a whole.
I consider that the reform package that is proposed by the committee represents a significant and progressive step forward. It is good to re-emphasise what the convener said—the reform package is about making the regime more transparent and more robust. We already have transparent and robust procedures in place, but it is always appropriate for us to look at how they can be improved. It is correct that that is being done.
I am pleased to confirm that the Government is supportive of the committee’s proposals and that it considers it appropriate for a bill to be brought forward to implement them. It will, I believe, be the first committee bill for some time.
Members of the committee will recall that, during the consultation process, the Government identified two issues that it believed required careful consideration. The first was that of whether failure to register or declare an interest should no longer be a criminal offence, and the second was whether a rectification process should be introduced to deal separately with minor instances of non-compliance and thus avoid investigation of such cases by the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland.
In its response to the consultation, the Government put forward a number of arguments about the merits of implementing such policies. In particular, we were concerned that either move could be perceived as diluting the accountability of MSPs, and we therefore welcome the fact that, after careful consideration of the consultation responses, the committee has decided not to proceed with these measures.
As for the proposals that the committee seeks to implement, I particularly welcome the end of dual reporting of members’ financial interests to both the Parliament and the Electoral Commission. The benefits of this reform are twofold. First, it will streamline the registration process for MSPs, ending a confusing and potentially disruptive arrangement; and, secondly, it will provide the public with a single point of reference as well as a single complaints system for any perceived instances of non-compliance. Both benefits are very important. That said, it would be wrong to underestimate the challenges that the committee has faced in seeking to combine the two different registration schemes and the fact that it has done so without undermining the robustness of either scheme or adding unnecessary complexity is a significant achievement that I hope the whole Parliament will recognise.
The proposals also reflect the Parliament’s founding principles by seeking to deliver parity for MSPs. First of all, they seek to end dual reporting for independent members, despite existing statutory mechanisms being based on members of political parties, and—on the other side of the coin—require independent members to be made subject to the requirement on members of political parties to register controlled transactions such as a credit facility extended to an MSP for political activities.