Hansard

The Procedures Committee is quorate and has democratically decided to start, so I welcome everybody to the fourth meeting of the committee in 2006.The first item is to report on the visit that Karen Gillon and I made to Catalonia. Before I make that report, I should mention that Karen Gillon is away on parliamentary business. Bruce McFee is also away on committee business to visit the Parliaments of Estonia and Finland. We should also note that our excellent clerk, Andrew Mylne, has become a proud father. We wish his family all the best.A paper has been circulated about the visit to the Catalan Parliament. I draw members' attention to the section that begins at paragraph 24 of the paper, which concerns an interesting procedure called "interpellation". As Alex Johnstone will confirm, there is a similar procedure in the Norwegian Parliament in Oslo. The interpellation procedures of the two Parliaments are slightly different, but basically they are both mechanisms whereby an individual member can raise an important general issue, not a constituency issue. Interpellation is a bigger matter than asking a parliamentary question and can have consequences that our members' business debates cannot have. In the Catalan Parliament, if it is accepted that a member has a good enough issue for an interpellation, he gets 10 minutes to speak on it, the minister gets 10 minutes to reply, the member gets another five minutes and then the minister gets another five minutes. Nobody else gets any time to speak at all and there is no vote but, if the members' general view is that the individual member has hit on a good issue, they can have a debate on a motion that can say something useful. If the general view is that it is not a great issue, that is the end of the matter.The Catalan Parliament has another interesting idea. At the second stage of interpellation, after the member has lodged his motion, the other parties can lodge amendments to it. The motion and amendments are debated in the normal way but, in the end, it is up to the mover of the motion to accept or reject the amendments. The Parliament does not vote on each amendment; instead, the mover of the motion says, "I will accept amendment A but not amendment B," and the Parliament votes on his motion as amended by amendment A. That is in an intriguing idea.The main point that we should pursue is the concept of members being able to raise general issues in some way, which is good. Perhaps we could have an easier word for it than "interpellation".I ask Alex Johnstone to comment on the procedure in Oslo.