Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 30th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Good morning, everyone. I'd like to call the meeting to order.

First, I'd like to wish a very happy birthday to Ms. Normandin. This is probably not the way you imagined spending your birthday, but we're very happy to be in your presence today. We hope your day goes well.

Welcome to meeting 13 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. Pursuant to the order of reference of Saturday, April 11, the committee is meeting to discuss the parliamentary duties in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before we start, I want to inform members that pursuant to the order of reference, the committee is meeting for two reasons. Number one is for the purpose of undertaking a study and receiving evidence concerning matters related to the conduct of parliamentary duties in the context of COVID-19. Number two is to prepare and present a report to the House of Commons by May 15 on the said study. The order of reference also stipulates that only motions needed to determine witnesses, and motions related to the adoption of the report, are in order.

Today's meeting is taking place by video conference. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. Just so you are aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entirety of the committee as you see it on your Zoom screen right now. That is the online screen that people can stream and watch. It will just be focused on the speaker when they are speaking.

In order to facilitate the work of our interpreters and ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules. This is mainly for the benefit of the new witnesses we have before us today, although we know they are probably well versed in procedural rules like these and etiquette for these meetings.

Interpretation in this video conference will work very much like it does in a regular committee meeting. You have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of floor, English or French. We have noticed that it is best, if possible, to remain speaking in one language and to select that language at the bottom of your screen. If you are going to switch from one language to another, please also pause in between and switch that language at the bottom of your screen. Remaining on floor language sometimes has caused some difficulties.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. When you are ready to speak, you can either click on the microphone icon to activate your mike or hold down the space bar while you are speaking. When you release the space bar, your mike will mute itself, just like a walkie-talkie.

I would remind you that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair. Should members need to request the floor outside the designated time for questions, they should activate their microphone and state that they have a point of order. If a member wishes to intervene on a point of order that has been raised by another member, the member should use the “raise hand” function. This will signal to the chair your interest to speak. In order to do so, you should click on “Participants” at the bottom of your screen. When the list pops up, please click the “raise hand” icon.

When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute. The use of a headset is strongly encouraged.

Should any technical challenges arise—for example, in relation to interpretation or any problem with your audio—please advise me immediately. The technical team will work to resolve your problem. Please note that we may need to suspend during these times, as we want to ensure that all members can participate fully.

Before we get started, can you all click on your screen in the top right-hand corner and ensure that you are on gallery view? This view should enable you to see all participants in one view. It will ensure that participants can see one another.

During this meeting, we will follow the same rules that apply to opening statements and the questioning of witnesses during our regular meetings. As per the routine motions of the committee, each witness has up to 10 minutes for an opening statement, followed by the usual rounds of questions from members. Just as we usually would in a regular committee meeting, we will suspend in between panels in order to allow the first group of witnesses to depart and the next panel to join the meeting.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses here today.

We have with us Matthew Hamlyn, strategic director of the chamber business team from the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

We also have with us Siwan Davies from the National Assembly for Wales and Ian McCowan from the Privy Council Office. From the Scottish Parliament, we have two witnesses: David McGill and Bill Ward.

Welcome to all of you.

We will start with you, Mr. Hamlyn, for your 10-minute opening statement, please.

[Matthew Hamlyn, Strategic Director, Chamber Business Team, Chamber and Committees, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland]

Thank you, Chair, to you and to all the members of the committee for this invitation to give evidence to your committee on a subject that is occupying all of my time at the moment.

I see that I have been asked to speak for up to 10 minutes. I don't think I have 10 minutes' worth of material, you'll be very glad to know, given that you have a lot of witnesses to get through.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

That would be great.

Actually, I would like to highly encourage all the witnesses at this point and say that if you find that you can keep your statements brief, please do so, because there are so many questions that everyone wants to get to. Thank you.

[Matthew Hamlyn]

That greatly suits me, as I don't have a prepared presentation, apart from what I've written in the last 15 minutes during the sound checks.

