Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, November 12, 2020

Official Report 580KB pdf

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Subordinate Legislation

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Scottish Elections (Details to Appear on Election Material) Regulations 2020 (SSI 2020/297)

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Scottish Elections (Details to Appear on Election Publications) Regulations 2020 (SSI 2020/298)

Our second item is for members to consider two pieces of subordinate legislation. The papers have been circulated. Do members have any comments?

I do not know who can answer my question, but I wonder whether the regulations essentially allow for dual mandates. I know that the regulations are focused on the online side. Let us say that somebody is standing for a party on the list. My question is whether the regulations allow for a dual mandate, or whether they simply take the regulations that apply to normal paper leaflets and reproduce them for online material.

We can forward any questions to the minister, so your question was useful; otherwise, the legislation would just pass straight through. We will get that question to the minister and get a reply for you and for the committee.

Does anyone else have anything to ask?

It would probably be helpful for us to have the minister before the committee to answer some questions. Has there been any consultation with the political parties? Has there been consultation with local government? Some clarity is required, particularly around what would constitute “an individual’s personal opinion” and what would fall within the scope of the regulations that would require an imprint.

There are a few other questions that it would be worth asking the minister that I might need to have answered. For example, it appears that the regulations apply to paid statements, but do they apply only to paid statements or to other statements?

Thank you. Time is an issue for the committee, because we have a huge amount of work to cover before Christmas. Would it be possible, in the first instance at least, for members to send their questions to the clerks, who can forward them to the minister? We will see how that works.

Patrick Harvie has something to say.

I appreciate that this is the first time that the issue has come to the committee, but the instruments give effect to something that was debated repeatedly during the passage of the first independence referendum legislation and the more recent framework legislation on referendums.

A significant amount of discussion has been had with the Electoral Commission throughout the UK, including in Scotland. Every time that the issue has been discussed, there has been a fairly clear consensus that what the regulations propose ought to happen.

My instinct is that we should not do anything that holds up approval of the regulations. I do not see a problem with members exploring questions in parallel with that, but I do not think that we should do anything to hold up approval of the regulations.

At its meeting on 6 October, the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee considered the regulations and made no comment on them. I do not know whether that says something about that committee’s position and that it thinks that the regulations should go forward. However, if members of this committee have questions, we need to make sure that they are raised as quickly as possible. We should collate our questions and send them to the minister for his reply. That would speed things up and keep up the tempo.

I agree with Patrick Harvie. Is there not a requirement on us to approve the regulations fairly urgently to make changes to election rules? Changes have to be made six months before an election, so there is a huge sense of urgency. If we are to have the minister in front of us, we might need to have another meeting to facilitate that.

I regret the shortness of the timescale that we have been given, but I do not think that we can rely on the fact that the DPLR Committee has no objections to the regulations. It has no objection to the technicalities of the instruments—its role is to look at the technicalities—but I do not think that any lack of objections from the DPLR Committee is an endorsement of the regulations.

Nonetheless, I agree with Patrick Harvie. I do not think that we should hold up the regulations if we want to have the election at the usual time.

I thank everyone for those contributions. The regulations were on the agenda and we have to discuss them. However, the fact is that we need to stick to the timetable for the Parliament’s sake and for the elections that we have coming up in May next year, which is not very far off.

Do members agree that we should write to the minister with members’ concerns? That would keep the tempo up, as long as members can get their concerns about what we have been presented with to the clerks, which can then go forward to the minister. Is that okay? I think that everybody seems to be okay with that.

We now move into private to consider the next two items on the agenda.

11:21 Meeting continued in private until 11:49.