 I welcome members to the 13th meeting in 2018 of the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee. I welcome Tom Arthur to his first meeting of the committee and I thank David Torrance for his contribution to the work of the committee. Alison Harris has submitted her apologies. I will formally welcome Mike Daley and Mike Homiard to the meeting in a minute. Before the evidence session begins, there are a couple of pieces of business that we must decide first. First is a declaration of interests in accordance with section 3 of the code of conduct. Can I invite Tom Arthur to declare any interests relevant to the remit of the committee? Good morning and thank you very much. I am delighted to be joining the committee and I can confirm that I have no relevant interests to declare. Gender item 2 is a decision on taking business in private. It is proposed that we take item 6 and 7 in private. Those are. Item 6 is the amendment at stage 3 to the civil litigation expenses and group proceedings, Scotland Bill. Item 7 is relevant recent developments in relation to the European Union withdrawal bill. Does the committee agree to take these items in private? We will move on to agenda item 3, consideration of the prescription Scotland Bill. This is the fourth of our evidence sessions on the bill. We have with us before us today Mike Daley, Solicitor Advocate and Principal Solicitor at the Government Law Centre, and Mike Homiard, Money Advice Consultant with Citizens Advice Scotland, the two mikes. That could be interesting. Can I welcome you both to the meeting and we will open the evidence session and we will move to the first question from Neil Findlay. The Scottish Government has suggested that the exception for council tax and business rates in the bill is likely to be unchanged, making those debts subject to 20-year prescription, but there has been a suggestion that some councils may treat that differently and apply the five-year prescription. In your experience, can you advise us what your experience has been of that in terms of pursuance of debt? I think that it is unfair to have 20 years prescriptive period for council tax. The position is six in England. Ultimately, if you go back to the Law Commission's discussion paper, clearly the idea, which I think was quite laudable, was to have clarity, simplicity, certainty and all legal obligations subject to a five-year prescriptive period. I think that principle is absolutely correct. In an ideal world, I would say that it should be five years for council tax, five years for everything, but the Government also appreciates that clearly the bill does not make provision for that, there are exceptions. What we would suggest as a compromise for the committee to think about, if we are not going to get the ideal position of five years, would be that for those statutory obligations that have been accepted, I would suggest that they should be subject to five years with a test in terms of exceptional circumstances. The exceptional circumstances test that we would propose would be if there has been willful, false or misleading information by the debtor, which has resulted in a material delay enforcing the debt. That position is the case in Malta for tax, so that it is a six-year prescriptive period, but it can be extended if there has been willful, misleading. The second scenario is if the creditor can show that there has been a delay in enforcing the obligation and it was not a material delay on its part by sitting on the debt. The ideal situation is five years for everything. If we are not going to get that, it cannot be right to have these exceptions for 20 years for all of these different categories, because it does not fulfil the Scottish Government's aim to have that simplicity, fairness and clarity. We would agree from the citizens advice Scotland point of view that five years would be long enough. We have issues where advisers are talking to clients about council tax debts that are 15, 18 years old. The client has no recollection of whether these debts have been paid or not, so he cannot get bank statements going back to that period of time. The council, on the other hand, may have changed the systems, so the old debts or legacy systems cannot prove that the debt is owed with a statement of account, but the sheriff officer is still pursuing the debt. From a fairness point of view, just like with any other debt situation, one that carries on that length of time is going to be quite difficult for consumers to contest if there is an issue as to whether that debt is actually still due. If you had discussions with the Government about this, what I would say is that, in terms of Mike's point, which I completely agree with about the old council tax debt that does kick around, how come we would have 20 years for that when we have ultimately, this Parliament, had to rectify the old pole tax debt that kicked around for a very long time? In England and Wales it was extinguished in terms of liabilities. We did not do that in Scotland, I think, wrongly so, but we did get round to doing it not that long ago through this Parliament. It seems to me that it is incongruous to say, let's not have people subject to 20 years of pole tax debt and so on and so forth, yet for council tax we are going to extend it. We have to remember that every single payment that gets made under the five-year prescriptive period just extends that five-year prescriptive period. A council tax debt that starts now could still be being collected in 18, 19 years' time just because there is a payment being made and the five-year prescriptive period has been renewed. Having the 20-year long-stop is a good thing, obviously, but with a five-year prescriptive, a debt can still carry on for a very long time. I don't know whether there must be some basis of truth