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I agree. The concept is interesting. The only similar example that I can think of is that Poppy Scotland converted an old truck into a mobile exhibition about the first world war. It went around Scotland and it was incredibly successful at educating people, especially young people. It was almost like a mobile museum and it was very well put together.

A Parliament bus could be a wider thing, because a large part of the issue is that a lot of people do not know where the Parliament fits in relation to the broader range of concerns that they might have about local government issues and UK Parliament issues. We potentially have a broader educational opportunity to discuss more generally the roles of the councillor, the MSP and the member of the UK Parliament in relation to local issues and needs and how people can engage effectively with all the institutions in our democratic society. A bus could be part of a broader enterprise that could be quite successful. It would be worth testing that out.

The point about the Parliament’s function in relation to holding power to account is really important. It all merges into one blob in the mind of the public, so teasing that out would be useful.

I have often thought that it would be good to have a long-running fly-on-the-wall documentary that got into the mechanics of how Parliament operates day to day, like “Inside Central Station” on the BBC. It would be a long-running programme, but it would be a kind of public service broadcasting thing that covered councils and both Parliaments and dealt with what they are like day to day—not in a political sense, but in the mechanical sense of how it all operates. That would be a very effective tool for making the public aware of how the Parliament actually works day to day, so that people were not seeing only the political theatre. I keep pitching that to the BBC, but I do not think that it is going to take me on.

It is an interesting question. I have had the opportunity to participate in Prime Minister’s questions, and I know that the Prime Minister does not get advance sight of the questions. The order paper has numbers and members’ names; it is just sudden death, which is why there is a stack of notes that is gone through frantically. Frequently, the response will be something like, “That’s a really interesting point—I’ll get my officials or the relevant minister to respond.” That is usually quite good for constituency issues, because it can result in such matters getting escalated very rapidly, and you can get quite a decent outcome.

I therefore wonder whether there should be something else, instead of having some preamble in the Business Bulletin, which then leads to a pre-scripted response. Sometimes, though, that can be helpful; if you want a detailed answer on something, you might well volunteer to give the minister the information in advance. I just think that a different format would be an interesting way of changing things up a bit and could improve the relevance of responses—or, perhaps, make people keener to respond.

I am Paul Sweeney and I am an MSP from Glasgow.

Oh, is it? I must have missed that one.

I am sympathetic to that point, because the issue of contempt for Parliament is not well enforced, which I have found to be quite frustrating, particularly in the chamber. Enhanced powers for the Presiding Officer to compel relevant, timely and succinct answers would be good. Sometimes, responses can be almost antisocial, as they consume time—they can, in effect, become filibustering, with someone havering on for a minute and a half without getting to the point, which is designed to push other questions off the shelf, so the minister has to answer fewer questions. In other legislatures, such as the Irish Dáil, the equivalent of the Presiding Officer has the power to stop a minister if that is happening.

People should treat the chamber with the respect that they would treat a courtroom, in the sense that they should give relevant and punchy answers, and the questions should be succinct and to the point, too, and should not go off on a minute-long preamble. It might be possible to tighten up the standing orders to make the Parliament more rigorous with regard to how questions are addressed.

It is a powerful set of recommendations. We all get repeat customers in relation to casework inquiries. It can often be a core set of people who are always coming back to us about issues because they have tapped into the mechanism of how to do it. That does not mean that the mechanism of how to do it is widely known about; it can be quite an arcane procedure and it can also be quite intimidating to get in touch with an MSP or an MP. I think that it would be useful to make that process more accessible.

From time to time, we get mass email campaigns, whereby a campaign organisation will create an information box that allows people to punch in an address and then send a model response on a campaign issue. We can get thousands of duplicate emails, to which we have to do a mass response. That can be fine from the point of view of perfunctory engagement, and it is broadly used to signal mass interest in a particular issue, but it is not a form of close engagement.

I suggest that the Parliament might be able to create a better interface that people could use to write to their MSP. It might be a matter of scanning a QR code on, for example, a bus shelter advertisement, which could bring up a pro forma document that provides their constituency and regional MSPs, asks about the nature of their issue and gives the text to fill out the box. That would make it easier to send an email; it might be less intimidating than having to sit and manually type it all out. That might make the process somewhat simpler.

There could also be a call-back service—if someone requested a call back on an issue, they could get a phone call—or a surgery booking service. Perhaps it would be better for the Parliament to have an interface on its website for doing such things, rather than people having to rely on individual MSPs’ social media and websites for information, because the quality of that information can be highly variable. That is just a thought.

There is also the TheyWorkForYou website, which makes engagement a bit easier, but that might not be the easiest of interfaces.

Thank you very much, Dr Tucker. That is really helpful with regard to understanding the broader political concerns. Do you have any further comments in relation to the broad scope of that clause, Sir Jonathan?

To verify your position, would you regard the use of secondary legislation for the purpose of the revocation and replacement of REUL as completely inappropriate? Based on the need for scrutiny, should the emphasis, or at least the general presumption, be on using primary legislation rather than on using secondary legislation?

I thank the witnesses for their helpful contributions.

The powers in clause 15 allow UK ministers and devolved ministers to revoke retained EU law until the end of 2023, or assimilated law from 1 January 2024, and replace it. That power will be available to ministers until 23 June 2026. Where provision is made to replace retained or assimilated law, the replacement provision can implement different policy objectives. I am keen to get your collective views on the scope of the power to revoke and replace retained EU law and assimilated law.

Thanks for that. There is—