 Cymru'r ddechrau i'w 10 gymrannu'r gynhwys inni 2018 o'r ddeligFs-Pawls i'w Llaw Reformgasp. Cymru'r ddechrau i'w Gyl Clark, Neil Mogee, ynnegol cofnod i'w prynhwys? Keith Browneart. David Johnson i'r ddisselwyd am llulio yn ddelig, bydd eu defnyddio'r prysgryffordd i'w ddiwlad o'r billiol, mydwyr o'i rhai ni'n ffrinig yw'r prysgryffwys yw'r ddynneu cyffredig. must decide first. That is a decision on taking business in private. It is proposed that we take items 4, 5 and 6 in private. Item 4 is consideration of the delegated powers provisions in the management of offender Scotland bill. Item 5 is a draft report on the Scottish Crown estate bill. Item 6 is an update on the UK withdrawal from the European Union legal continuity Scotland bill. Does the committee agree to take these items in private? We will move on to item 2, which is consideration of the prescription Scotland bill. We have been designated as the lead committee for this bill, so this morning we are beginning our stage one scrutiny. As I said before, we have before us today Jill Clark, who is head of civil law reform unit and Neil Mogey solicitor from the Scottish Government, and David Johnson QC, commissioner and Gillian Swanson project manager from the Scottish Law Commission. Welcome to you all. I will open the evidence session. I will start with a couple of general questions about the consultation that went on here. Perhaps the Scottish Law Commission can just tell us what the key features of the consultation were, how it went about it, what documents were published, who was consulted and what the responses were. Yes, thank you very much, convener. The position is that we carried out what we think is a comprehensive consultation exercise. At an early stage, we held a seminar for interested people at various professionals and business interests. We used that to formulate the proposals that we then drew together in a discussion paper that was put out for consultation for a period of three months. We publicised the discussion paper to about 110 people directly, as well as making news of the consultation available on our website and, I think, also through Twitter. Then we subsequently having received the responses to the consultation, we drew together our report, which, as you know, always includes a draft bill. We then carried out a further exercise consulting on a working draft of the bill, which we found quite productive. Again, we tried to follow the same pattern of publicising it as widely as possible, and also drawing it to the specific attention of various stakeholders, including local authorities, central government departments, as well as insurance companies, business interests and professionals. I think that those are probably the key features. If I've missed something, I'm happy, of course, to expand on that. Okay. What would you say were the main points to emerge from the consultation? I think that the main topics in which consultees were interested, I would say, were the scope of the five-year prescription, because, as the committee is aware, we are proposing that it be expanded for various reasons. That was something that, I think, particularly engaged the interests of central and local government, especially when they saw the working draft of the bill. That would be, I think, the one key issue. So far as business professionals and insurers were concerned, probably the key issues related to the so-called discoverability test, that's to say changing the time at which, in claims for damage that was originally latent, the prescriptive period begins to run. We were recommending changes to that, as the committee knows, as well as to the length and the starting point of the 20-year cut-off prescription. Those are things in which those particular people were especially interested. I think, finally, the question of whether it should be permitted to extend the prescriptive period, and if so, in what circumstances. That, again, is something that's important in practice for solicitors and professionals, and that's an issue on which they certainly express their views quite fully in consultation. I think that those would be the main issues. Thank you very much for that. From the Government point of view, did the Government carry out a public consultation? In general, the Scottish Government doesn't consult on bills that have been identified as suitable for this process, mainly because the SLC has just normally undertaken a very recent comprehensive consultation of their own. However, we do carry out some targeted and focused consultation with key stakeholders. In September last year, the Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs wrote to a number of representative bodies. They included the Association of British Insurers, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Royal Incorporation of Architects, the Law Society, the Faculty of the Arts, the Royal Institution of Chartered Servers, Construction Scotland and Civil Engineering Contractors Association. We received two responses. One really just offered their continued assistance with the bill. I think that they'd been assisting the Scottish Law Commission with it. The other saw clarification on a couple of technical issues. We wrote back to them and they confirmed that they were content. Was that last one Cosla? Yes, it was. Any questions from members on the consultation? Did either the SLC or