Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2025
It has taken a long time to reach today’s stage 1 debate on the Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill. I first suggested that we should do something in this area in the previous session of Parliament, following a number of conversations with my then party leader, Ruth Davidson. I got things formally moving on the bill at the start of this session, the end of which we are perilously near. The bill was introduced in December 2024 and has been at stage 1 for 11 months. It should not take this long for a member’s bill to be dealt with. In the past, we have seen bills fall due to lack of time.
I can now, at last, say that I am grateful to the non-Government bills unit for its work on the bill so far. We still have a lot of work to do in a very short space of time. I also thank the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee for its report, which I will come on to. I also thank the former Minister for Parliamentary Business, Jamie Hepburn, who is sitting in the chamber, for his positive engagement on the bill.
If the Parliament does not get the bill over the line in this session, Scotland will be left as the only part of the United Kingdom without a recall system. That would represent a failure of Parliament that I do not want to see. We must collectively rise to the challenge. The Welsh are now edging ahead of us, having taken evidence from me as they thought about how they might tackle the issue. Last week, their Government introduced a bill that includes a recall process for all members of their Parliament.
My bill would improve democratic accountability by ensuring that MSPs can be removed more easily if our conduct falls short of what our constituents could reasonably expect. The first part of my bill would introduce a recall system for the Scottish Parliament, drawing on the Recall of MPs Act 2015, but adapting those provisions to ensure that they work with our distinct electoral system.
The bill sets out that any member will be subject to a recall petition if one of two trigger conditions is met. The first trigger is if the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee recommends to Parliament a sanction of 14 days or 10 sitting days, and Parliament resolves to sanction the member for that period. The second trigger is if the member is sentenced to prison for a period of up to six months.
The Presiding Officer would then begin the recall petition process. That would be a four-week process for the electorate to indicate whether they consider that the member should be subject to recall. For a constituency member, if a threshold of 10 per cent of the electorate in that constituency signing the petition were met, the member would be removed from office. They would have the option of running in the resulting by-election to seek to regain their seat. For regional MSPs, my original proposal—the one in the bill that is before us—was to have a recall petition process across the region, which would require 10 per cent of the region’s electorate to sign a recall petition. In addition, at least three constituencies within that region would have to reach the 10 per cent threshold.