 Welcome to the Equal Opportunities Committee. It's the 16th meeting of 2015. Can I ask you to set any electronic devices to flight mode or switch off, please? I'd like to start with introductions. We are supported at the table by the clerkin and research staff, official reporters and broadcasting services, and around the room by the security office. My name is Margaret McCulloch, and I am the committee's convener. Members will now introduce themselves and turn starting here on my right. Good morning, Sandra White MSP for Glasgow Kelvin, Deputy convener. Good morning, John Finne MSP Highlands and Isles. Good morning, Annabelle Goldie MSP, West of Scotland. Good morning, Drew Smith, Member for Glasgow. Good morning, Krushan, our MSP for the office. John Mason MSP for Glasgow Sheddleston. The first agenda item today is the decision on taking business in private. You are asked to agree consideration of a draft report on your inquiry into age and social isolation at item 4 in private. Are we all agreed? You are also asked to agree consideration of the work programme at item 5 in private. Are we all agreed? Yes. Agenda item 2 is to hear evidence from the Minister for Local Government and Community Empowerment on an affirmative instrument, namely the Qualifying Civil Partnership Modification Scotland Order 2015 draft. The instrument is laid under the affirmative procedure, which means that the Parliament must approve it before provisions may come into force. Following this evidence taken, the committee will be invited to consider a motion to approve the instrument under agenda item 3. I welcome the minister and his accompanying officials and can I invite the minister to make any opening remarks, please? Thank you, convener, and it's a pleasure to be here. I should say back here at the Equal Opportunities Committee to outline what the draft order is doing and to ask the committee to recommend it. From the outset, just for clarity, I want to be clear that the order and the consultation announced to some fanfare two days ago covered two separate issues. The order is about allowing persons in the same sex civil partnership registered out with Scotland to marry here. The consultation is about the future of civil partnerships in Scotland generally. Any legislation following that consultation would be some way off and could not happen in this session of Parliament. The draft order amends the definition of qualifying civil partnership in the Marriage and Civil Partnership Scotland Act 2014. This amendment means that couples in a civil partnership registered in England and Wales or Northern Ireland and couples in a civil partnership registered in an overseas jurisdiction can, if they wish, change their relationship to marriage in Scotland through having a marriage ceremony. The draft order also provides under Scots law the couples are to be treated as married from the date when they first registered their relationship or, if later, from 5 December 2005. The reason for that reference is that it is when same sex relationships were first given legal recognition in Scotland through the Civil Partnership Act 2004. We have also laid a separate SSI, not subject to parliamentary procedure, which makes minor changes to the marriage notice form to reflect that in future couples in a same sex civil partnership registered out with Scotland will be able to marry. The stage 1 report by the committee on the then bill recommended that there should be provision so that couples in a civil partnership registered out with Scotland could change their relationship into marriage here in Scotland. There was then a vigorous debate at stage 2 in the committee on amendments. I took part in that, as I recall, with the Government amendment eventually being accepted. I entirely accept that it has taken the Government as longer to lay the draft order than we would like. Last year we were busy implementing a range of components of the 2014 act so that in particular the first same sex marriages could take place in Scotland in 2014. This year we have carried out two consultations on the provision now in front of you. The first consultation was on the general principles and the second in line with section 9 of the 2014 act was on a draft of the order that is in front of you. As the policy note indicates, we then took a number of steps following these consultations, preparing guidance for registrars, preparing guidance for couples and dealing with these transitional issues. The order forms part of our continuing work more widely to implement the 2014 act. Other work to implement the act includes the consultation that I referred to. Our plan to consult on qualifying requirements for religious and belief bodies that they have to meet before they can solemnise marriage or register civil partnership. That will require very careful and close consultation with religious and belief bodies in particular. We are continuing to work with the equality network and the Scottish Transgender Alliance on regulations about the registration of marriages and civil partnerships following gender recognition. We are preparing an order on alternative evidence such as hormonal treatment to be accepted by the gender recognition panel in cases where a person transitioned to an acquired gender some time ago and is seeking recognition thereof. The Government also promised to consider further the issue of the age at which people can obtain