Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2025
No, I will not take any more interventions—maybe I will do so later.
I am grateful to the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee members for unanimously recommending that Parliament supports the general principles of the bill. The committee report comments on all areas of the bill, but it is fair to say that it does not make clear the committee’s collective position on a number of the provisions. For example, I am not sure whether the committee is for or against my potentially confusing and expensive proposal for the recall of regional members.
I assumed from the committee’s evidence and from its members’ questioning that it would be against that proposal, so I wrote to the committee on the day that its report was published to advise that I am now intending, if the bill passes stage 1, to amend that process to reflect the simpler approach that is proposed in the Welsh Government’s new bill. That would remove the recall petition process for regional MSPs and replace it with a straightforward poll on whether to retain or remove a member, which would be decided by a simple majority across the region. If the member lost that vote, they would be replaced by the next person on the party list, in the usual way.
That change would deal with many of the concerns that were raised in the committee’s report, and I would welcome comments from members across the Parliament on that proposal during the debate. What I am now proposing is a Scottish system that models its approach to the recall of constituency MSPs on the UK Parliament’s system and its approach to recall of regional MSPs on the Welsh Government’s system.
On the provisions on disqualification for a lack of physical attendance in the Parliament, my starting point for the bill was the fact that any MSP could, in theory, not attend the Parliament, either remotely or in person, for their entire term. That is the fact of the matter, and it is the law that councillors cannot get away with that, unless they have a good reason to be absent. I am of the view that it is not unreasonable to expect a fit and healthy MSP to come into the Parliament at least once every six months, and most people would agree with that.
Throughout the bill process, I have been clear that people’s personal circumstances should be dealt with in confidence, and I am not really sure why there has been confusion on that point. The committee had concerns about how the process would work in practice. It took issue with the role that the committee is being asked to perform and the lack of detail in the bill as to how the process would work and the criteria to inform its deliberations on what is or is not a reasonable excuse. The committee was dead against imposing a physical attendance requirement on MSPs.