It might be helpful if I explain what I'm doing in this context and then talk the committee through, very briefly, what we've done in the last four weeks, which has probably been the biggest set of changes to how the House of Commons works in the last 700 years.

I was asked by the Clerk of the House, John Benger, to coordinate all the different work streams that are going on to deliver what we are loosely calling “virtual Parliament”. That's across the work of our select committees, the chamber coming on stream, electronic remote voting, and then beyond that the virtual legislation committees, which in our system are different from our policy-based select committees.

That's quite a lot of work. We've also had to liaise closely with our colleagues in the House of Lords, as we have a shared parliamentary digital service and a shared broadcasting service, which support both Houses. Those two teams have been under particular pressure in the last few weeks.

So, what happened? Just before our Easter recess, so late March, the House passed a motion allowing for select committees to meet virtually, that is, to allow participation by electronic means under the authority of the Speaker. The first virtual select committee took place two or three days after that. Appropriately enough it was the Health Select Committee, talking about the coronavirus with the health secretary.

Over the Easter recess, which was slightly longer than usual because of the pandemic, we had an increasing number of virtual select committee meetings. In parallel, the Speaker wrote to the Clerk of the House on March 31 asking him to ensure that by the time the House returned on April 21, we had arrangements in place to allow for remote participation in questions to ministers and for statements by ministers in the House on the basis that members could participate either physically or virtually, which is why we are calling this a hybrid model or hybrid proceedings.

We worked exceptionally fast to work out whether this was possible, what was possible, and then to deliver it. We also worked in parallel with the government, the Leader of the House and the party managers to ensure consensus with what we were proposing, and the Speaker played a very active role in doing that.

We had to agree to procedural motions that were required to enable all of this to happen, so on our first day back, April 21, by special agreement with the Speaker, we chucked out that day's business and just agreed to motions moved without notice to enable what we call hybrid scrutiny proceedings to take place the next day.

The next day, April 22, so still not very long ago—like last week I think it must be now—we had our first virtual question time and virtual Prime Minister's question time. We then immediately passed motions to extend this hybrid model further to other classes of business, including legislation. We also agreed in principle to electronic remote voting so members would not need to come to Westminster to vote. We have now had four of what we call our hybrid chamber days. We've had the second readings of three bills on three days this week.

One thing I'd like to mention at this point in particular is that we've done everything with incredible speed, and that has been a real challenge for the House service and digital service. We have risen to this challenge, I would say, magnificently, and the Speaker and everyone else have said the same thing.

We've learned very fast completely new ways of doing things, and this is supported by large numbers of staff working remotely from their front rooms and rooms like the ones we're sitting in now, but it has also required a lot of staff still to come to the Palace of Westminster. They work in the broadcasting studios in the chamber because we have physical participation, and to some extent in committee rooms. It still does mean we have a lot of colleagues who have to come and work in the building.

We've had to be very frank with members about what is deliverable, both due to technical capacity and due to the human resource capacity of how long you can keep people for setting up. We have seen how much time colleagues spent on the set-up for this committee meeting. We are having to do that for maybe 60 members at a time for a full day's proceedings, and that's quite a large staff undertaking.

The other thing we've done is adapt practices. We've dropped large classes of business from our agenda for now, and we have dropped, for technical reasons, a lot of the traditional ways we do business. There are no interventions in speeches. We have published lists of speakers so that everyone knows who is coming next, so that the broadcasters know whom to queue in, and so that we know who is speaking virtually or physically. We've set much longer deadlines for members wishing to participate in proceedings, because we need to do all the planning and make sure their connections work, and all the rest of it. That's made a very big change to the feel of how things work.

It is also weird, I have to say, sitting at the table of the House in a chamber built for 400 people with 20 members present, with the member speaking beaming data, and eight large screens suspended from the galleries. I'm now wearing headphones at the table of the House, as is the Speaker's secretary, so that we stay in touch with the broadcasting team, who are in a different building.