in this, but the Law Society suggests that some councils are deliberately not pursuing that because of the surcharge that's added to the six per cent surcharge that's added in terms of the debt and that there's a benefit for them. Do you have any experience of that, or do you think that that is happening? Certainly what I've seen happen with council tax debt is local authorities going for sequestration. If somebody is a homeowner it could be quite pernicious because what happens is that if you have over £3,000 of debt then the local authority can petition for the sequestration of the homeowner. That happens every single day in this country. If it does happen and there's equity in the property, which there often is, if somebody has done a right to buy for example, then the trustee in bankruptcy has a legal obligation to realise the assets on behalf of the creditors and you end up creating homelessness. You say there that if we're not going to get this, why shouldn't we push as hard as we can to get this? Mr Daly of Olden Day is a campaigner and I'm sure that if we push hard at this stage and campaign at this stage then we can get this done. I would certainly hope that we're not packing our hand on this at this stage. To be fair, as a vice Scotland and the Government Law Centre are in complete agreement, the law commission was correct in its original premise in terms of the purity of the principle. Why not have five years? It seems very peculiar that it's going to be six years in England. The fact that you make a payment continues the other five years, so it's kind of unnecessary for council tax, but that's what we would prefer. If we're not going to get that, then better than having the 20-year kind of stop gap would be can we get a compromise to make it exceptional if that's a fallback position? Of course, the role of this committee is to scrutinise the bill and to suggest amendments and put forward amendments, so you never know. The law society suggests that the exception for council tax and business rates is unfair for other reasons. For example, it refers to the unfairness to people who, in good faith, believe they paid their council tax and yet many years later may end up being sued in respect of their own share and other people's shares due to joint and several liability. The law society comments on the difference of approach in Scotland to council tax and business rate debt compared to England, whereas you've said a six-year limitation period applies. Do you want to comment on their views? You've dealt with a six-year bit, but what about the difference of approach? What about this joint and several liability issue? I agree with the law society of Scotland's point that that's the complication with council tax that it does if there are two people who are living on a property, whether as tenants or owner-occupiers, that they're joint and several liability for that. We know that it's very common for relationships to break down in life, for people to end up getting into other relationships. It creates the uncertainty that the Scottish Government originally framed and requested the law commission to do this bill for, because this bill is all about clarity, simplicity and fairness. I think that it does do that in some respects, but I think that what's happened is that perhaps the beautiful butterfly of the bill, which was in the discussion paper as a concept, with the process of consultation and lobbying has perhaps become a moth. A butterfly and a moth? Let's figure that one out. Mr Homeyard, perhaps you can work that out. No, I'm not going to go there. I would agree with the law society's point about joint and several liability as well. It's quite difficult when you have marital breakdowns, relationship breakdowns and one person is coming in to see you for advice who, as far as they know, have paid in good faith towards the council tax, but the other partner hasn't. That person can be pursued for up to 20 years after the last payment for the other person's share of the council tax. It doesn't seem fair. Question 4, Stuart McMillan. Good morning, panel. Certainly section 3 of the prescription bill and section 38 of the Social Security Scotland bill is that the five-year prescription would apply to overpayments of devolved social security benefits, but 20-year prescription to overpayments of reserved matters. Given that we are looking at the prescription bill in the Scottish Parliament, one could therefore presume that prescription is a devolved matter and the Scottish Government could presumably therefore not give the Department for Work and Pensions the exception from five-year prescription if it wants for reserved matters. Which approach do you favour in relation to prescription and reserved social security debt? Is it the five years or the 20 years? Would it be helpful if you could provide any examples in your responses? Clearly, for the same reasons as we have outlined for council tax, we would be looking at a five-year prescription period as being best fitted to the system. Again, with the DWP debts, we would like to see a five-year prescription period as well. It won't make sense to somebody who is claiming a Scottish benefit and a UK benefit that they can be pursued after five years for one debt but not the other. There needs to be some sort of consistency there, so we would agree with CPIG on that point. In terms of examples of where things can go wrong with DWP debts, one example that we came across quite often in giving advice was people who came to claim their state pension would come in and see advisers when they got the first payment. They found that the first payment was short of what they were expecting, and it turned out that they were getting a deduction for an overpayment of benefit many years previously or a social fund loan. Again, in many