Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am happy to take up the minister’s offer of further engagement and therefore I seek the committee’s agreement to withdraw amendment 66.

Amendment 66, by agreement, withdrawn.

Amendments 67 and 68 not moved.

Section 28—Pilot schemes under the Scottish Local Government (Elections) Act 2002

I am going to speak only to my own amendment, convener, and I will be quite brief.

Amendment 69 will require parliamentary approval not for all pilots but for any pilot that alters how votes are cast. My primary area of concern is e-voting—electronic voting, digital voting or however you wish to phrase it. I am not seeking to ban e-voting pilots outright, although in all honesty I would do so, but I think that any move from a paper to an electronic ballot, even as part of a pilot, would be of such significance that it should require specific consideration before it went ahead. Any trial of a new system, even in a single area, will still be part of a live election in which somebody will be elected to represent a community.

Given the significance of long-held concerns about the potential ability to compromise such a system, there should be that additional level of scrutiny. Therefore, I propose that any pilot that changes how votes are cast be subject to the Parliament’s approval.

I move amendment 69.

I thank the committee members and the minister for taking part in the debate. I recognise that these would be significant changes, but we should be a bit cautious about the argument that significant changes cannot be introduced to bills through amendments, because that robs everyone other than the Government of the ability to make significant changes. Back-bench MSPs from the governing party, as well as Opposition MSPs, also have the right to legislate for substantive things.

Good morning, everyone. It might seem a little odd in the first instance that I, a Green, am moving an amendment to get rid of cash deposits, now that we are finally at the stage of other parties in that we can afford to pay those deposits ourselves. I am moving it because I do not believe that participants in elections should face financial barriers, and cash deposits obviously create such barriers. The ability to pay £500 bears no relation to the demonstration of a reasonable level of support.

Deposits originated after world war 1 as a way to pay for elections. The political parties themselves, combined, had to pay for the administration of elections. Clearly, we have moved well beyond that, and cash deposits are a legacy of a different era of electoral administration.

The Electoral Commission has reviewed the issue a couple of times. Most recently, in 2015, most of the countries that it reviewed—certainly across Europe—had no cash deposit system. Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands do not have such a system. The United States has quite complicated ballot access arrangements but it does not have a cash deposit system. Those countries that had such a system tended to require financial deposits of far less than the equivalent of £500.

The argument that is used now for cash deposits, given that we have moved beyond the point where they are used literally to pay for the administration of elections, is that they provide a barrier to filter out unserious candidates. They limit the length of our ballot papers compared to those in, say, Australia—where, for some senate elections, ballot papers can reach 1.5m to 2m long, with over a hundred candidates on them.

The length of the Scottish Parliament’s regional list ballots suggests that cash deposits are not exactly acting as a significant disincentive in that manner. Plenty of “unserious” candidates can afford £500, but the financial barrier gets in the way of what might be regarded as more serious candidates, particularly independents.

What I propose instead is that we strengthen the system so that it is equivalent to the nominator or subscriber system that is part of the Westminster general election nomination process. That system long predates cash deposits—it has been in place for Westminster candidacies since the 1870s. Currently, only 10 electors are needed to sign each nomination, but that requirement sits alongside the £500 cash deposit.

For some reason—which I have not quite been able to get to the bottom of—when the Scottish Parliament was established, we replicated the requirement for a cash deposit for Holyrood constituencies but we did not replicate the 10 nominations threshold.

I want to emphasise that this amendment is about implementing a long-held recommendation of the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission’s 2015 report states clearly:

“We recommend removing the requirement to pay a deposit at all elections, as we do not consider that there should be a financial barrier to standing for election.”

Instead, I propose to implement a nomination threshold. For constituencies, the threshold would be 0.05 per cent of voters, or 50 individuals. In practice, in most mainland constituencies, 0.05 per cent of voters would usually be slightly more than 50 people. However, the reason that I include the 0.05 per cent as well is to reflect the fact that island constituencies have much lower populations, and it would therefore be reasonable to have a lower nomination threshold in an island constituency. For the list system, the threshold would be 150 voters, or 0.05 per cent of voters—which would generally be around 150 people.

