Meeting of the Parliament 25 November 2025
Today, we are being invited to agree to treat the Non-Domestic Rates (Liability for Unoccupied Properties) (Scotland) Bill as an emergency bill and to consider it under an accelerated timetable. The bill is necessary because of a legislative error in the Non-Domestic Rates (Scotland) Act 2020, which, inadvertently, according to the Government, removed the legal basis for charging non-domestic rates on unoccupied properties.
In the debate so far, we have heard a dispute about what should and should not happen and who should and should not be responsible. Those are genuine arguments, and there need to be answers to those genuine questions. We have been presented with a piece of defective legislation. When it was passed, everyone had one understanding of what it achieved, but the legal understanding of it is different.
The Parliament is being asked to pass an emergency bill to repair a small error. That is not to make excuses for the error; we should explore why it occurred in the first place. Indeed, we in the Parliament have faced a number of challenges around the competency of legislation, and yet we have heard on a number of occasions an urge to cut debate times so that legislation cannot be explored. Maybe that is something that we all need to look at.