I can't underestimate how big the cultural, technical and political change has been. The things that I would say are essential are consensus among the parties about what's happening and an agreement on what is doable, an agreement among the political parties on how we extend and build going forward so that we can do more of this in the medium term, and also really strong and effective leadership of the staff involved, to ensure that we, as very senior managers and leaders in the organization, can have those frank conversations with members about what we can and can't do, but also to ensure that we support and motivate our staff to keep on delivering this more or less impossible stuff.

The next big challenge will be electronic remote voting. Literally, as I speak, we are doing the first live test with several hundred members of Parliament. Planning for that has been.... Well, it's been interesting, I would say.

I'm very happy to stop there and answer further questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you so much.

Next up is Ms. Davies, please.

[Siwan Davies, Director of Assembly Business, National Assembly for Wales]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon from Wales, where the Senedd has been continuing to meet virtually since we had the lockdown here in the U.K.

I'd like to talk briefly about how we've made changes. I'll structure my talking under four headings: the political will that was required to have the Senedd continue to meet during these times, the procedural ability to do so in terms of the changes that we made and those changes that we did not need to make, how we got it up and running, and how we will keep it up. A lot of the points that Matthew raised are also pertinent to our experiences here in Wales.

First, where there's a political will, there's a way. Our Llywydd or Speaker and the First Minister of Wales were determined that the Senedd would continue to meet during the COVID-19 emergency. They decided that we would suspend our planned Easter recess and that the Senedd would continue to meet. That was for two reasons.

The nature of the devolution settlement in Wales is such that, at times like these, the assembly in Wales and the legislatures in the U.K. had agreed that certain powers would be taken up to the United Kingdom level for coordination across the United Kingdom. That led to an unprecedented situation where the U.K. Parliament was legislating for Welsh ministers to have powers to make subordinate legislation that would not necessarily require the approval of the assembly. The First Minister and the Llywydd were very keen that the Senedd could continue to meet to look into how that was going to happen in operation.

There was cross-party support for a continuation, so no members objected to this on the grounds of public health. By political agreement there was a smaller, emergency Senedd, a smaller number of members to come together to meet to continue business. This was all premised on physical meeting prior to the lockdown in the United Kingdom.

We indeed had a meeting of the Senedd in a smaller form, and at that time we agreed to a raft of emergency standing orders to enable the continuity of the business of the Senedd going forward. They included new recall provisions where the Llywydd could recall the assembly—hitherto it had been the First Minister who could recall the assembly—and a reduced quorum. The quorum for 60 members usually is 10, and we reduced the quorum to four, enabling business continuity in an extreme scenario.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

If I may, I feel very bad about interrupting you, but perhaps you could slow down just a little bit for the benefit of our interpreters. It's a little easier for them when they have speaking notes. They're trying to do simultaneous interpretation.

[Siwan Davies]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you.

[Siwan Davies]

We also introduced weighted voting. Previously, there was no ability for any form of proxy voting, so we introduced the ability for block voting by groups of parties or individuals casting their own votes. We restricted public access to the building when it was open, and this enabled us to go online later on. We agreed to relax some of the requirements in the Standing Orders for questions to be taken on a weekly basis, and we had a provision for the functions of the legislation committee to be undertaken by the whole assembly, if that was necessary. Finally, we had provisions to elect a temporary presiding officer or a temporary chair of the proceedings in the event that the Speaker and the deputy were unavailable. Those provisions were agreed on, and that was all premised on physical meeting.

Post-lockdown, the business committee was keen that the Senedd continue to meet in virtual form, and there was no requirement for us to change our Standing Orders. The statute and Standing Orders here in Wales do not require any physical presence for meeting. There is no specification of a place of meeting, and there is no requirement for members to be present. Rather, they are required to participate, so we didn't need any additional provision for virtual meetings.

The only requirement we had that determined the practicality of certain mechanisms for virtual meeting was our statutory requirement to have bilingual proceedings, Welsh and English, which is similar to the situation you have for the need for translation. Therefore, we were able to continue to meet as a Senedd post-lockdown by turning to a virtual platform, and we used Zoom, as you are now.

