Chamber and committees

I am a bit confused. There seems to be an argument for agreeing with restricting the dates but, on the other hand, you are saying, “What about everyone else?” and wanting to make it open ended. I am confused about what Jamie Greene is trying to do and what the point of the amendments is.

I agree with my colleague. The amendment is well intentioned, but we run the risk of overlegislation if we agree to it.

Will the member take an intervention?

I want to clarify a point about the fee. I understand that amendment 90 is about the appropriateness of the fee, but I am not sure whether you want the review to look at reducing the fee amount or abandoning the fee altogether. We cannot abandon the fee, because it is an integral part of the scheme and goes with the bill as a whole. I am just unclear about why you want to review the fee and any reduction in uptake—which, by the way, I am not sure how you would measure.

I thought that we all understood that there has been extensive consultation with stakeholders, but I am happy to let the minister answer.

I am not arguing that businesses should not be compensated—of course they should be—but I take a bit of issue with your constantly saying that businesses will be shut down. Retailers will still be able to sell for 57 days of the year; how they rearrange their business models will be entirely up to them, and compensation might come into play, too. It does not necessarily mean that retailers will no longer have their businesses.

On amendment 61, the onus is already on the retailer to ask for proof of age for alcohol and cigarettes, so the amendment might be pre-empting something that is not a problem.

On Katy Clark’s amendment 46, licensing is an integral part of the bill and dovetails with other measures, so if we agree to amendment 46—regardless of what Pauline McNeill was saying about how it could come back at stage 3—licensing would be gone from the bill. If licensing were not there, I think that that would negate the purpose of the bill, which is to make people realise that they have to be responsible when they are buying and setting off fireworks. If there were no licensing scheme, that would defeat the purpose of the bill.

I agree that the detail is very important. We would have to scrutinise the licensing scheme when it comes around in the future, but it is far too sweeping to say that we should just take it out of the bill now.

I appreciate many of the points that have been made, but I fear that we are going down a rabbit hole in talking about why existing legislation is not being used and prejudging whether the bill will be used. It is new legislation. The police and the courts are in favour of it. There is absolutely no reason for a review to be in the bill because the bill would be a fresh start and has the support of the courts and police. It is not necessary to put a review in the bill.

To be honest, I have a lot of sympathy with amendment 67, which seeks to amend the age limit, but there could be unintended consequences. It could push more people into buying by proxy for 20-year-olds, for example, and it would risk widening a black market. However, I will be interested to hear what the minister has to say on it.

If your counsellors hear something alarming—I am sure that they will; it would all be alarming, in my estimation—and believe that someone is having dangerous thoughts, what do you do then, given that you allow them to remain anonymous?