Meeting of the Parliament 22 April 2015
I note that the lowering of the threshold for registered gifts is being undertaken to comply with the recommendation of the group of states against corruption, GRECO, which is a monitoring body including all members of the Council of Europe as well as the United States and Belarus. Not only did GRECO state that it thought that the threshold for MSPs—along with those for members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords—was “rather high”, but it noted:
“This state of affairs is particularly worrying because ... there are no restrictions on the acceptance of gifts without regard to whether they are required to be registered.”
As an institution, the Parliament has always striven to operate with the highest standards of propriety, so it is right and proper that we should take on board that recommendation and that the threshold should be reduced to 0.5 per cent.
The GRECO report seems to have missed the advice that MSPs are already given about accepting gifts. I think that we have fairly explicit arrangements, especially when it comes to the advice on commercial lobbyists, which could be summarised as, “If you’re in any doubt, don’t.”
When it comes to the proposal to streamline the reporting requirements, it is clearly a commonsense approach to rationalise from two systems to one. Why have two reports for MSPs to make, two places for the public to search, two places for people to complain and overlaps because of dual reporting when we could make life easier for all concerned with one report, one search and one place to go for those who believe that the requirements have not been met?
Although most breaches of the reporting requirements since 1999 have been relatively minor and have generally been oversights, as the Parliament has been able to deal with them through the sanctions that it possesses, it is important that the option of prosecution is retained to deal with any serious offence. To do otherwise would be to undermine the importance that we as a Parliament attach to openness and transparency in the actions of elected members. That is particularly important for anyone who undertakes paid advocacy work.
On the question of the retention of records, 10 years seems not unreasonable to me, and I can think of no good reason why records for the previous two sessions of the Parliament should not be publicly available.
Although the committee has taken on board most of the GRECO recommendations, the exception—the issue on which we might consider going further—concerns the matter of shareholdings. GRECO considered that
“a Member may be more influenced by the effect of a matter on his/her stocks than by the receipt of a payment for a speech”.
I note that the committee decided that the level was right “on balance”. The decision seems to be based on the levels for the Lords and the Commons being higher, and on those for the Northern Ireland Assembly being only a few grand lower.
I am not sure whether there are any other arguments against the level being lower. I know that few, if any, of my constituents would regard having £28,000 in company shares as an insignificant financial interest. Although that is below our threshold, there could be several such holdings without any needing to be registered. Perhaps that could be addressed when the committee’s deputy convener sums up.
16:35