the Government write to the Citizens Advice Scotland or any other welfare rights organisation? In this occasion, citizen rights have informed us recently that they are peiring down and they normally just pick up from our Twitter feed if they are interested in responding. I think that Alison Harris has a question. In England and Wales, debts relating to council tax and business rates arrears are extinguished after six years. What is the policy rationale and or the legal reasons for allowing councils 20 years to recover such a debt in Scotland? I'll leave the legal reasons to colleagues. The exceptions relating to council tax and the business rates, the bill basically maintains the status quo. We can't comment on why the position is different in England and Wales but that difference will have subsisted for some time. Here, local authorities had made representation to the Scottish Law Commission on the matter and among the points that they made were that the policy reasons which justify accepting taxes payable to the Crown such as HMRC and Revenue Scotland for the five-year prescription apply equally to taxes payable to local authorities. It was acknowledged that, as a rule, five years should be sufficient time to collect those taxes. There were cases in which local authorities faced difficulty in collecting the taxes when they fell due, as well as arrears of tax from previous years. The Scottish Law Commission was persuaded by those arguments and they noted that both kinds of taxes benefit from the same special provisions for enforcement by diligence and by summary warrant procedure, and it seemed appropriate that their amenability to prescription should be the same. Just to be clear on that, if somebody has managed to dodge paying council tax for more than five years down south, they could get away with it but not here. Six years, yes. But no, not here. It's 20 years that would apply. There's not very much I can add to that. As Jill Clark has just said, we weren't initially, when we consulted, much persuaded that special rules needed to be made for council tax, albeit as she's already explained, the position is that it's generally understood that it's not covered by the five-year prescription and therefore it applies that only the 20-year prescription is available. It is perhaps just worth adding that the difference between the six years in England and the 20 years here is perhaps a little less stark than it appears because if you get a recovery order, a liability order in England within the six-year period, then you can enforce that without any limit of time, essentially, so that in practice, the differences in the timescale may be less stark than they appear. But I think the position really is that we decided after the representations already described and that there were difficulties in recovering areas that we should not be too dogmatic about saying we weren't persuaded and that we should sit with the status quo and that's really where we've ended up. Thank you. David. Thank you. Good morning, panel. The combined effect of section 3 of the bill and section 38 of the social security bill is that five-year prescription would apply to devolved benefits, but 20-year prescription to reserved benefits. Why is there a divergence of approach here? Again, in terms of the department for work and pensions policy in respect of the reserved social security payments, that's really a matter for them and we don't feel we can comment on that. The bill provides maintenance of the status quo for them, so it was 20 years before and it's 20 years now. The social security Scotland bill, which is currently before the Scottish Parliament, sets out that obligations to make payments to Scottish ministers for recovery of devolved social security payments made an error will prescribe after five years. The effect will be that overpaid, devolved social security payments cannot be recovered after five years unless Scottish ministers were misled into making the overpayment. Scottish ministers are the view that this approach fits better than any longer period of prescription given the fundamental principle underpinning the Scottish social security system that people should be treated with dignity and respect. Having a five-year prescription may also act as a driver of continuous improvement in the new social security agency, supporting prompt action to establish whether or not to recover overpayments. The difference between the approaches is probably a natural consequence of having devolved powers here and that the Scottish Government can do things differently based on the priorities set by Scottish ministers. Thank you. More generally, when the proposals were being developed, what consideration was given to a possible interaction between social security Scotland bill and the prescription bill? From the local commission perspective, the timing meant that, in fact, we did not, while we were formulating our proposals, give consideration to the social security bill. It was introduced, as you will know, in June 2017, and our report was published two to three weeks after that. In essence, we weren't in a position to formulate policy or recommendations taking account of the provisions in that bill. Once the Government took our report on board and was considering how best to progress it, we had some discussions with the Scottish Government about how those would