Seòmar agus comataidhean

Are there any practical considerations? You have already mentioned that disqualification needs to be declared up front. Other members of the panel should feel free to comment, if they have any perspective on that.

It is clear that there are many situations in which someone could be elected to serve a term of office and then not complete that term, and that some of those situations might be known to the person at the start of the term and others might not be known to them until later, during the term itself.

You mentioned that the public might expect to have the right, if they elect someone, to expect that person, at least at the outset, to intend to serve the full term. Is there, or could there be, provision under the proposals for such candidates to make their situation known in the public domain, so that the public would vote in the full knowledge that there is the potential risk that the person may not be able to serve the full term?

Do you have any perspective on whether a disqualification order would be likely to act as a deterrent to unacceptable behaviour?

I have a final point that you might want to come back on. You mentioned, in your answer to Emma Harper, timing and prompt responses and the need to be able to react quickly if circumstances change. I am not sure that people would be queuing up and waiting for the new location then pouncing on it. However, assuming that that was the case and it was felt that those provisions needed to be in place, that would be a reason to have a ministerial directive rather than using a Scottish statutory instrument or whatever. However, you also talked about consultation. That would absolutely be the right thing to do, but consultation is a lengthy process.

It might be helpful if you were to comment on that now, although you might want to come back with indicative timelines and say why a process of due consultation would be prompt enough but a Scottish statutory instrument and due consultation would not.

In your view, would abortion services need to be mentioned in any signage, singing or whatever it was that was going on in order for it to fall foul of the legislation?

I will touch on something that has come up about the trade union exemption. When you described the impact on women who are accessing services, you rightly referred to the issue of anonymity in certain areas. The fact that there is a lot of activity can be problematic and so on. The bill is designed to address the behaviour of those who seek to influence, prevent access to, or persuade people not to access, services.

If we take a step back to look at that, there are hard-won trade union rights that are important for many reasons that we all agree on. However, an objective view is that the whole purpose of a peaceful picket is to stop people accessing, or persuade people not to access, services.

The bill balances competing rights. For the record, will you explain again how you see the difference between preventing people from accessing services, seeking to influence or persuading people not to access services on one hand and, on the other hand, the right to carry out activity that you could argue could be done elsewhere, as we have outlined with regard to anti-abortion protests? How do you characterise those competing rights and will you explain how they fit together?

I want to talk through the areas that I covered in the previous session—you will be familiar with them. They are the implications for churches that are located in safe access zones; the implications for private property in the zones; what is and is not allowed; and whether you foresee any issues around the restrictions in both directions—that is about whether things might be too tightly controlled, where the line is and what the scope is for, for example, images to be projected from buildings that are further away than the 200m limit.

I keep coming back to this point, though, because it is important. You, too, will understand the importance of potential criminalising of silent prayer; if there is no context, I am struggling to see how it can be criminalised. If I am hearing you right, you are saying that the police would make such decisions, so you are kind of passing the buck on to them. I might come back to that issue later.

I wanted to ask one other question. You have made the point—rightly—that one of the very important aspects of the issue is how women who are accessing the services feel about what is going on. We have taken evidence that, from a distance, any protest could be deemed to be creating a problematic environment that might make it difficult for women to access services. That could include other protests that we have heard about, such as those around the Eljamel issue, trade union activity or any bunch of noisy people with placards who are standing outside a place shouting and handing out leaflets. From a distance, such a protest could seem to be a protest about anything, and that could be just as impactful on women who are accessing the services. I just want to understand how you square those different views.

Going back to Ruth Maguire’s point about this being something that is silent and there being no other visible signs, you said that context and what is going on round about will be important. However, if there is none of that—if all there is is someone simply standing and praying silently, with no other visible signs around them—is the Government’s position that such activity will not fall foul of the restrictions and measures in the bill? After all, you keep coming back to the point about context and the police making a decision on that basis, but if there is no such context, just silent prayer, how do you make that illegal?

Thankfully, there has not been a strike here as there has been in other parts of the United Kingdom but, if there were such a strike, that would be an effort to seek to persuade people not to access or provide services.