 OK, coleg, rymudd i gyd i gweithio eich 11 ymgwrdd a'r 12 ym 2015 i ddod i'r prysgwyr, i gyd yn gyfrifio'r cymdeithasol cymdeithasol. Rwyf wedi cwestiynau i'r newydd neu'r cymdeithasol, am fawr, yn eich cyllidiau i gyd yn gweithio'i cystafol. Ysgolwch ar F1 i gyd yn dros, i gyd yn gweithio gyd yn gweithio'i cystafol 3 i gyd, i gyd yn gweithio'r cystafol i gyd yn gweithio'r cystafol gyda'r llawr hyn o'r Scotland Bill, do you agree to take this item in private? We're agreed. Thank you very much. Agenda item 2, next item is for members to consider correspondence received from the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body and the Scottish Government in response to the committee's inquiry into lobbying. The cover note that's been provided highlights the extent to which the government has based its consultation on the committee's model for a lobbying register. It also highlights where the government has chosen to go in a different direction from the committee. I invite you to make whatever comments you wish to make at the stage, colleagues. Does anyone wish to say anything in particular at the stage? I can if you're not going to. Patricia. Do you have any idea why the Government has chosen to deviate from our proposals? There doesn't seem to be much in the way of explanation of the rationale for that. I can only say that I would suspect that the Government lawyers may have had some hand in this and have taken a more legalistic view, whereas we sought to take a more practical view. I certainly think that we might want to make comments and steer the Government back closer to our original proposals. That would be the position that I would speak as an individual rather than as your convener at the stage. I would suggest that we do. Gil. Except for this, the Government is talking about having individuals registered. I wonder whether it might be possible if it was one person who happened to be a consultant, but everybody else would be registered under a company. If you think it out, it might not be just as bad and resource-driven as the first look. I think that our proposals were focused around perhaps two things. The first thing, which is missing from what the Government has said at the moment, is that they do not have a de minimis—in other words, a level of lobbying below which it is not necessary to register. We perhaps need to have a little think about and question them why they have chosen not to follow us on that. Secondly, if you take that approach, it is really any organisation, be it one person or a million people, who exceed the de minimis that has the register. I have not thought through the full implications of that, but there is a danger that you end up with such a diffuse lobbying through large numbers of people from a single organisation that you can lose the focus and the aggregation that would come from all that organisations lobbying by various people within it, being consolidated in one place in the register. I suspect that it might make it more difficult to actually see what is going on, but there is probably further debate. I suppose that I had two concerns about that. One was that the whole tenor of our report based on the information that we were given and the evidence that we took was that it was about the activity and not the person. It bothers me slightly that any future legislation would deviate from that, but it seems to me—this is where the corporate body is absolutely right—that there would be a huge resource implication. If it is an organisation that consists of one person, then that is one person or one organisation that has to be registered. However, if it is an organisation—and this is not beyond the realms of possibility—that employed 100 people, 75 of whom may, at some point, have some involvement in lobbying, then all 75 of them would have to register, but the Parliament would also have to make sure that those registers were appropriate, correct, up-to-date and all-read. That would almost make us industry within the Parliament, which would be quite resource intensive. Would your right to say possibly lead to a dilution of the focus on the fact that it is supposed to be about the activity and not the individual? I think that, too, the other thing that adds weight to that is that they are not allowing a grace period—in other words, you may not lobby until you have registered. Therefore, it would be of necessity that you would have to put everybody forward. As we have said, when it becomes apparent that you have lobbied, you have 30 days in which to register. I want to add to Patricia's point that she has struck me with these big organisations. What happens if they change personnel all the time and you are stuck and you have to re-register and register? That is subsidiary to Patricia's point. I was very concerned about that. I did not think that that is the right way to go about it at all. For those big organisations, we have 60 or 70 people in them. We never knew who they were, and the clerks would spend their whole time registering and registering people. Margaret. The other point on having to register in advance of the meeting, which you do not always know that when you are going to meet someone, they are actually going to lobby you. In some circumstances, you will, but it is just that practicality of that. On the consultation, I did notice a glaring error in what happens next. It says summer 2014. The Higgs boson has a backward reference in time that you have read, the Copenhagen interpretation of the basic theory, but, mostly, you cannot go backwards. We have a chance to speak to the Government about their proposals. I have been listening to everything that is being said and I share a lot of the concerns. Obviously, we will have a chance to drill down into this and get the reasoning behind why the Government feels that those things are necessary. However, it might be useful. In the meantime, as Margaret was just suggesting, if you had a word with the Government just to say, look, we have got these concerns. Are you really sure that this is where you want to go? We will be wanting to tease them out in some detail, so just think about it before you come out with your final proposals. The Government has launched a formal consultation, so there is a range of options. First of all, for the committee to respond to the consultation, although that puts us in a slightly odd position because we would be likely to be the committee that will then consider it. I suspect that, in formal terms, that might not be the way that we would wish to proceed. We may as individuals or as members of political parties may find ourselves party to responses to the consultation. If anyone who is a member of the committee is a party to our response, it might be helpful to make sure that we are aware of that, although responses will be in the public anyway, unless something unusual is going on. I think that, certainly, we should draw together the comments that have been made, and we appear to be broadly in the same place from what I have been hearing. We will maybe get Ross to write a note and send that to the minister, and I will go and see the minister. I think that that sounds a way forward in the first instance. I think that it is very important, as the consultation is now under way, that we write to the minister? That is precisely my point. I think that it is now a public document and it is a public exercise, and it is really important that we put our comments in writing. Well, just as a matter of process, and I will come to Gil in a second, I am suggesting that we do it outside of being a formal response to the consultation. Oh, absolutely, yes. Not as a response but as a letter from the committee. I just want to be clear that we are of one mind on that. Gil, on the point that I was going to make, the Government will benefit from what we are saying just now of the public record. I smell lawyers speak here, so it might not be just as bad as we think, but if you remember that this committee did discuss who would actually pay for any registration, et cetera, and we took a decision if it is resource driven, as it suggests in here. I am not so sure that it is, but if it is, we had considered that the cost should not be borne by those who register, so that might need to be rethought out because resources provided by the Parliament is a different thing from those who benefit from doing this work. Or somebody would need to rethink this. I want to put that in the record so that the Government can see the way that we were thinking and how the model that we had prepared and what the thought process was. Right, that is okay. Does anyone else want to make any observations at this stage? As I say, that in no way inhibits any individual or the party of which anyone is a member from making their own range of interests in responding to consultation. Right, okay. If that ends agenda item 2, that ends the public part of the meeting, and we now move into private session.