I have included provision in amendment 57 for ministers to vary those thresholds in the future, to reflect population change. I would also propose that cash deposits still be allowed in the event of snap elections, to recognise the fact that it takes a bit more time to collect signatures than it does simply to lay a cash deposit.

The amendment also includes a provision whereby, if a member of a party is elected, the party gets automatic ballot access at the subsequent election. That is quite common across other electoral systems comparable to our own. The fact that a party has had a candidate elected previously is a clear demonstration of its credibility and a reasonable level of public support—therefore, why should any barrier be placed in the way of its standing a candidate again? For example, all of the parties represented in this committee would have to go through the nomination process once, but, assuming that at least one MSP from each of our five parties were returned at the 2026 election, we would not have to go through that process again in 2031.

For the existing Holyrood parties, the amendment would end what I see as, frankly, a total inefficiency whereby hundreds of thousands of pounds are transferred from all our bank accounts at the start of an election period to a council bank account and then transferred back into the party accounts afterwards—assuming that we reach a vote share of 5 per cent in all the relevant locations.

That is amendment 57. You will be delighted to know that I do not have nearly as extensive a set of speaking notes for all of my subsequent amendments. Amendments 57 and 68 are the substantial ones.

To start off, I would just say that, as much as I am grateful for the minister’s various offers to take to consultation some of the issues that have been raised as part of this process, the fact is that we are now heading towards the point where the Government is committing to a consultation on dual mandates, residence requirements, deposit reform and by-election reform. Indeed, we are getting to the point where there will be further consultation on more issues than are contained in the bill in the first place, which I think brings us back to the issue that I raised before—that this has been a missed opportunity to take forward a more holistic and substantive package of reform.

Nonetheless, amendment 58 seeks to end the anomaly in which peers, quite rightly, cannot be MPs—they cannot even vote in a general election—but they can be MSPs. This is not a judgment on individual peers who have been MSPs; it is purely about the principle of democratic accountability. In that respect, it is somewhat different from Graham Simpson’s dual mandate amendments, because it is not concerned about somebody's ability to do two jobs simultaneously. Instead, it is more focused on the issue of democratic accountability.

The Lords is not, by definition, a democratic institution. It is unaccountable; it makes law, but it is not accountable to the public. I find that an affront to parliamentary democracy, and I think that it is contrary to the values of this Parliament, too. Peers are absolutely free to become MSPs—they should just resign from the Lords first. This simple amendment follows through on that simple principle. I welcome the Government’s commitment to consult on the matter, although I do not find that, in and of itself, necessarily a reason for Parliament not to move forward with it for the 2026 election. Nonetheless, we are where we are on that.

I should also put on the record that I spoke directly to Katy Clark before lodging this amendment, particularly to emphasise that this is not about individuals but about a democratic principle. Of course, it would apply only from the next election; it would not apply to anybody currently in that position—that is, Ms Clark herself.

On amendments 60 and 62, which relate to the aggravators, I want to give a little bit of clarification with regard to what the minister was indicating. The amendments would give those sentencing someone convicted of an offence against the categories of people involved in the elections the ability—and the option—to reflect on the harm done to the democratic system at large by the offence. It does not mandate the giving of a more substantive or different sentence; it simply gives those sentencing the option to consider the matter. We should recognise that, as well as the harm that is done against the individual, these offences do harm against the democratic process as a whole.

The minister, quite rightly, made the point that we have seen rising concern in recent years. Our democracy is under a bit of pressure—not as much as in some other nations, but increasing nonetheless. Indeed, those who are involved in our democracy face increasing hostility, something that I have no doubt we have all experienced, and the amendments simply give those sentencing an additional option. The measures would apply only to those convicted of an offence that had been directed at one of the six categories of people in question, and there is also the option to consider it as an aggravator in the way that the minister mentioned—that is, with regard to emergency service workers.

With amendment 61, on the disqualification register, I have lodged what I think is quite a simple amendment. As has already been mentioned, there is no list of disqualified individuals. We have a system that relies on self-policing by those who, by and large, have been disqualified because of their conduct in relation to the electoral process and offences committed against those involved in it. These people are generally going to be on the disqualification register because, by definition, they do not particularly respect the democratic process as it stands.