interact in the course of August and December of last year. I think that, probably there, I have to leave the story for Jill Clark to take over. I think that the position is, as described, that for the Department of Work and Pensions, 20 years is what they have and is what they want in policy terms. In our policy terms for the Scottish Government, five years was seen as more appropriate. Therefore, there is a divergence. Why is it seen as more appropriate? I am speaking about a policy area that is not my own, so you will forgive me if I take the time over this. Social security colleagues would say that they have taken a different approach with the Social Security Scotland bill. They have set out principles of having benefits as a human right in that bill. Dignity and respect is paramount in the approach that they have taken, and they consider that five years is a much more appropriate and prescriptive period. It is probably not fair to ask you that question. It is probably directed at somebody else. In Scotland's recovery of an overpayment of benefits or tax credits is to be subject to a 20-year prescription. However, England and Wales take a different approach with the distinction between recovery by court action and recovery by deduction from on-going payments. Did the Scottish Government, or the SLC, consider whether the Scottish law should make that distinction? If so, what conclusions were reached? As far as the commission is concerned, this is not an issue that we got into. We considered at a more of a general level what exceptions we thought should be made to the proposed general rule that statutory obligations to make payments should prescribe after five years. We didn't get into the question what the appropriate procedures for recovery of benefits would be. I think that we regarded that as being a matter of policy for others and probably strictly outside the narrow confines of our project on prescription. Stuart Scott has a question on forfeiture. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Certainly an earlier version of the proposals had a specific exception to five-year prescription for forfeiture. Can you explain what forfeiture is and why you are now content that that exception is not necessary? That is really just a technical change to remove what was an unnecessary provision. Proceedings for forfeiture in relation to customs and excise and proceedings for the forfeiture of a ship were accepted from the five-year prescription and they had been included in the bill. That was to align Scott's law with the position in England and Wales in the limitation act 1980. Further work revealed that those provisions are not necessary. In relation to statutory obligations to pay tax and duties, those proceedings relate to underlying obligations that are covered already by the exception of tax and duties. If the underlying obligation to pay tax does not prescribe after five years, the means to enforce that obligation by proceedings for forfeiture remains open as long as the obligation exists. They were removed from the bill following discussion with the Scottish Law Commission and with their agreement, and their removal makes no practical difference. It is a tidy up exercise. It would do a bit of duplication. Certainly in terms of section 5 of the bill in relation to that section, the SLC is option 2. I was going back to the law before Morrison. I also got a reasonable amount of support on during the consultation. What is the policy benefit of adding the requirements that the pursuer must know the identity of the defender? You can respond by reference to examples of situations where you think that it is important if you think that that would actually be helpful. At the most straightforward level, it seems to us that prescription is about the extinction of obligations once they are enforceable. It is hard to say that you actually have an enforceable obligation unless you know who you are to enforce it against. That is a very simple answer. A slightly more sophisticated answer is that it also seems to us fairer that if you do not actually know who is responsible for an act or a mission that prescription should not have started running against you. To take up your invitation to provide an example, I think that in many of these instances, construction cases provide the best examples, partly because they are complex and there are many parties involved. If we take the instance of when a defect in a building emerges, often there will be an argument about whether the cause of it is inadequacies in the design, which might be down to the architect or possibly the structural engineer, or whether it is inadequacies in the construction itself, which should be the fault of the contractor or perhaps one or more of the subcontractors. The key difference that it will make here is that you would need to know if you identify a design problem, is it the architect or is it the structural engineer who is at fault? Similarly, with construction problems. If I could just develop a point a little bit further, one of the problems, as you will know, that we identified in the existing law is that in building contracts where something goes wrong, the employers in the contract typically sue everybody—the architect, the engineer, the surveyor, subcontractors, contractors—because they just do not want to miss anyone out in case it turns out that they