gender recognition and we are still considering this. Any changes here would definitely require primary legislation. A key issue is ensuring sufficient support is available for young people in this situation. The equality network and Scottish Transgender Alliance also have an equal recognition campaign covering a wide range of areas of which this is one. The Government will consider what response we should make to that campaign, including on that question of the age at which gender recognition can be obtained. In conclusion, this order helps further the implementation of the 2014 act. It is a further step towards equality, in line with what the committee wished at stage 2. I invite the committee to recommend that the order be approved. Thank you, minister, for that information. Would any of the members like to ask the minister a question? John Mason? Thank you, convener. Minister, you can clarify. As I understand it, if a civil partnership in Scotland is to be changed into a marriage there are two potential routes. There is the marriage ceremony or there is the administrative process. If a civil partnership is from overseas then it has to be a marriage ceremony and cannot be the administrative process. Can you explain why that is the case? The administrative process takes advantage of the access that we have under the registers at the moment that the couple have already been verified under Scots law and have gone through the processes involved. That initial check would have ensured closeness of relationship and included check that it was a true relationship. That is not something that we have ready access to and certainly not rapid access to if the relationship was entered into abroad. On consideration we have felt that the longer timescales, the greater scrutiny of the process is more appropriate here and will nonetheless allow people in Scotland who have come from abroad to undergo, to change their civil partnership into marriage. The ceremonial route can be rather limited. There is no requirement to splash out on a great wedding in a castle but it nonetheless provides those safeguards more adequately. I accept that the marriage ceremony could be quite simple but would there be a cost difference in that? Can I refer to an official on the costs? You can have a civil marriage ceremony in Scotland for £125 that is more expensive than the administrative route for changing civil partnership to a marriage. At the moment those are free for the first year, after the first year there will be £30. That includes any checks that have to be done and the closeness of relationship and things that ministers talked about? Yes, as the minister said, those checks will have been done when the couple entered the civil partnership because of the provisions about are you too closely related applied to civil partnerships as well as they applied to marriage. Whereas there is more work for a registrar to do when they are confronted with a couple who they have not dealt with before in terms of checking, do these people know what they are doing, are they over age, are they both in a position to get married? There is not another marriage somewhere else or something like that. The registrar does need to go through a number of checks like that to ensure that people are eligible to marry in Scotland. Okay, thank you. Any other member like to ask a question? Christian, then Annabelle. Thank you for coming in. Yes, we are all welcome of course because some of us did vote for the amendment and it is quite welcome out there as fast as you can hear it. But I would like to know about the numbers of couples who may wish to take it up. Do you think the uptake will be quite slow? Have you got any idea of numbers? Any financial implications about the numbers? It's hard to tell exactly because we don't have a register of everybody who's entered into a relationship abroad and is now living in Scotland. We're not a database state. We do know, however, that there have been particular couples that have been in regular contact with campaigning organisations and with the Scottish Government to highlight this anomaly. There is clearly a category of individuals here that we want to provide the opportunity to. This may well be taken up by a relatively small number of people, but when you look at the alternative, which is those couples divorcing or dissolving their civil partnership in Scots law with all of that entails so that they can marry or going to a home jurisdiction and exchanging, which may not even be possible because many of their home jurisdictions may not offer same-sex marriage. By home jurisdiction, I mean the jurisdiction where they took out the relationship they may well now consider Scotland to be their home. When you consider all of that, there is an injustice here that just needs to be dealt with and an equality that needs to be delivered. Annabelle? Minister, this is less a specific question, more a general observation and drafting. I'm clear about the policy intention and I rely on the advice of our clerk and also the contribution from the delegated legislation committee of this Parliament to keep us right. If I look at the face of this instrument, in all honesty, I haven't a clue by looking at the face of this instrument if it's doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's a question about general draftsmanship. Is this really the only way we can draft a statutory instrument by