We have had four meeting of the virtual Senedd. The first was on April 1. We were the first U.K. legislature to have virtual plenary proceedings. We have had four virtual meetings of the plenary, one per week, increasing the number of members who are participating. The first meeting was recorded. Subsequent meetings have been live. We've had voting online from the second meeting, and we had another vote yesterday by weighted voting. We've had various interesting procedural and other issues arise along the way, so we've been learning as we go along.

We've had virtual committees starting to meet from this week. We have had meetings of the health, education, economy and legislation committees. We're currently running a timetable of two committees on Tuesday, two on Thursday and the virtual plenary meetings on Wednesdays.

What enabled us to get it up and running, in addition to the lack of a procedural prohibition on meeting virtually, was the fact that we're a young institution. We're a small institution; we're unicameral. That means we're young, and our members and staff are used to working electronically in an electronic chamber. They're used to electronic committee meetings. We're small, and therefore, in contrast to Matthew's contribution, it's feasible for all members to participate, albeit, as you know, a bit of a challenge.

Because we're unicameral, all the staff work for the same organization. The ICT, broadcast and the clerks all work together, which I think has made it much quicker for us to be able to get up and running. I suppose it's just a can-do attitude. On a Friday, the business committee said they would like to meet virtually the next Wednesday, and we just made it happen. It was a bit of a challenge, but we got on with it. The challenges, I suppose, were mainly technical rather than political or procedural. There was a political will, and there was no procedural barrier, so it was just a question of making the technology work. We're using a licensed version of Zoom with the translation capability.

Going forward, I think the challenges for us, as for you and other legislatures, are ones of capacity. Once you have a system up and running, there's a demand to try to get all the business up and running again and, as Matthew just said, that's simply not feasible.

Also, as you will find, Chair, there are challenges around chairing virtual meetings, around providing advice to virtual meetings when clerks and advisers are not in the same space as members, and also around maintenance of order in a virtual plenary. There are upsides and downsides to that. Clearly, there is the concern behind all of this that the technology will fail, that Internet connections fail, that the proceedings are at the mercy of some external providers to some extent.

I think the final challenge is trying to do business as usual in an unusual way: how we can flexibly apply different practices and procedures in the new normal, and then, going forward, how we move back to business as usual when we've had our experience of working online, and whether that leads to an increased appetite for online delivery of assembly businesses going forward.

That's our experience here in Wales. I'm happy to answer any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you.

That was very enlightening, and there are a lot of similarities to what we've been trying to do in the meantime right now, temporarily.

Next up is Mr. McCowan, please.

[Ian McCowan, Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Governance Secretariat, Privy Council Office]

Thanks very much, Madam Chair.

Members of the committee, I never thought I'd get a chance to appear in front of a parliamentary committee from my dining room. There can be no doubt we're in some interesting times. That said, it's an honour to appear to try to sort through how best to approach the pandemic.

I've been asked to provide some remarks as part of a panel from some other jurisdictions, and I'm going to try to fit into that framework by focusing my remarks on three areas: first, how government business has adapted; second, how cabinet has adapted; and finally, how parliaments seem to be adapting, particularly ours.

In each of these areas, I'm going to try to draw on what we're seeing in provincial and international experiences. Clearly, different jurisdictions are adopting different approaches suited to their own particular context. That said, comparisons are always helpful, and I'll do my best to sketch out a few that may be of interest.

I should say at the outset that all jurisdictions have slightly different parliamentary traditions, and they're in slightly different positions combatting the virus. We're all trying to figure out how to find the best path forward and stay true to our democratic traditions. I should also say at the outset that, from a governance perspective, it seems clear that all levels of government in Canada have come together collaboratively to combat COVID-19.

Before I turn to Parliament, I have a couple of comments on government operations. They are going to have to be, of necessity, comments at a high level. The story of the pandemic is still being written, and governance energy is still focused on managing it. Once we get through the pandemic and the smoke clears a little bit, there will undoubtedly be a chance for the world to look at lessons learned from this extraordinary crisis. In that context, I note that in addition to this committee's examination of the ways and means of how the House can now meet virtually, there are now, after yesterday, seven House committees authorized to undertake reviews of the effectiveness of government measures to address the pandemic, and in like manner, the Senate has authorized both the finance and the social affairs committees to study the implementation of COVID-19 measures. The Senate is also going to have a special committee do a retrospective study in the fall.