lose their claim by prescription. And we think that that's wasteful of resources for the parties, for insurers and also for the courts themselves. So the difference, the adding the identity criterion, the third of the three facts in the bill before you, is that employers won't be at risk from prescription until they've actually identified who is at fault. So in my example, they've identified it's a design problem and they've identified that it's actually the architect who's responsible for that problem. So the difference there would be, without the identity query, you would still be faced with potentially having to sue engineers, architects and anyone else who had some involvement in the design. This should obviate that need. Can I ask a supplementary to that then? I mean, I'm not an expert in contract law and in building, but to use your example in terms of construction, if it still wasn't clear as to what the defect actually was, and clearly you'd imagine that all the parties would state it wasn't them, it's not their responsibility. So if you don't understand, if you don't know which person actually has been the person who has been responsible or the company has been responsible, then how would this aspect then work in this bill? Would it then just go back to what they did beforehand, just to try and have litigation against everyone? Well, I suppose that's one possibility. Here, what we've been seeking to do is to to make sure that time doesn't start too early, because, as I said, if it starts too early, then you're forced in a situation where you don't really know enough, you're forced to to sue everybody just to protect the position. Obviously, because we now have a proposed tripart test in the bill before you, where you need to know firstly that you've suffered some loss, that's usually easy once there's an evident defect in the building. The difficulty then is saying, well, was it caused by somebody's act or omission? Did someone either do or fail to do something that should have been done? But I think the short answer to your question is that if they simply haven't been able to pinpoint what the problem is, then on this test, the time wouldn't be running yet against the pursuer, so their claim would still be alive and not subject to being cut off by prescription. Okay, so it would remain alive until such times that they managed to identify one or multiple parts? Exactly. For each relevant person, each party they might sue, you need to be able to tick all three boxes about defect, act or omission and identity. Once you've done that, the time will start to run. You've got five years from then in relation to each of those people. That's helpful. Thank you. Just to simplify it, if I've bought a new house and problems emerge with this house, I'm basing this on an actual case that I dealt with. Problems emerge with the foundations, so you would think, right, well I'm going to make a claim against the people who built the house. The people who built the house may then make a claim against the people who put the foundations in. The people who put the foundations in may make a claim against the person who designed the foundations, and so it goes on. I, as the householder, cannot possibly go all that way down the chain, so what am I to do? I think in practice what you would do, obviously there are difficulties for people who are unable to get professional advice, and that's something we just have to live with in creating the legal system. I think what one would do is go to an expert, ask for an expert report what is the problem here, how is it caused and who is at fault. If you get good quality expert advice, it's actually the person who designed the foundation or the person who inadequately poured the concrete that is at fault, so then you would be starting to accumulate the knowledge that you need for prescription to start to begin. I've never had a contract with those people. I bought the house off the builder, so surely my claim is against the builder, and if there's another claim, that's up to them to pursue it. Yes, clearly, if the claim is in contract, then you have to rely on the person you contracted with. So the clock would start ticking as soon as I take action against the builder? Yes, I think that must be right, and if you were able, for example, to find a claim in delict to bring against somebody else, not totally straightforward on the current state of the law, but if you were able to, then the question when time started to run against that claim would have to be addressed by looking at the same three factors that we've been discussing, and that wouldn't necessarily begin at the same date as the contractual claim. But the basic position, as you say, is that if you have a contract, then that should be the first recourse that you seek. If you were simply seeking, for example, making good of defects in the building, then we may not be in the territory of a damages claim at all, but all those things will be quite sensitive to the particular facts of each case. To take that on a bit further, you mentioned subcontractors in your opening earlier comments. Clearly, the economy has not been totally solid over the course of the last 10 years, particularly in the housebuilding sector. Many housebuilders will have brought in and still do bring in subcontractors. If there was a problem in the house, and ultimately it was down to