3 The Committee System

The way in which the Committee system operates and works is a unique feature of the Scottish Parliament. There are a number of Committees (shown in Box 5) with allocated areas of responsibility. They have between five and fifteen members and scrutinise the work of the Government. They work much more on cross-party lines than do Committees of the UK Parliament. There tends to be much more agreement among MSPs from different parties when they are scrutinising or challenging the Scottish Government’s legislation as it passes through Parliament. The Convenors of the Committees are responsible for organising the meetings. These Convenors are drawn from across the main political parties.

You should now watch this short video in which Iain Gray explores the work of the Scottish Parliament and its committees.

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Transcript: Iain Gray on the work of the Scottish Parliament and its committees

IAIN GRAY

A big part of our job is to make the laws of Scotland in any area which is devolved to this Parliament. It's this Parliament that makes the laws. That's why we're a Parliament.

But how we go about actually doing that is quite complex. Somebody has to propose the idea behind the law. Somebody then has to draft it. And then in the Parliament, we spend a great deal of time working on it line by line, sometimes word by word, changing it, supporting it, opposing it until it comes out at the end as a new law for Scotland.

Committees in this Parliament have a really important role when it comes to laws. And that's partly because we don't have a House of Lords or anything here. So in the British Parliament, when they make a law, it then goes to the House of Lords and their job is to check and make sure that it's not bad law or it's got mistakes in it. We don't have that here, so a lot of that responsibility lies on our committees.

So when a law is going through the Parliament, and that can take a year for that process, on several different occasions at different stages, the committee, the relevant committee, so the Transport Committee, if it's a law about transport, about railways or buses, for example, they would look at that law. They would not just look at it themselves, but they would also invite in experts, users of the service if it was a transport law, and they would question them about what they thought about the law, whether it was right, whether it should be different. And then they would make recommendations to the whole Parliament. So any law, which comes out of this Parliament, will have the fingerprints of a committee all over it.

When a committee looks at a draft bill, the first question they're asking themselves is do we want this law at all? And there are occasions where the parliament will divide and some MSPs will vote for a law and against a law in a committee. Initially, we'll take that decision.

But if I'm honest though, most laws that come through this Parliament end up with fairly broad support because everybody has had an opportunity to amend it, to change it. And in the committee, that's a lot of what they will be doing. So, they will be deciding if the law is a good idea at all, asking people from outside for their views on that, and if they decide in general it's a good idea, they will then spend a lot of time changing words and sentences and paragraphs.

I mean, above all, to make sure it does the thing it is meant to do because if you get the drafting of a law wrong, you sometimes find it doesn't do the thing it was supposed to do, and then you're stuck with it.

End transcript: Iain Gray on the work of the Scottish Parliament and its committees

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Iain Gray on the work of the Scottish Parliament and its committees