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Plenary, 01 Jul 2004

01 Jul 2004 · S2 · Plenary

Item of business

Stirling-Alloa-Kincardine Railway and Linked Improvements Bill: Final Stage

Radcliffe, Nora LD Gordon Watch on SPTV

This is the third private bill to go through Parliament, but it is the first that has dealt with transport and works. It has been an interesting, if demanding, experience to work on it. When the mountain of paper that I have collected during the passage of the bill is recycled, I will not be surprised if it causes a blip in the recycled paper market.

There are more serious issues about the process and how it might be improved and I am glad that the Procedures Committee will examine them. It should also review the situation in which the Presiding Officer finds himself as a local member who is prevented from speaking in the debate. There are occasions when we should assume that people have integrity—this is one of them. Parliament should set a precedent that local members not be debarred from speaking in debates that concern their constituents.

The three-stage process for private bills parallels the process for public bills. There is the preliminary stage, the consideration stage and this final stage. I give heartfelt thanks to the clerks and special advisers for guiding us through and assisting us in the process. I commend them for the huge amount of work that they did. I mentioned the mountain of paper, but all that paper had to be organised, presented, tabulated and so on. Just moving paper around was a huge job, never mind doing it in a way that made it interpretable and useful.

It was a pleasure to work with my colleagues on the committee—we worked well together and I appreciated the convenership of Bill Butler.

At the preliminary stage, the committee considers the general principles of a bill and whether it should continue as a private bill, and it gives preliminary consideration to objections—basically, it considers whether they are admissible. The committee's report at the end of the preliminary stage has to be approved by Parliament before the bill can go to consideration stage, at which the detail of the bill is examined and each group of objections is dealt with.

The procedure for consideration of objections was unfamiliar, as the committee sits in a quasi-judicial way, and its role is to act as arbiter between the promoter of the bill and the objectors. I commend the way in which the objectors rose to the challenge of operating within that formal framework. I was impressed by the different groups of objectors who argued their points extremely effectively and with great courtesy, and who were extremely helpful to committee members on our various site visits, to which Bill Butler referred.

A bill committee reports on its conclusions at the end of consideration stage, having heard the arguments of promoter and objectors. There is a further opportunity for amendments to be made, and the bill arrives at its final stage to be debated by the whole Parliament. It will be obvious from the report that the committee gave a great deal of detailed consideration to the various objections and suggestions that were made by individuals and businesses that were affected by the proposed reopening of the stretch of railway line. It was our job to weigh the disbenefits to objectors against the wider benefits of the proposal. We did considerable work to satisfy ourselves that the alleged benefits were well founded.

Although I know that objectors have been disappointed that the committee eventually decided that various rerouting suggestions should not be upheld, I hope that they accept that we gave their objections serious and detailed consideration.

It was possible for the bill to deal directly only with a narrow set of matters; it was not possible to have anything in the bill on compensation, noise and vibration mitigation, safety fences and so on. However, the committee went to some lengths to ensure that the promoter gave fairly detailed assurances on those matters, which weighed heavily in balancing our conclusions.

I hope that Parliament will agree to the motions on the bill that are before it today and that the rail project will go ahead and deliver the benefits that the minister and others outlined. It is exciting to stand at this time looking forward to the reopening of 21km of railway line that will connect Alloa to the passenger network and cut many rail miles and even more lorry miles out of the delivery of coal to Longannet. It will, I hope, encourage economic development, free up capacity on the Forth rail bridge, with benefits to the wider rail network, and open up even more exciting opportunities. I commend the bill to Parliament.

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Plenary, 01 Jul 2004

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