cases, they couldn't actually remember having even claimed the benefit. It's just that the claim benefit for a short period of time went into work all the way up to retirement age. In the meantime, that overpayment or the social fund loan was sitting there firstering away and not being dealt with. Going back then to the DWP to ask for the evidence of how that came about is very tricky. They don't often have the records to show how that situation came about and the claimant, by that point, has long lost any documents that they had to show that they were making payments towards it. I mean, again, going back to the Scottish Law Commission, one of the reasons that we have prescription is, for the very point that Mike has illustrated, which is that as a matter of public policy, evidence and recollections from witnesses deteriorates over time. I agree with Mike. Let's go back to the first principles that should be five years. What I would say in terms of your specific point, Mr McMillan, is that, think about it from the point of view of fairness. So, somebody who is receiving social security benefits, if they think that an injustice or a mistake has been made, they have to do a mandatory reconsideration. They normally have a month to do that. It could be extended in certain circumstances and generally is a month to appeal. Think about the social security system in terms of the UK system is utterly, utterly geared into a fairly restrictive position whereby you have very little time to ever challenge anything. And yet we are going to give 20 years for reserved benefits. I think that it is completely unfair and equitable. I think that you are right to say that the law of prescription and indeed when it comes to pursuing matters in the courts in this country is devolved to this Parliament. I would certainly hope and encourage that the committee seeks the bill to be amended so that we have five years for all social security benefits because that would be fair. In terms of the benefits that are actually reserved and that we have got no control over and the issue of prescription of them, you are then suggesting that they should be the same. In terms of, for example, what to be enforced through courts, in terms of one of the difficulties that we always have is that provision in the social security acts for deductions from benefits. I fully accept that the Scottish Parliament cannot legislate in that regard but I do think that we should maximise what we can do with the powers that we have to have that uniformity and as Mike says, if you are somebody who is receiving a combination of devolved Scottish benefits and UK ones, you are going to be in a right, Guddle. We cannot therefore not actually be a potential devolution issue that could arise from that. If we from the Scottish Parliament could be considered to be meddling in a reserved area, that is not a smiling ever-steadyly, if we do not actually have that particular power, particularly in the 85 per cent of the reserved social security area. Could that then potentially highlight some type of constitutional argument between the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Government and the UK Government? I think that we have already got one, haven't we? I think that we have done more than one. I take your point, and it is an absolutely fair and proper point, but I would say that surely we must do everything that is possible and perhaps get the Scottish Government to re-look at this and look at what we could possibly do and perhaps put that to the minister when the minister comes to this committee. I also clarify something here. The system, as it is in England, is that they have six years to recover the debt through court, the DWP debts, but what they will do after that period of time, as Mike has already said, is take an on-going deduction from on-going benefits for lower payment, and they can do that any time after six years. In addition to that, they have also got powers under the welfare reform act to do a direct earnings attachment, so anybody who is working, the DWP can go to their employer and ask them to make a deduction from their wages without a court hearing or anything like that. In England and Wales, they have six years, so Scotland to have five years for the same thing would actually make sense. As we have said already, they still have other powers on which to recover money, which would hopefully deal with the UK-wide issue. When I worked in housing, I would be able to recall all the limits on backdating of certain benefits a while ago. At the moment, for example, I say for reserved benefits, what is the timescale that someone will receive backdated payment, whether it has been an official error by the department? Or another issue? How long is it normally? Sorry, I do not know off the top of my head. It used to be a year, but I need to double-check. A year, and that would probably say a year is given the atmosphere within the benefits system, a year has probably been chopped even since then. Even if there is a benefit error by the department, you can only go back a year for the entitlement, but if the individual makes an error, we can go for 20. It is less, as I said, the days when I used to do social security tribunals myself. As we have said, there is no logical sense to have 20 years for the DWP. In terms of enforcing Scottish courts, I cannot see how it is a reserved matter. It is just a basic element of justice and equity in this. On behalf of the claimant, you can only go back a year, but on behalf of the department at the opposite end, you have 20 years. There is just something grossly unfair on that. It is probably worth, Mr Finlay, checking whether there is a procession next week. Have you got any other questions, Mr McMillan? Yes, thank you. You touched upon the CPIG evidence a few months ago, and I think that your reply was quite helpful. The CPIG evidence suggested that it did not favour the exception in section 3 of the bill for tax credits. Is that something that you agree with? Yes, absolutely. We come back to the first principles, which should be five years as a generality. If we are not going to get that concession from the minister, let's look for the exceptions to make them exceptional. It must be absolutely ludicrous to have 20 years for all these different exceptions. I mean, why would you need 20 years? If you look at the provision for defective products, this comes from the EU directive in terms of product liability. It's 10 years, pan-European. Why have we got 20 years? 