Even at this early stage, it is already apparent from a public service perspective that the pandemic has forced an acceleration of some existing trends that we had in government operations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the use of technology to work remotely. Literally overnight, work groups across government, like most of their private sector peers, have been required to work from home. This acceleration of existing trends is a huge, unplanned experiment in teleworking and video conferencing. Of course, it's too early to determine conclusively the emerging best practices from the experiment, but some early returns from it seem promising, with potential implications not just for continuity planning but more generally for how government goes about its business day to day.

As with a lot of the innovations that are taking place, we're going to have to do lessons learned reviews to see what practitioners feel are the lessons that can be pulled from the new technology. This might be particularly important in terms of organizations with a national footprint that need to be connected regionally but also, most importantly, with their citizens.

On government services, public service has needed to operate in new ways to match the urgency of the crisis in order to get desperately needed supports out the door. That is happening.

Governments throughout the world have been challenged to transform their practices in such areas as improving health care systems, delivering supports, speeding up procurement, engaging the public, securing borders and ramping up coronavirus testing. There are best practices emerging in all these areas. Some of the best practices will be Canadian, but it would be myopic if we limited our learning experience to our own borders, even if you add in the very good examples of excellent provincial and municipal innovation in Canada.

In the race to speedily identify best practices, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is an important source of good ideas. As they did following the great recession of 2008, the OECD is assessing country practices in response to COVID-19 with a view to identifying best practices to inform government decision-making. They've already developed a country policy tracker, which charts the actions of more than 90 nation-states to combat COVID-19. In addition, they've developed 12 streams of work to assess country responses for issues such as resilient health care, inequalities and social challenges. This is a good example of the type of international experience and lessons learned exercises we're going to be following closely.

In regard to cabinet, approaches to conducting cabinet business have also been agile. Since the outset of the pandemic, including the need for the Prime Minister to self-isolate in March, cabinet operations have changed in a number of ways.

On March 4, the Prime Minister created the cabinet committee on the federal response to the coronavirus disease, or the COVID-19 committee. This committee is chaired, as you know, by the Deputy Prime Minister, and it has been very active. Their meeting rate has been higher than the norm for a cabinet committee, in keeping with the nature of the crisis we're facing. Another important feature from a governance perspective has been the government's extensive use of first ministers' meetings to ensure a close link and collaboration with the provinces, in addition to innumerable bilateral discussions. This helps ensure a national integrated response, as different orders of governments have managed to work very successfully together.

In terms of full cabinet operations, they've had to rely on technology, as have all other organizations in society, given both the realities of social distancing and the challenges that all of you face as parliamentarians from across the country.

For parliaments around the world, many of the same issues are arising. All jurisdictions are trying to think through the implications of COVID-19 for their operations.

I'm going to touch on four key issues in terms of what seemed to be commonalities across the board: reduced sitting times and frequency, implementing social distancing, passing emergency legislation, and the use of virtual meetings.

First, it's interesting to note that most legislatures in Canada and around the world responded to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis by adjourning or reducing hours, thereby adhering to the medical guidance. This includes all provincial legislatures that were in session at the time. For those provincial legislatures that were not in session when the virus hit, the Speaker made a determination to adjourn, as happened in P.E.I., where the Speaker cancelled the spring session. All provincial legislatures stand adjourned.

Another common feature of the federal, provincial and international response has been to consider emergency legislation. As you know, this happened at the federal level with the passing of Bill C-13 and Bill C-14, and again this week with another bill. It also happened in Alberta, with the passing of Bill 10, the Public Health (Emergency Powers) Amendment Act. Passage of emergency legislation has occurred in other provinces. Ontario—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Sorry. You have so much experience and so much to share that I hate to interrupt, but there is a problem with interpretation being able to hear you clearly right now, and there is probably not much we can do about that. If you could just slow down, it would really help. Pause at the end of each sentence so that they know they're getting an accurate interpretation.