the work of a subcontractor, but that subcontractor has now been out of business. Who would claim to go towards the housebuilder and for them to then attempt to try to recover money, but who would they recover it from to try to get the thing fixed? But also what then happens to the person who has purchased the house? For each of those cases, if you were working on a particular case in practice, the first thing you would want to do is look closely at the contract of what remedies it makes available to the contracting party who has been let down. Typically, in a case like that, you would expect that the remedy would be against the seller of the house who may be a property developer or maybe a building contractor. That is where I would imagine most contracts would make the liability lie, but it is difficult to give a general answer because it will depend entirely on the contractual situation. Typically, one may find in contracts like this that you are not given any contractual entitlement to go and pursue other parties. Your only remedy is to pursue the one with whom you entered into the contract, but I am not sure I can give you any more specific answer, because it will depend very much on the content of each contract. My final question is for section 8 of the bill. Some response to the discussion paper expressed the doubt that the proposed rule would work well in relation to the defenders' emissions or on-going breaches, as compared to how it would work for the defenders' actions. Can the Scottish Government offer the committee any reassurance that is here on this particular topic? I would like to lead David to that one on the new start date. Yes, the commission obviously considered the submissions that were made about the difficulty in applying the proposed new rule to emissions. We were not persuaded that it introduced anything that was not already an issue under the existing system, because, as you may recall, under the existing legislation, damages claims are already measured by, well, there is already reference to continuing acts or emissions in the legislation. Therefore, even under our current system, you have to be able, in certain cases, to identify when an emission took place. Typically, you can say that it took place when it became impossible for it to be remedied. You have to do something by a certain date, or it becomes impossible to do. That would often be the date you would identify as the date that an emission occurred as a matter of law. The short answer really is that this is an issue under the current law. We were not persuaded that referring to acts or emissions in section 8 was going to introduce a problem that lawyers are not already used to dealing with under the existing legislation. I move on to section 6, which deals with interruptions and extensions to 20-year prescription. It would amend the law so that the main type of 20-year prescription could no longer be interrupted and halted by a relevant claim or a relevant acknowledgement, but there would be the possibility of an extension to 20-year prescription. That would only allow litigation, which has started to finish. Those proposals have majority support on consultation. Brodies was one of a minority of respondents who expressed reservations about section 6. It suggested that the period should still be able to be interrupted. However, it should restart not from the beginning but from where it left off in the first place. Do you want to comment on that suggestion? Yes, thank you. I think that the first thing I would say is that we have common ground with Brodies in thinking that there is an issue that needs to be addressed. It is simply a question of what the best mechanism of doing that is. As your introduction to the questions has already explained, this is the single exception that we propose introducing to having an absolute cut-off after 20 years. The rationale for that is that prescription is meant to cut off old or stale claims, but that clearly is not a rationale that applies if somebody is actively pursuing a claim when the 20-year period cut-off arrives. In common with Brodies, we regarded this as an issue that needed to be addressed. We gave some thought when they proposed that we might do it differently from the way that we have suggested, which is simply tacking on a bit to the end of the 20-year period. We gave some thought to that, but we thought that our own solution was actually preferable. If you take Brodies' suggestion, you could end up, say, with a litigation raised in the middle of the 20-year period, which took five years to conclude. On the Brodies analysis, you would, in effect, have a 25-year prescriptive period. That is certainly one way of doing it. On our approach, we thought that it is preferable to extend the period simply by whatever balance of time is needed to complete the proceedings that are in play at the end of the 20 years. We are hopeful that, in the rare cases where this arises, that balance of time would really be quite short. We are relying partly on the fact that nowadays courts tend to case-manage cases, and they do not allow them to drag on indefinitely. It seemed to us that, on the whole, in order to keep as close to the 20-year limit as possible, that our solution would be preferable to Brodies, although they aim to achieve the same thing. The final point that I would make is that, when Brodies responded