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.