20 years is a legacy that goes back. I mean, these acts all go back to 14674, 1617. How come we've ended up with 20 years? I do think that it's an historical legacy and I could see no basis for why we stick to that 20-year period, I have to say. There's also a joint in several liability with tax credits as well, which we've already discussed in regard to council tax, so the same issues could arise there. My final question is just regarding the issue of the council tax debt and overpayments, and the differential in terms of the time. What practical difficulties do you actually face when trying to deal with and help clients in defending their particular claims? Well, I mean, the difficulties in terms of nobody's got any recollection. I mean, one of the things that I was hoping to raise with the committee is, I think, an issue that the bill has failed to address, and that's the appropriate date for the start point for the five-year prescription to start. That's set out in schedule 2 of the 1973 act, and it's quite a complicated formula. For example, for things like credit card debts or loans and what have you, the way it works is that if the agreement makes provision for when the money is due to be paid, that's the period in time that it may well be for the five years to start counting, which failing when there's a real problem. It's a written demand for payment. We've got to a government law centre, and we've got cases before the sheriff appeal court in Scotland. It's involving these big UK international companies that buy up debt. You may say, why do they buy up debt? Well, they buy up debt because the Basel Committee and the European Union has been pushing the banks after the financial crisis to get rid of what's called NPLs, non-performing loans. So, what they do is they sell the loans, mainstream banks, to companies that then chase them. So this is a massive international industry. Now the cases we've got are like for example six years or from the last payment that our client in Glasgow has paid. But the way it works is that the constable then say, but hang on, the start point should be from when we did the written demand. So you can actually curate a longer period in five years under the existing law by doing a written demand at a later point. What we are arguing is that the credit card agreement, originally with Virgin, then another bank and end, makes provision for the last payment. You get into folk hiring advocates to argue how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin. I think that the solution—this is what certainly my colleagues at the Government Law Centre think—is that why don't we just simply say for the purposes of the start point for the five-year period in terms of, for example, debts? It could be the last payment made. There is already provision in the legislation for acknowledging stuff that, as Mike says, can extend it, so it's not like it's balanced. However, if we're really going to simplify things, we could just simply say the last payment that is made by the debtor, that's the ticking point. That then creates the policy objective of what the Government is trying to do is to say, if you're a creditor, you've got five years to get this money. If you can get the money within five years, then it prescribes. What Mike has just said about the issue with the credit cards, this is an issue that we're facing in our citizens advice bureaus as well, where people are coming in with trying to work out what the actual date is when prescriptions should be measured from. If they contact the creditor, the creditor's got one view, obviously we have another view, and it actually makes it very difficult for a debtor to represent themselves or even for a lay representative to go and argue in cases which have gone to court. We would need the services of somebody like Mike to go and argue on behalf of the client, but coming back to your question about the practical difficulties of council tax over 20 years, I can give you a few examples. The way that money is collected often goes into different accounts for different years, so what can happen is that the debtor thinks that the oldest account has been paid, but actually the money is going to a more recent account, and then when the sheriff officer contacts them 10, 15 years later to say, you still owe this money, they can't understand why the oldest account has remained unpaid. The issue that Mike has brought up regarding sequestration is that we, as our advisers, would see clients who have built up council tax debts over 10, 11 or 12 years without any action coming from the council to collect those debts prior to that point. To be quite honest, I think that those people had got to the point where they think that they were getting away with it, but then to suddenly receive a writ out of the blue to say that they were going to be sequestrated. They can't understand how they go from apparently inaction to drastic action, which will have an impact on any property that they own. If there was a five-year prescriptive period, that would force all creditors to actively try to enforce their debt and perhaps