to our consultation on the draft bill, they expressed the view that they were content with the scheme that we had put forward. I think that they are, in fact, satisfied with the provision in the bill as it stands before you. Right. Okay. Thanks for that. Section 13, the standstill agreement, Alison has got a question on that. When the SLC, in its discussion paper, proposed the possibility of contracting out-of-prescription, it got a mixed response. Is the Scottish Government content that the conditions now set out in section 13 of the bill will remove any controversy and make it a suitable proposal for this committee to be considering? Yes, we absolutely do think that. David, you can perhaps explain the rationale behind it. Yes, I am happy to do that and then return to you if that would help. If I could just give the background thinking quite briefly, the starting point is that the Act lays down the prescriptive periods and therefore we think those ought in general to be the periods that actually apply. That is one premise. A second one is that if you are going to allow any extension to those periods, then those extensions must be ones that balance the interests of parties, which obviously diverge. It must not be capable of undermining the system as a whole. That led us to the view that it should not be possible to extend the 20-year period with the single exception that we have already discussed about proceedings that were continuing because it is meant to be an absolute cut-off. Therefore, to allow people to extend the 20-year period would clearly undermine that principle. Therefore, we then focused our attention on the shorter periods, such as the five-year period, should it be possible for parties to change that. I think that a key factor for us was that we thought that it would be inappropriate for parties to be able to change the prescriptive period in advance, for example, while making a contract. We were concerned, for example, if parties were to enter into a contract that says that we are going to have a 10-year prescriptive period instead of a five-year one, that would first undermine the system, which is supposed to be as clear and have as few different periods as possible. Secondly, it would favour a party who is in the stronger bargaining position. That led us to the view that the right balance is struck if you permit some agreements to extend the period, but only in strictly limited circumstances. The ones that we proposed were firstly, as I have just been saying, that there must be a dispute. The dispute must have arisen already, so you do not invent a new prescriptive period in advance. You enter into this agreement after the dispute has arisen. We also proposed that the agreements should be limited in time and should be capable of being made only once. Perhaps I could go back to the construction example for a moment in case that helps. If we have, say, the employers in a building contract who learn all the relevant facts just before the five years are about, well, they've learned all the facts, so they know they've suffered a damage. They know it wasn't the architect who did it because it was a design problem. They then have five years. Under the existing system, the only way to preserve their claim is to raise proceedings. What the bill provision is seeking to do is to give them another option. If they can agree before the five years have run out, agree with the architect, we'll have a short extension for, say, six months or a year to see if we can settle out of court. We thought that was a more efficient use of resources. It also avoids raising the stakes or increasing the pressure in the way that litigation does, and it saves costs as well. It seemed to us that was an appropriate way of dealing with this issue and struck the right balance. I think the other point to make addressing your question is that although there was some divergence of view about whether these agreements were a good thing, a lot of it was really predicated on the particular conditions that applied. By introducing the three conditions that I've mentioned, after the event, only one year and only one extension, we think that those conditions address most of the reservations that were expressed by consultees. I should say all of the reservations that were expressed by consultees. I hope that that may help. Thank you, that does, thank you. Right, so we're going to ask about a very interesting case, that's the Hugh Patterson case. Stuart will ask about this. I wonder if you could just, for the record, give a little bit of background to it, which is in our papers. Certainly, Mr Patterson's case that there's a petition, then the Parliament, the petition number PE01672, and it was submitted in October 2017. He submitted this petition because he had particular experience of the effect of the 20-year prescription. This was when the convening associated with the house purchase went wrong, something that he didn't find out about until many years later. He then tried to sue his solicitor for damages. What Mr Patterson found is that the legal obligation to pay damages can be extinguished by the 20-year prescription without the five-year prescription period even starting to run and without the pursuer having been aware that the legal obligation to pay him or her damages existed at all. Certainly, I know that the SLCA acknowledged that Mr Patterson's