a whole series of references to existing statutes and simply substituting or deleting provisions? I think we're getting into a very wide question there about draftsmanship. I could be uncharitable and point to the Scotland Act 1998, a piece of legislation that everybody in this Parliament is very familiar with and which now resembles its original version in a lot of parts only tangentially having had things bolted into it. There's always a point where legislation that has been amended so often then gets revisited and gets consolidated with a new act, but this is fairly common and the habit is to be able to provide the act as it is in force and to be able to provide that online. So, while the order that implements the changes may be quite complicated, I think we've both served on the subordinate legislation committee at various points to appreciate the complexity of that. Well, thankfully, Minister, I've never served on it. You've never? Why I'm probably still in a degree of relative sanity today. Well, there we go. My apologies for that slight on your character if you took it as such. I certainly did spend some time on the subordinate legislation committee and I appreciate that issue. But this is an order that makes some changes and that will then be reflected in the legislation as amended and presented that way. We do have a programme of work with the Scottish Law Commission looking at possible candidates to consolidate legislation. I had a meeting with them along with colleagues a couple of weeks ago, not about the marriage act, but about a different area of family law. We can certainly add perhaps the Marriage Scotland Act to the list of areas that the Scottish Law Commission might want to look at for consolidation legislation in due course. I'm sure the convener of the Justice Committee will be thrilled to hear that when she does. But if we do think about the entire process of this, the Marriage and Civil Partnership 2014 act in itself was largely, indeed, possibly entirely an amendment of the Marriage Scotland Act of 1977, as indeed have many other changes been since then. It is simply the nature of our statute-based system. I thank the minister for his tolerance. Thank you, Annabelle. Anyone else have any other questions? No? Can I just ask a very quick question as well for those individuals whose civil partnership was conducted outwith Scotland and in those countries where the marriage is not recognized abroad? Those individuals are going through the marriage ceremony here. Is that identified and highlighted to individuals that, although they are married and recognised in Scotland, it may not be recognised in their own home country? Yes. This is one of the big concerns about having this option. Indeed, any aspect of cross-border family law that you can move from one country to another and a relationship that you entered into in one country can be not recognised, can be recognised differently. For example, the French PACs, if you undertake that while in France as a same-sex couple, you will gain one set of rights. If you then come to the United Kingdom, it is recognised as a civil partnership, which actually has greater rights despite you having entered into one area. So anytime there is a cross-border movement in this field, it creates complications. Our approach has been to prepare that guidance note for couples, which stresses very much the importance of establishing what the implications are going to be in the jurisdictions that they have concern about. It also highlights the possibility of them taking legal advice on it, because it is going to be very complicated between certain jurisdictions. If, however, people have moved from another jurisdiction and tend to spend the rest of their life in Scotland, it is eminently straightforward and highly desirable. Based on what we have heard from those couples, where there is that fluidity between countries, there are complications just as there are in any cross-border movement, especially in same-sex marriage, which is recognised in a variable way. The guidance that will go to couples and the extra advice to registers in their handbook to ensure that they can advise couples as well. There is an element here of we can provide the information and there may be individuals who could take more note of it, but we are doing everything we can to make sure that is underlined with them, because we do not want anybody to find themselves in that situation accidentally. Agenda item 3 calls for the committee to formally consider and recommend approval of the motion, namely S4M-14271- that the Equal Opportunities Committee recommends that the Qualifying Civil Partnership Modification Scotland Order 2015 draft be approved. I would like to invite the minister to speak and move the motion S4M-14271. I think I've already spoken in favour, so I'll happily move the motion in my name. Okay, thank you. Any members of any comments? No? Okay. The question is that motion S4M-14271 and the name of Mark will be approved. Are we all agreed? Yes. That concludes consideration of the affirmative instrument. We will report the outcome of our consideration to the Parliament. Thank you minister for your participation and thank you colleagues as well. That concludes the public part of today's meeting. Our next meeting will take place in Thursday 1 October. I will now suspend the meeting for the committee to move into private session. Thank you.