put off the need for things such as sequestration by councils. In a nutshell, councils would not be able to allow debt to build up because they would have to act within five years. Do you think that that happens in terms of housing law? If you think about housing law, the Scottish Parliament introduced the pre-action requirements, both for homeowners and for people in the social rented sector. That requires social animals, for example, to ultimately raise proceedings for eviction and for payment once they have gone through a process of trying to help the person. The rest of our system is geared towards making sure that we can sort out and maximise people's incomes through and get advice through, whether it is going to CEBs or other agencies. This seems out of kilter. The final point for me is that, in terms of the back-dating period that I have checked with the power of technology, and it is one month for housing benefit, it is all you can back-date at three if you are of pension age. It is for housing benefit, it is reserved benefit that we are trying to find out about, so the other reserved benefit. I think that the nub of it is the periods that one could back-date at have been shortened over time. I have some questions on the discoverability test. Section 5 of the bill sets out the new test associated with the start date for five-year prescription in relation to the obligation to pay damages. The Scottish Law Commission consulted on four options for section 5 of the bill before deciding to use option 3. Those were option 1, keeping the law in Morrison, option 2, going back to the law as understood before Morrison, option 3, going back to the old law but adding the requirement that the pursuer must know the identity of the defender and option 4, leaving it to the court's discretion. As a matter of policy, which option do you favour and why? Are there any drawbacks to the option now set out in section 5? I do think that the UK Supreme Court applied the law as passed, as is, but it is often the case that we can think back to the House of Lords when things, the aww judgment and homelessness where the Scottish Parliament reversed that with the House in Scotland in 2001, because it was not entitled to a secure home from the House of Lords decision back in the 90s. The Scottish Parliament often corrects a legal position because it does not seem to be fair. Option 3 is what the bill has in section 5, which is pure common sense. The Morrison against ICL Plastics Ltd created an absurdity in the situation where you did not know who was the cause of negligence and yet the time is ticking away because you know you have an injury. Who are you supposed to sue? You could say, we will just sue everybody we think might be, but you still could end up missing the correct defender. From a logical point of view, that case showed that the law needed to be changed. The law commissions and the bills come down on is pure common sense. The time should start ticking from when you have suffered an injury or loss and it is because of fault or negligence and you know who is responsible. I have to say final point is that remember this is in the context of section 113 of the 1973 act, so it is not a subjective, do I know these things, it is an objective legal test which is that you ought to have known these things. The bill is absolutely right in terms of that provision. I agree that it makes sense, but damages are not really an area that we would advise people on, so I would defer to Mike in this case. Last week we heard some oral evidence to the effect that the third part of the new test in section 5, the requirement that the pursuer know the identity of the defender, might increase the complexity of the law in some situations. For example, where there are multiple potential defenders, different prescriptive periods could run in relation to each defender, depending on when each defender became known to or ought to have come known to the pursuer. We also discussed how the third part of the test might work in a situation where there was joint and several liability for a debt. Do you think that there is a risk that the third part of the new test will overly complicate things? Alternatively, should we be supporting it as, for example, something that increases fairness in the law? I would agree that it creates fairness. We need to put it in the context that those examples that are given where it can become incredibly complicated are not the mainstream scenarios. The way in which there is a multiplicity of potential defenders is not, certainly, in terms of personal injury cases that I have done over the years. It is more the case that there has been possibly two in the types of cases that I have dealt with. Sometimes I have ended up suing both, and then one drops out when you get it sorted, which is not ideal, but it is workable. The bill is trying to say that if nobody is aware of the pursuer is not aware of who was ultimately responsible for the fault, the negligence, the injury, then surely it is right and proper that, when they become aware or ought to have become aware, the time period starts running. I do not think that that can be seen as unfair. Yes, you may argue that it creates the potential for more than one time period to run, but the only alternative that you have against that is just to have one period for everything, and then the person who suffered loss of injury loses out, and that cannot be right. I would agree. That is the second move that we do not advise on this area. I will finish with that. I will ask about the start date of 20-year prescription, which is in section 8, where the bill proposes a new start date for 20-year prescription. Can you say whether or not you support that? I think that you have touched on five-year, Mr Daly, but what about those 20 years? I would