[Ian McCowan]

No problem. I'll slow down. I was just mindful of the precious time limitations, but I will slow down.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you.

[Ian McCowan]

The passage of emergency legislation has happened, as I mentioned, right across the board provincially—in Ontario, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan—and internationally you're seeing it in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom.

I'll give you a couple of points of comparison in other Westminster parliaments. On March 25, the New Zealand Parliament met with a reduced number of MPs. They received and debated a formal epidemic notice from Prime Minister Ardern, and at that time they passed some COVID response bills.

Australia's House of Representatives last met on April 8, with a reduced proportional number of representatives. The purpose of the sitting was to pass supply and some bills for COVID-19, and then, following the adoption of these measures, the House was adjourned at the call of the Speaker. The Australian Senate met later that day, passed the legislation, and then they, too, adjourned.

What you're seeing—and this won't be a surprise to committee members—is parliaments doing what they do well, which is, in times of crisis, trying to figure out how to adapt to and address matters of public urgency in a timely and effective way. It's a strong tradition in Westminster parliaments.

The public service has also tried to adapt in its interactions with parliamentarians. A good illustration is the daily call with parliamentarians that's led by the Public Health Agency. Since these calls started on March 16, they have become an important conduit for information.

I'll give you just a couple of quick metrics. There have been as many as 226 parliamentarians on that call, with an average attendance of about 141 each day, and there have been 91 MPs and senators who have asked questions. These questions have originated from representatives from every province and two territories. The public service effort to support the call has had about 18 departments and agencies involved.

For those working in the group focused on governance, it won't surprise you to learn that we're very interested in seeing what responses your committee comes up with in response to the motion the House adopted on April 11. The issues you're grappling with are being faced around the world, and the solutions you come up with, frankly, might be of interest to other jurisdictions.

I have just a couple more comments. In order to respond to social distancing, there have been sittings of legislatures with reduced proportional attendance and shortened sessions, often one-day sittings, to deal with emergency legislation. That seems to be the pattern. Legislatures at the provincial level that have adopted these practices include B.C., which met on March 23 to address the crisis and pass supply. Other provinces that have adopted sitting practices consistent with social distancing are New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Ontario and Quebec. Internationally, these practices are seen all over the place in England, France, Germany—the Westminster countries.

The continuation of committee business is another point that seems to be a commonality. Virtual meetings like the one we're having right now seem to be a very common feature of various legislatures. For example, it's the case in Quebec and it's the case in a number of international jurisdictions—Argentina, Spain, France, Luxembourg, the EU, New Zealand and the U.K.

Madam Chair, I think I'll leave it there in the interest of time. I apologize for the sound being wobbly, but I am happy to answer any questions, and I'll leave it at that point.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you very much.

Next up we have two witnesses from the Scottish Parliament—David McGill, clerk and chief executive, and Bill Ward, head of broadcasting.

Mr. McGill, I believe you have an opening statement to make.

[David McGill, Clerk and Chief Executive, Scottish Parliament]

Yes, thank you, Chair, and I'll maybe ask Bill Ward to say a few words just at the end.

Thank you for the invitation to give evidence. I'm delighted to contribute to this discussion on behalf of the Scottish Parliament.

Bill Ward is our head of the broadcasting service, and his team has been completely instrumental in enabling us to support the Parliament in continuing to meet during this time. Bill will be able to answer questions of a technical nature that will be beyond me.

Just initially, by way of background so that you can understand the context in which we've been trying to meet these challenges, I will say that the Scottish Parliament, like the Welsh assembly, is a unicameral Parliament. We have 129 members. We currently have 19 committees, consisting of between five and 11 members. The Parliament normally meets in plenary session on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, with committees meeting those mornings. Voting is normally done in plenary session by electronic means, using consoles on each member’s desk. In committees, voting is by show of hands.

