Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2024
It is a pleasure to follow Colin Beattie, who gave a considered and thoughtful speech that highlighted many issues of concern about the bill that I wish to reiterate.
The proposed legislation has good intentions—there is no doubt about that—and I am sure that it will have unanimous support across the chamber when we get to decision time, but it is severely lacking in detail. What exactly are we to scrutinise today in the stage 1 debate? Surely we all agree with the idea that we ought to take a view on modernising our law on how we should treat people who suffer from severe mental health issues in relation to their financial affairs. But surely, when a bill is in front of us, we should be looking more at the substance of what is being proposed to deal with the issue. Murdo Fraser has said that Conservative members will support the bill. As I said, I think that it will be unanimously supported—I hope that it will be—but we need more detail.
New laws cannot be made casually, and the Parliament does not have a great reputation for making solid and robust law. We do not have a revising chamber. We have to get to the detail of any bill so that we do not produce bad or weak law, and we should be very wary of rubber stamping vague bills such as the one that is in front of us. For example, who is to be helped? How are they to be helped? How long are they to be helped for? What mechanisms will be used to provide the help? We have no idea what additional resources will be required, in a public or a private sense, to fulfil the bill’s requirements, because specific and substantial details on that simply do not exist. Therefore, we are all left to discuss a worthy principle that everyone in the chamber already agrees on—namely, that we should update our existing bankruptcy legislation and introduce a mental health moratorium for people who are suffering from mental health issues.
However, I simply do not think that we should accept any provisions that emerge on the basis of the bill that leave at-risk Scots in a less protected position than people in England and Wales. I hope that none of us would support a bill, or the details of any bill, that would leave our citizens in a worse-off position than their fellows in the rest of the United Kingdom, but that is what I fear we will see happen if the Scottish Government, as is its pattern, accepts the recommendations of its own working group, specifically on the entry criteria. That has been well covered in paragraph 50 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee’s report and in paragraph 72, on the scope of the protections. I congratulate the convener and the committee for the excellent stage 1 report that they produced.
The minister should agree today to the committee’s request in paragraph 76 of the report, if he wants to look it up. He should commit to that request today. I have to ask for that because there is nothing in the bill that spells out the detail that we are all badly missing.
The explanatory notes say that section 1 of the bill gives ministers
“a power by regulations to establish a moratorium ... on debt recovery action in relation to individuals who have a mental illness.”
The policy memorandum, which was produced by the minister, goes even further and puts it more succinctly. It says:
“Further work will be taken forward within government and with stakeholders to develop the details of the scheme which will cover specific areas such as the criteria for entry to, and exit from, a moratorium; the specific protections afforded by a moratorium; and the duration of those protections.”
So, the substance of the bill is still to be worked out, and our role as parliamentarians in scrutinising what the Government is proposing is therefore largely fatuous. That is a familiar trick from the Scottish National Party and Scottish Greens in office. They introduce proposed framework legislation that empowers ministers. Daniel Johnson is right to highlight his concerns, which we should all share, about the extent of those powers, which sounded very much like Henry VIII powers to me as he read from the bill. As I say, the Government is proposing framework legislation empowering ministers to—