rather leave it as it is. From reading the policy memorandum and the excellent briefing from Spice on the bill, it seems that the rationale is that, because the pendulum has swung for section 5 of the bill in favour of pursuers, let us swing the pendulum a bit in the other direction for potential defenders in terms of the 20-year period. That seems to come out there now. That makes sense. I am not quite sure that it works like that in real life, though. What is the problem about the current position with 20 years? In terms of the provision in section 6 of the bill, which would remove interruptions to that 20-year period, I could certainly be more sympathetic to that, because that could be a fair compromise. However, the reason that I have a difficulty with it—again, those are probably unusual cases that would happen, but if they did happen, they would be catastrophic. For example, if the law was changed, so it is just a simple 20-year period, if you have defects in buildings and latent defects that only come to light 20 years down the line, then it is game over for the consumer. I am not suggesting that there are lots of cases like that, but there will be cases like that. Why do we not just leave—as I say, my Government Lawsense preference would be no need for section 8. By all means, we have section 6, and that would be a much better outcome. Again, sorry, we have no opinion on section 8, but section 6, with a long stop on prescription, is something that we will be pushing for. In the case that you mentioned, where you could get defects in buildings, which could appear after a long time, is it not fair that you have some sort of cut-off? Maybe you would, convener, because this happens all the time in financial services, but what we have done with financial services is that we have created a financial compensation scheme that covers scenarios where businesses go out of business. If you think about the existing law, if we did nothing about the 20-year period, then if a business is no longer trading, what is your comeback? If a business is trading, it will have insurance when we would have thought, and I suppose that when you drill it down, it is about the equity of if that was caused by the fault. It is not just any old mistake, it has to be negligence. Let us say that it is the negligence of the builder, and it only comes to light 20 years down the line. Why shouldn't that builder in principle be liable? That must be the logical explanation, because the alternative is to say, well, it is tough luck for the homeowner. So do you have no limit? No, I think that just leave the law as it is. What we are suggesting is that you could simply delete section 8 of the bill, no difficultly with section 6, which is what I am saying is the compromise, because obviously that could then be interrupted, so it could be more than 20. If you just want to keep the law as it is for that, I think that we would be happy. As I say, the reason it seems to be that we seem to have section 8 is some very peculiar idea that, because of the ICEL plastics case, we need to do something for businesses. Section 8, again, some concerns have been expressed by stakeholders, including the law society and the faculty of advocates about how it would work in relation to emissions to act and on-going breaches. The Scottish law commission said in oral evidence to the committee that the language used in section 8 would be familiar to the courts from another part of the 1973 act, and so it could not see a difficulty, but what is your view? I think that I would tend to agree with that opinion that the act or omission is a term of art. Mr Finlay, we are back to you. The Parliament has had a petition from Mr Paterson in relation to a convention case that went badly wrong for him. I have to declare an interest here, and I have worked with Mike Daley on a pretty similar case, a convention case, in which another two-homans suffered greatly for almost 20 years because of a convention case that went badly wrong. The issue that has been raised here is about the harshness of those cases and how the prescription period has been very severe in dealing with that case and others like it. I wonder if you could comment on that. Yes. As Mr Finlay said, we worked together on the Happy Valley cases and the other cases in Aberdeenshire. The Herald certainly ran a campaign, and we got a satisfactory result after, I do not know how many years. On that, the potential is there for this problem to exist again and again and again? If I can give an example, I have read the position in relation to Mr Paterson's case, and it is horrendous. There is no doubt about it. I would give this analogy. You could go into a shop to buy a toaster, and it does not work. You are entitled to get a new toaster or to get your money back. You go into a solicitor's office to buy a house, it turns out that it is defective, you do not own it or there is some horrendous thing. They then get experts from high and mighty professors of law who say that it is not negligence and that goes on for 10 years or whatever. You have the position where you go into a solicitor's office to buy a house, which is what you have to do, and you end up not owning a house when you have paid the bill. You can go into a shop and buy a toaster and get a new toaster or get your money back. How have we created in this country a situation? It is the fall of solicitors and the Law Society, because the solution to Mr Paterson's case is not to be found in prescription. The solution to Mr Paterson's case is that the Law Society of Scotland should introduce a system of strict liability so that anybody who buys a house through a solicitor, through a Scottish solicitor, turns out, for whatever reason, because it is complicated that they do not own it and there is a defect, that that is