The challenge for the Government and, I suppose, the test for the committee and for Parliament is the extent to which we can create robust legislation at whatever moment we decide to so, and according to whatever timescale.
I can think of some proposed legislation that Parliament has laboured its way through, giving it its greatest consideration. Having been considered by absolutely everybody, it has been found to be flawed. We can give these things all the time in the world but then find that we have missed something when they come to be tested. That has happened to Parliament on a few occasions after it has devoted an extensive timescale to a bill.
I will not now try to persuade the committee on all occasions that we should condense the timescales for the consideration of legislation; that is an observation on what has happened in certain cases.
One of the issues that I have discussed with the committee on previous occasions is the fact that our legislative process as a Parliament, which has been carefully constructed over many years and which takes a long time to consider and assess all the relevant factors in bills, may not be able to be applied when we have to take swift decisions on tax and budgetary issues. We have seen some of those interactions already. We saw them over the introduction of land and buildings transaction tax, when our careful, thoughtful preparatory timescale was overtaken by the actions of the United Kingdom Government, and I had to act accordingly.
The interaction of wider factors with our legislative process is not always all that simple. I have taken a great deal of time over the course of the formulation of the tax responsibilities of the Parliament to consult extensively with organisations such as the Law Society of Scotland—and there are many others—which give willingly and voluntarily of their time to help us in the process of creating good legislation. I want to encourage that.
We adopt a particular approach to the formulation of tax legislation, which is as thoughtful and comprehensive as we can make it. There will, however, be circumstances where I judge that there is a necessity for us to act. In this circumstance, and referring to some of my earlier answers, I would be concerned that, if we had left these measures for a year before being implemented or if we had waited for them to be considered—which might mean having to leave them for longer than a year, as some issues will take time to resolve—we might have found the market opportunities for first-time buyers in Scotland to be eroded as a consequence of the differential between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom.