Seòmar agus comataidhean

It means physically being in a committee meeting or in the chamber.

Here—this Parliament.

It means attending a committee meeting such as this one or a session in the chamber; it does not mean attending a cross-party group or a reception in the Parliament.

Correct. You need to turn up only once every six months. As Emma Roddick said, doing so is not particularly onerous. Perhaps I am being too lenient.

—but that is not a reason to remove somebody from their elected position.

The tests are set out in the bill. They would need to actually break certain rules, which are set out in the bill. It is not enough to say, “I don’t like that person. I don’t like the way they have gone about that campaign,” or whatever. No chance.

In cases such as that, people are entitled to a degree of privacy. I know that we will come on to talk about non-attendance, but you have raised it. Let us that say somebody has an illness—this has happened. MSPs fall ill, which means that they cannot come in for a period of time. We would not expect somebody to lose their job because of that, and, if the MSP wanted it to be private, we would expect it to be private. Things happen in people’s lives that mean that they cannot come into work and they deserve that level of privacy. I am trying to maintain that.

That is correct.

At the moment, it is possible for any of us to decide not to come in, and that is wrong. That cannot be right. My starting point was that, because I had been a councillor, I knew the law that applied to councillors, which is very clear: if you do not attend for six months, you can be removed but you will not necessarily be removed. For example, I took part in a vote in South Lanarkshire Council about a colleague—not a party colleague—who had been off. I will not say why they were off, but they were and there was a very good reason why. The council decided that they should be allowed to continue, and that individual is still a councillor.

Thank you, convener. I have very much enjoyed the committee’s previous meetings on the bill. The range of questions—I am sure that I will get the same—has been very good and they have covered all aspects of the bill.

I am not assuming that we will get to stage 2, but, should we do so, I very much look forward to seeing Ruth Maguire back on the committee—if, indeed, she does return to it—so that she can get her teeth into the bill. That would be good. I am sure that we would all want that.

Appearing before a committee can be daunting. As a member, I have given a number of people a good grilling and, no doubt, some of them are watching, hoping that I will get the kind of treatment that I have dished out. This is not my first time appearing in front of a committee to talk about my bill. I appeared before the Senedd’s Standards of Conduct Committee, which wanted to know all about the bill. We did a private session and a public one, and I call those dress rehearsals.

I thought that it would be useful to provide some background to the bill and my thinking on it before we get into questions. As you all know, members of the Scottish Parliament are elected every five years. If a member decides to stand again, the public gets its say: they can decide whether that person is re-elected.

What happens if any of us do not adequately represent the needs of those who put us here, or if we demonstrate very poor conduct during those five years? We are all obliged to adhere to a code of conduct and, if we do not, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee can recommend sanctions up to and including suspension, but it cannot recommend that an MSP be removed from office, no matter how bad their behaviour. There is also no mechanism that allows constituents to remove an MSP during a parliamentary term, no matter how serious a sanction this committee recommends. The only way that an MSP can be removed from office altogether is if they receive a custodial sentence of longer than one year. That is too high a bar.

In addition, if any MSP is elected and never comes to this building—ever—there is nothing that the public or anyone else can do until the next election. That is an absurd situation. By contrast, in other workplaces, if an employee repeatedly or seriously breaches their company’s code of conduct, they could be sacked. If an employee just does not attend their place of work without good reason, they could be removed, and we would expect that. If an employee receives a relatively short custodial sentence for a criminal offence, that could lead to their dismissal, especially if they are in a senior position. To me, the contrast is quite jarring. My bill would improve democratic accountability by ensuring that MSPs could be removed more easily if our conduct fell short of what our constituents could reasonably expect.

The bill is in three parts. The first part of the bill would introduce a recall system—the committee has focused quite heavily on that. It draws on the Recall of MPs Act 2015 but adapts those provisions to ensure that they work in our electoral system. We will, no doubt, discuss that later.

Part 2 would reduce the length of custodial sentence that results in the automatic removal of an MSP from more than 12 months to six months. It provides that, if an MSP does not attend parliamentary proceedings in person for a six-month period without good reason, this committee could recommend to the Parliament that they be removed.

Serving as an MSP is a privilege, and my bill would ensure that we are all much more accountable. Ultimately, I think that the people who choose us to represent them will feel that the provisions of the bill and their implications for members are fair, proportionate and in line with what people in the outside world would experience in their places of work.

I look forward to the questions.

Well, that is fine—you could suspend somebody from the Scottish National Party, but they could remain as an MSP. As a whip, you cannot remove somebody as an MSP.

That is the key issue, really, and it is something that I really wrestled with when I was thinking about the bill. For a while, I did not have a solution and I just thought that I was going to have to give up on recall; then it hit me that I was thinking about it in the wrong way. If we are going to have a power of recall—and all parties in the Parliament seem to agree that we should have something—we must address the fact that we have this odd electoral system, which I have said in this committee that I do not like, but which we are stuck with, so I must work with it.

For constituency members, it is relatively straightforward—we can almost mirror the system in Westminster and improve on it, as I said last week. We could ultimately have the best recall system in the United Kingdom at the end of this. However, we also must balance that with the fact that we have regional members.

With a constituency member who is subject to recall, there are two stages. First, the voters are asked whether the member should be recalled, and, secondly, there is a by-election if a threshold is met. What struck me about that approach was that the member, should they wish to proceed—some will not—would be able to put their case to the electors and say why they should stay on. When looking at the regional situation, I wondered whether it would be fair to replicate that process as closely as possible. Although I accept that there will be an enormous cost if that ever comes about, it seemed to me that it would be fair—and, ultimately, fair to the member—to have that two-stage process. I think that most of us in this room are regional members. If it were any of us, I think that we would want the ability to put our case to the electorate if we wished to fight the recall, because otherwise—