In terms of decision-making, the Parliament’s “House Commission” is known as the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body, or SPCB. It's chaired by our speaker, the Presiding Officer, and has a representative of each of the five political parties that we have. On the business side, the business committee is called the “Parliamentary Bureau”, which is also chaired by the Presiding Officer and consists of the party whips. This is where the majority of the decisions and discussions have taken place about when and how and indeed whether the Parliament and its committees meet during this pandemic.

Turning to our response to the pandemic, public safety measures, including lockdown, were introduced on March 23 by the U.K. government and were adopted by the Scottish Government. As with other Parliaments and organizations, we already had business continuity plans, but we just never imagined that we would have to implement rules on the scale that we subsequently have.

Prior to full lockdown, we had taken some early actions, such as ceasing parliamentary events, tours and access to the public and so on. With lockdown in place, we took the decision to close the building to all but essential maintenance staff on non-sitting days. That included those members who use their parliamentary office as their constituency office. We gave early advice to members about how to go about closing their local offices and how to engage with their constituents remotely.

Turning to parliamentary proceedings, our strategy from the outset has been to continue to meet in some forum to hold the government to account. The Parliamentary Bureau shared our view that it was more important than ever that our democracy continue to function at this time.

On April 1, Parliament met physically to consider the methods of legislation that we've just been hearing about—in our case, the Coronavirus (Scotland) bill. This meant having to consider all stages of the legislation in a single day. Because this bill was considered in the chamber, we wanted to observe social distancing arrangements, so we reduced the number of seats available from 129 to 79, and we configured them in such a way that we met the social distancing requirements. A proportional share of those 79 seats was given to the parties.

That said, the Presiding Officer was still reluctant to go as far as barring any elected member beyond those who turned up to attend proceedings, so we also made arrangements for voting to take place in the vicinity of the chamber, and not just at the seats as normal. As it transpired, we didn't require those extra arrangements, because at no point did more than 79 members turn up.

I'm pleased to say the arrangements worked well and the bill was passed that same day. While we were meeting that day to pass that legislation, we also took the opportunity to elect an additional Deputy Presiding Officer in case any of our other three Presiding Officers couldn't undertake their duties, particularly because one of them was already self-isolating due to her age.

At the same time as we were continuing to stage physical proceedings with reduced members, we continued to work on how the Parliament could hold the government to account without physically meeting. Bill and his team worked around the clock to investigate different platforms and liaised with procedural colleagues on what might work for us. Our international relations office also undertook a considerable amount of work in identifying what other legislatures were doing.

The immediate result of that was that on April 9 we staged our first leaders' virtual question time, where party leaders had the opportunity to question the First Minister on the Scottish Government's response to the outbreak, all conducted on a video conferencing platform. The session involved a short opening statement from the First Minister on the latest developments, before opening to questions from the four opposition party leaders. We streamed it live on the Parliament's television service, and the BBC also carried it live. It was also covered in some form by several other broadcasters.

This was our first step, but we recognized that it was limited to party leaders, and other members should also have the opportunity to question the government, so we arranged two subsequent sessions the following week, consisting of leaders’ virtual question time as a first session and the members’ virtual question time as a second session, where up to 20 members had the chance to put questions to four different cabinet secretaries.

I think it's probably important to say that these first few virtual question times were informal meetings to allow members some access to ministers. Despite looking and sounding like formal parliamentary proceedings, we weren't governed by our Standing Orders and, therefore, they don't qualify as formal parliamentary proceedings. That said, an official report, our Hansard, produced transcripts of these virtual question times, and we published them on our website alongside other official reports or proceedings.

We have also now established a specific ad hoc committee to scrutinize the government's response, and that committee held its first virtual meeting on April 23, last week. This committee has been established to complement, rather than replace, the work of other committees, which are all keen to continue to meet.