put right and we have an insurance policy that we all pay into to put that right, because it will not happen that often, but it will happen and it is catastrophic. The Law Society could do that tomorrow if they have wanted. I have certainly suggested that they do it and they have not. The legal profession is currently under review. There is a review that the Scottish Government has commissioned. I think that this is something that is long overdue. It cannot be right that you could buy property in this country and end up having 20 or 30 years of not owning it and becoming ill because you are trying to argue whether it is negligent that the solicitor got it wrong. That is wrong, should be strict liability. The insurance company refuses to take any role in that. At least if you buy a toaster, you are unlikely to get taken to court for somebody to get the toaster back off you, which is what happens in those cases also. I am a solicitor and I have to say that I am ashamed that this is the position that we have. I think that it is wrong and I have spoken out about it and I have spoken to the past president of the Law Society, I have spoken to the chief executive and they should do something about it and if they do not, I think that this Parliament needs to do something about it. We do have the draft members bill sitting still potentially ready to do that. I will probably not want any friends. I agree that, from a consumer point of view, it is totally unsatisfactory that somebody does not end up owning a house after paying for a service. Mike's solution is probably the best in terms of dealing with that because there is always going to be bad cases that arise out of whatever time limit that you set. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. I think that much of what I wanted to touch on has already been covered, but just for the point of clarification, I will address that specifically to Mr Daley. With regards to 20-year prescription, what are your views on ending the possibility of interruption? I think that we are quite relaxed about it. I think that the legal position at present is that if you acknowledge the existence of the obligation, then 20 years still continues. Mike talked about earlier in terms of how that works for council tax, so it is not such a big thing to have five years. I think that we are reasonably relaxed with section 6 of the bill. I think that what is much more important is section 8, which we have talked about, which is much more potentially fundamental, because it is effectively distinguishing the right completely. Just one further point of clarification for the benefit of the committee. What are your views on that, because there has been some suggestion that this is an option, interruption taking the form of a pause, which can be recommenced, taken and taken out of the time that is already elapsed? I think that section 13 of the bill, and I feel very uneasy and unhappy about that. The danger is that, if you think about it from a perspective that law centres and CEBs and money advice agencies will have people coming to them, but often people do not come to those free agencies in Scotland. What happens is that they negotiate directly with the creditor. If the creditor is to say, what is going to do your favour here, let us have this pause, let us have this period of a year, you are probably going to agree to that. You are probably going to say that I have all these other things going on in my life, I am under stress, I am under pressure, delay another year, what do I care? Our preference would be not having section 13, but clearly I can see that there is an intellectual argument to say that, in certain circumstances, it could be useful if parties are of a quality of arms. I get that. If we are going to have section 13, I would be happy with section 13 if we just protected the consumer in terms of vulnerability, and we could easily do that by requiring the consumer to, for example, have went to a solicitor or, indeed, it could be a credited money advisor to certify that they have been given advice. We could do that with employment laws, so if somebody settles with their employer, they just cannot do it themselves, they have to get somebody to give them independent advice. The reason I am saying also on the credited money advisor is so that you do not have to pay. You can come to a law centre solicitor or a credited money advisor, and that could be done for free, just to make sure that you are not being pushed into it. To characterise your position, you have concerns, but you think that they could be mitigated by having new safeguards in place. That is really to get around the danger of the weaker party being abused, if you like. I would agree that there should be a safeguard in place for the consumer, because most consumers are not aware of their rights, so they could easily sign them away, if somebody presents it in a certain way to them. Given that with debt cases, which is what we primarily deal with, the whole point is that the debt has been extinguished to ask for the debtor to have that extended by another year, which does not make any sense. Do any members have any other questions that may have occurred to them? Anything that you wish to add that we have not covered? I think that that has been very comprehensive, and I think that myself and the others in Scotland are very much agreeing on everything from a consumer perspective. I think that the bill is welcomed, and I think that the bill does do good things, but I think that it could do a lot more good things if only the committee could suggest some amendments. I have some useful suggestions. Thank you very much for coming in. It has been a very useful short session, but we have covered a lot. I thank you very much. I will suspend the meeting briefly to allow you to leave.