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Excellent.

My other question is on whether it would be useful to have clarification in the bill of the opening times for signing a petition—for example, a statement that people can sign a petition between 9 am and 7.30 pm. Again, it might be useful to give support to those who are administering the petition and to provide clarity and understanding that can be pointed to. Would that be helpful or, again, should that be a decision for the petition officer? Perhaps Peter Stanyon can start.

If we put aside the point on policy, which I accept will be indicated by the Scottish Parliament in one way or another, would providing for the petition to be signed in the area in which you are registered to vote—in essence, linking it to your constituency or local authority area—make the administration of it far more straightforward?

I will probe that with you. We are talking about what I hope are hypotheticals. If a young person turns 16 when council elections are looming, they may trot along and vote in that election. Then, potentially, they might be told, “By the way, you can’t take part in this other election because you turned 16 two days too late for registration.” The registration teams face such problems all the time. Is it simply an administrative process, or is there something that should concern us, such as that that might cause a feeling of disenfranchisement?

That is helpful.

My final question is for Peter, and it is about the interaction between parties and petitions. Political parties, for various reasons, will throw the kitchen sink at some recall petitions. Do you have any administrative concerns about the relationship between the work that parties do to seek a particular outcome and that of parties that are seeking an alternative outcome? Is there anything that we should consider from the experiences with previous petitions? How does that experience feed into the relationship between the parties and the petitions officer?

That is excellent. Jenny, do you have any comments in response to that question?

That is fine—it is why I asked the question.

On the understanding that I neither agree nor disagree with the proposal, there is a tension between the information that this committee may want to have in order to reach a decision and how the data needs to be obtained and handled and how long it is preserved for. A challenge exists in the fact that, in the real world, additional information will, no doubt, be available through social media and the opinions and views of people who allegedly have other information that is not being put forward. This committee—along with a number of others—spends a huge amount of time balancing those two aspects.

Then there is the challenge of the existence of things that become disclosable subsequently. Notwithstanding whether I agree or disagree with the proposal, a decision that this committee reaches on such a point would at some stage invariably have to go to the chamber for validation, because we are subservient to the chamber in that regard. The amount of information that then becomes available in respect of that challenges all strong efforts to retain data on the smallest number of people and for the shortest period of time.

I am asking you the impossible question, and you know that it is coming. How do we reconcile the tensions? In reality, information will get out there that could be particularly harmful to an individual MSP but that has been handled as well as it possibly can be under GDPR. Is there a danger that, in achieving that, we defeat the purpose of what we are trying to do? On paper, that is relatively straightforward: it is whether there is an explanation for why someone has not been in attendance.

Discuss. [Laughter.]

I am sorry, but I am going to rudely cut across you. What the bill is asking us to decide is whether there is a reason for someone not having been present for 180 days. In a sense, it is not about putting the record straight. If other information comes out, the bill does not say that we need to put the record straight. We can sit within that remit of just saying, “This is our view.”

I will come back on a couple of points. The petition itself is simply about going in and saying, “As an individual, I’m putting my name here for the recall.” In the—thankfully relatively limited—examples of recall petitions in the United Kingdom, have there been any challenges with regard to delivery? Have people wanted to indicate, “No—I don’t want a recall to take place”?

At the moment, you walk through the door of wherever the petition is being signed and everyone knows which way you are voting. Have you had any administrative challenges in that regard or experiences as to how that plays out in real time? I ask Peter Stanyon to respond first.

Therefore, it is not insurmountable in the sense of it being such a big challenge that we should not go there.