In your remarks, convener, you said that the instrument had not been laid for the approval of Parliament. I take a different view. It has appeared in the Business Bulletin and, at that point in parliamentary process terms, it has been accepted by the chamber desk and put in the Business Bulletin, and it therefore should be regarded as having been laid.
I am perfectly content with the explanations that have been provided that, because it has been agreed by the Government that laid the order that it is ultra vires and therefore has no legal effect, the legal aspects of the order concerned are adequately dealt with. I welcome the fact that no printed or otherwise published version will appear in the archives.
However, that still leaves open the question of parliamentary process. The order having been laid, there is no formal recognition by the Parliament that that laying should not have any future effect—in effect that the laying should be undone because the order could not properly be laid.
There are a couple of ways in which that could be dealt with. It could be dealt with by the Parliament simply passing a motion agreeing that the order be unlaid, or it could be reported in the Business Bulletin that the previous report of the laying of the order had no effect and therefore the order should be regarded as not having been laid in the first place.
Those are matters of process, and it may well be that the committee should write to the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee to ask it to consider whether the disposal of the instrument, which has been laid but could not properly and legally be laid, has actually been completed in a satisfactory way. I suggest that we do that.