case was a very difficult one, where the prescription had operated harshly. However, it also said that the policy needed for the law to be certain meant that no proposals to help people in Mr Patterson's position could be included in the bill. The Scottish Government supports the SLCA's position on this, and the latest correspondence from Mr Patterson to the Public Petitions Committee suggests that he now thinks that reform to land registration law and practice might be the appropriate avenue for reform. The committee is certainly aware of Mr Patterson's petition relating to his particular experience of the 20-year prescription. For the benefit of the record, it is a solution to the problem that he outlines, the reform of the law and prescription, and if not, can the Scottish Government indicate where it thinks the solution might actually be? We would note that Mr Patterson understands that the reasoning behind the law and prescription is that it understands the law of prescription and that liability cannot be carried in perpetuity. The Scottish Government's view is that the 20-year long stop serves the important purpose of creating legal certainty, finality and fairness. We were asked by the Petitions Committee for our view on an approach that was suggested at one of its meetings of notifying purchasers of the title at the time of registration. We had commented that there is relevant legislation in place under section 40 of the Land Registration, etc. Scotland Act 2012, that when an application for registration is accepted or rejected by the keeper of the registers, they have to notify the applicant. In most cases, that is usually the solicitor acting for the party involved in the property transaction, so long as it is reasonably practical to carry out the notification. That person submitting the application for registration, again usually the solicitor, can specify on the application two email addresses to which the notification should be sent. A further two email addresses may be provided for notification to the grantor of any deed and or their solicitor. What we are currently going to do is check with the law society what solicitors do in practice about notifications, because, hopefully, there is an administrative solution around that that would remedy the difficulty that Mr Paterson had that does not disturb the law of prescription. Clearly, Mr Paterson's case started some years ago before the Land Registration 2012 act. It was notwithstanding what is in that particular act, and I sat in the committee going through that particular piece of legislation. It was very much welcome to update that area of law. If it is certainly Mr Paterson's case, it also predates that particular legislation. We can all accept that this would be a hard case, but, clearly, something has happened that has had a negative effect upon Mr Paterson. In terms of some type of remedy, some type of successful outcome for Mr Paterson, surely there has to be some other way of using either this legislation, or this bill, or some other piece of legislation, or some other. You touched upon a moment ago in terms of an admin aspect, but there has to be some way of trying to prevent that kind of thing happening again in the future. I think that we can try and look at remedies that will prevent it. I do not think that anything can be done now for Mr Paterson's position, unfortunately. For Mr Paterson, you do not think that there is any closure or any successful closure for him. Well, his claim has prescribed, as far as I am aware, so there would not be a remedy in that aspect of the law. I think that the solicitor firm is no longer functioning. I think that they went bust. I imagine that the Scottish Law Commission will be—what do you call it—lost society would be very much involved in this particular case. I do not know if that is the case. All right. Any further questions from members? Okay. Well, a brief session, but we are only at the start of our look at this. I thank you for your time, and I will suspend the meeting briefly. Move on to agenda item 3, consideration of an instrument subject to the negative procedure, national health service, general medical services contracts, and primary medical services section 17C agreements, Scotland amendment regulations 2018, SSI 2018-94. The regulations make various corrections to rectify errors at which the committee reported on its 10th report published on 6 March. The regulations were laid before the Parliament on 14 March and come into force on 1 April. That does not respect the requirement that at least 28 days should elaps between the laying of an instrument that is subject to the negative procedure and the coming into force of that instrument. That is called the 28 day rule. The Scottish Government has explained in correspondence that the rule has been breached so that the various corrections could come into force timously on 1 April. Does the committee wish to draw the regulations to the attention of the Parliament on reporting ground J as they fail to comply with the requirements of section 28.2 of the Interpretation and Legislative Reform Scotland Act 2010? Does the committee find the failure to comply with section 28 acceptable in the circumstances as outlined in correspondence received from the Scottish Government to the presiding officer of 14 March 2018? I will now move the meeting into private session.