As mentioned, our focus and efforts have been aimed at finding ways of ensuring that members can scrutinize the government within the bounds of formal proceedings. Standing Orders changes, now agreed to, enable formal committee proceedings to take place on a virtual platform and also enable formal virtual meetings of the Parliament. Unlike the Welsh assembly, our Standing Orders did restrict where the Parliament could meet, so we had to change our Standing Orders to allow the Parliament to meet either in its normal debating chamber or in a virtual debating chamber, and we did the same for our committees.

For voting, we've also changed references in the Standing Orders from “the electronic voting system” to “an electronic voting system”. That's a small but important change, because it allows us to adopt any system that can be used remotely. Similarly, for committees, we've changed the rules there to make sure that they can operate on any platform that we provide.

To bring you right up to date, on Tuesday of this week, the Parliament met again physically in the chamber. A number of points of order were raised by members about the lack of opportunities to ask questions and also about our plans for remote participation. We recognize these frustrations and, as a consequence, we're increasing the time allocated for questions to the First Minister next week. We're holding additional virtual sessions. We're looking to stage sessions that do allow all members to participate, not just those who are listed to ask a question. We're also expanding the number of virtual committee meetings to meet demand and are planning to test options for remote voting and remote participation in business at Holyrood, in other words the hybrid proceedings that have been mentioned earlier as well.

Looking ahead, like others, we still have a number of challenges before us. The main ones are how we scrutinize legislation, how we stage online debates and particularly how we vote. As others have said, that's the biggest challenge that we still have to resolve. I'll be really interested to hear how the tests that Matthew mentioned earlier go today.

Our Parliamentary Bureau, unlike the Welsh assembly, has rejected block voting quite firmly, and it's currently taking soundings from members on proxy voting. The response so far to that consultation has been mixed, with even many members who are in support of proxy voting qualifying that support by saying that they don't want party whips to have a role in exercising proxies. We have some way to go to get a system that can be agreed to by members, and that leaves us trying to identify and test a system of remote voting that is secure and allows votes to be conducted quickly and be properly recorded.

Madam Chair, I would now like to hand it over to Bill, who will very quickly say a few words about the technical approach we've taken. After that, Bill and I would be more than happy to take questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

We have very little time, so could you take about a minute?

[Bill Ward, Head of Broadcasting, Scottish Parliament]

Sure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

We will certainly get to you in questions.

[Bill Ward]

Thank you, Madam Chair and David.

Trying to broadcast colleagues from across the world has placed a huge demand on the staff. We have a small department of nine technicians, and we've had to bring ourselves up to speed very quickly to find ways to support members and look at their user issues, while also understanding technical issues, connectivity issues and equipment and how to resolve those problems with members.

Our strategy has been to start small, as quickly as we possibly can, using the experience we had at each meeting and then debrief. This has allowed us to scale up week by week. We decided not to use Zoom in consultation with assemblies in Europe. Instead we've used a combination of a virtual vision mixer platform called vMix and another similar video conferencing system called BlueJeans. I can talk more about them if you find it useful.

There are two principles we've worked on. One, wherever possible we have kept all operators out of the building and working at home, and all the virtual meetings are operated in this way. Two, we have a very small skeleton staff working in the building when we are actually on the premises.

The other service we felt was very important to keep running during this time is the British sign language service. All our key proceedings have been signed virtually. We've had a lot of feedback from the deaf audience, and we realize the importance of keeping them informed at this time.

That's all I will say for now, and I will take questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you, Mr. Ward.

We will begin our questioning with a six-minute round.

MP Duncan, please.

[Eric Duncan, Conservative, Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON]

Thank you to our witnesses for the great information and for joining us. I know you have a lot on your plates so to make time for us is much appreciated.

I want to start with the Welsh assembly and the interpretation aspect, because we had a good discussion on that last night and are going to be continuing that conversation.

Ms. Davies, just to clarify, in the Welsh assembly you don't have bidirectional translation, right? It's from Welsh to English. Could you talk about your staffing requirements for that? Are you having the challenges that we're hearing about, the audio issues and health and safety issues?

[Siwan Davies]

Yes, I can confirm that we have translation from Welsh into English. We don't have it from English into Welsh.