Meeting of the Parliament 07 January 2016
Can I just get this point across, Mr Findlay?
The bill as it stands will make it difficult for local employers and small businesses to contact me. Some small and medium-sized enterprises might not even bother, because they will wonder whether it is worth the hassle to register to be able to have a meaningful dialogue with their elected member. It has been stated that the register should be targeted at organisations that have significant contact with their MSPs. One small engineering business recently came to me to discuss an expansion that would create jobs in the area. It wanted to know how it could take the next big step and to ask me to help it or point it in the right direction. That business might have looked for a different way of dealing with that and might not have approached an elected member if it had thought that there was an administrative barrier to doing so.
Would the bill mean that every single major employer in Renfrewshire would have to register and record every single meeting that it had with an elected member as we discuss the future of my constituents and their jobs? As the bill stands, it would put an added burden on the third sector to register, and one of the best things about the Scottish Parliament could be lost. This institution is Scotland’s Parliament and we all take great pride in the openness and accessibility of our members, ministers and Government, and that is worth preserving. I am aware that many of the original intake of members in 1999 looked at the workings of the Parliament and considered how to deal with lobbying. They knew that doing so could harm their vision for the Parliament.