I think that the Electoral Management Board is the appropriate body to maintain such a list and to make it accessible to the returning officers. As I have already pointed out, nobody will be required to check 2,500 names off the list. For a start, that 2,500 gets divided by 32 at the local council elections, but, in any case, you would be checking the smaller list against the larger one, rather than the other way round. I think, therefore, that this is a simple amendment that would come with a small additional cost, as we would be talking about a—thankfully—relatively small list and a small number of individuals.

We are talking about a group of individuals who have already, by definition, disrespected the democratic process, so relying on self-policing by them would seem to be a vulnerability.

I expect that the minister was indeed about to do so, given that it is something that we have already discussed. However, as he has mentioned the number of candidates standing for election, I would emphasise that, in any system in which a list of disqualified individuals was maintained, surely there would be a mechanism to check the list of disqualified individuals, not the list of candidates.

Unless there is an explosion of the kinds of issues that result in people being disqualified, the list of disqualified individuals will always be far smaller than the 2,500 people who stand for election to local authorities. All that a returning officer would have to do would be to cross-check the list of disqualified individuals; at no point in the system would anyone have to check all 2,500 candidates. It is just a matter of checking one list against another, rather than the other way around. As much as the minister is factually correct to point out the number of people who stand for election, that bears no relation to the workload involved in checking who is disqualified.

I am happy to take up the minister’s offer of engagement ahead of stage 3, with the caveat that we might end up not reaching agreement anyway. However, I am happy to give that a go and, therefore, I seek to withdraw amendment 69.

Amendment 69, by agreement, withdrawn.

Amendments 35 to 43 moved—[Jamie Hepburn]—and agreed to.

Section 28, as amended, agreed to.

After section 28

Amendments 4 to 7 moved—[Bob Doris]—and agreed to.

Will the minister give way?

Absolutely. That is an interesting point for us to consider. The cost of administering a by-election exceeds the annual salary of a local councillor, so there is a cost benefit analysis to be made on that point.

I apologise to Mr Simpson, because I cannot remember what the exact results have been in his ward at most local authority elections. If I recall correctly, if he were to have vacated his ward mid-session for whatever reason, I do not think that it is particularly likely that his party would have won the by-election, which would have left those who had originally voted Conservative without the representation that they had asked for. [Interruption.] Ms Webber is reminding us that her party probably would win a by-election in her former council ward.

However, in general, the point stands. That is shown by the examples that I have mentioned, including in Perth City North at the moment and in Dundee. It was a regular occurrence in Glasgow for years, including in the Hillhead ward, which my party won at a recent by-election. If we were to win another by-election in Hillhead, we would have three out of three councillors in a ward that originally elected one Green candidate, one SNP candidate and one Labour candidate.

I do not believe that Parliament has ever debated the issue before, so I will move amendment 57 because I want to air the issue. If there is an appetite to explore the matter further, my intention would be to come back at stage 3 with a more detailed amendment. Frankly, I did not want the legislation team in Parliament to put an extensive amount of work into an amendment if there was no appetite for it across the Parliament, but I want to explore the issue at this stage and ascertain whether there is an appetite to explore it further.

I move amendment 57.

That is a fair point from the minister. My counter to it is that, much as I think that the bill is full of reasonable suggestions, in many respects it is a missed opportunity. There was a missed opportunity for the Government to consult much more widely on opportunities for democratic reform, which would have coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Parliament.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge the points that the minister made and I draw out what he said about the commitments made elsewhere in relation to consultation and his offer to the committee to consult on the issue. I am perfectly happy to take up that offer. I acknowledge that amendments 57 and 68 propose significant changes and that consultation on those amendments would be helpful.

In lodging the amendments, I wanted to provoke and kick-start the debate, so I am perfectly happy to withdraw amendment 57 on the understanding that the Government will take the proposals forward as part of any future consultation that draws in other areas, which we will come to later in our proceedings.

Amendment 57, by agreement, withdrawn.

Sections 1 and 2 agreed to.

Before section 3