Chamber and committees

I will bring in Rachel Rayner or Steven MacGregor.

I recognise and understand the debate that is happening in Parliament. What I am trying to say is that we need to be able to deliver what we want to deliver, through the bill. It is not a case of taking anything away from the Parliament.

You bring up an important point. In my time on the committee, we never had any legislation to do, which was always strange coming from other committees that had legislative programmes to deal with.

Because of its remit, it is good for the committee to get its teeth into such bills, which are technical. Who better to do it than the members of the DPLR Committee? Everything that you deal with, day in and day, out is highly technical.

You will appreciate that the SLC bill that I gave as an example, the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Bill, was another example of a proposal that had been around for some time. We have to ensure that we get ourselves into a suitable place when I come to the committee. I am wary of SLC bills, because the case of the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Bill was a perfect example of that need. This is not to say anything about my official, Mr MacGregor, but he told me that the bill was imminent and I took him at his word and said so in front of the committee.

You will understand, Mr Mundell, that I no longer want to commit myself to a particular date, having been through the process in that example. The reasons that you have given are among those why I want to get 100 per cent of the detail before I get back to you with how the proposed legislation on judicial factors looks.

I know that Mr Balfour will be in mourning after the mighty St Mirren beat his team on Saturday, but I am happy to answer the question.

Last week, I sent an outline of our expected legislative programme to the Parliamentary Bureau. That is caveated with the fact that anything can happen between what we are programming at the moment and what ends up being reality. We will use that outline at the bureau, and we have a strategic bureau meeting this week at which we will discuss how to go forward with the business programme.

On committees, as the convener will be aware, I tend to have one-to-ones with conveners to discuss the upcoming programme, what business there will be over the year and how we can deal with that. That includes discussing members’ bills—although that is not so much with your committee—and things such as that.

On whether I could get you further detail a lot sooner, the information is already out there with business managers in the bureau. However, the caveat is that that information is available for them only on a need-to-know basis, because, as we know, things can change in Parliament.

That happens even when I talk to your convener about Scottish Law Commission bills. A perfect example is the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Bill. At my first appearance before the committee, I said that that would be the first SLC bill, that it would be very good and that it would be coming imminently. The bill became known to me as the unmoveable transactions bill, because it was about six months or so before it came before you. There was difficulty before we could it bring it to the committee for you to deal with it properly.

I do not want to go down the rabbit hole of SLC bills at this stage, but I use that as an example of a time when, in all honesty, I sat here and said, “I can do that within that timescale,” but it did not turn out that way.

When we can get you further information, we will. My officials engage regularly with the committee’s clerks, and we are happy to continue that flexibility and keep that door open. However, I do not like to promise things that I cannot deliver, and in some cases I might find myself in that position if I were to give you a longer-term view.

Rather than ramble on, I will pass that over to Steven MacGregor.

Yes, the fact that we still intend to do that was part of the one-to-one conversation that I had with the convener earlier. More likely than not, some of those SLC bills will come to the committee. That is a broad-brush comment.

As I have said previously, the situation is that we have to work with the UK Government. We have to consider its side of things and I have to work around its processes.

When I come along to the committee, I am often told that I must respect Parliament and give Parliament time to process the detail. It is quite funny that I have been trying to say something similar in some of my earlier answers today. It is a difficult balancing act for us to press the UK Government enough in saying that we need to know the detail, so that we can do what we need to do up here. It is the UK Government’s process, so it controls that.

The approach tends to be that officials talk to officials, and the discussions move up to ministerial level at times. I have not had such a meeting for a wee while, but I used to have meetings about various sections of the Scotland Act 1998 that we were dealing with.

In the first such meeting that I had with my UK counterpart, we said, “Listen—can we leave the politics at the door?” We were just talking about how both Parliaments can work together and deal with the issues. My counterpart agreed, because we needed to do that to make things happen.

The intention is to give my officials and UK Government officials the opportunity to have such conversations and move things forward. I do not know who is best to give more detail on that—is it Steven MacGregor?

I take on board everything that you are saying. Listen—as I have said to the committee on numerous occasions, I do not have a monopoly of good ideas. If someone turns up with a idea that will make something better and will make it work in the way that it should work, that is fair enough—my officials and I will look at it.

However, the idea of a protocol makes me a bit nervous, because we are currently managing to make the process work, to a degree. It takes time; the UK Government would say to me, “Well, that’s the time it takes, so work around it.”

Are you talking about the likes of framework bills and how we go about deciding on them?