Thank you very much, Chair.

I want to address my remarks today to the future of hybrid proceedings in the Scottish Parliament, and I hope the committee finds this useful.

Since I last spoke to the committee in 2020, our procedures committee has conducted an inquiry into the future of hybrid proceedings, and that inquiry was bookended by two chamber debates, one at the outset to help inform the remit and one on the publication of its report last month.

The main headlines of the report were that the hybrid facility should be retained indefinitely, partly to ensure the resilience of parliamentary business and partly to allow members to participate when they're unable to be physically present in the chamber; that the commitment to hybrid proceedings should make the Parliament more inclusive and encourage a wider diversity in candidates to become members; that the Parliament should commit to continual improvement of hybrid infrastructure and technology to support hybrid meetings and support a culture of iterative change and innovation; and that a pilot of a proxy voting system should be launched.

Despite the support for the retention of hybrid proceedings, the committee noted the general feeling that it's preferable for members, and especially ministers, to be present for proceedings, and also that the vast majority of our contributions are already physical ones. On that basis, it decided against having a system for seeking permission to remotely enter into proceedings involving set criteria. The committee strongly supported views that physical participation facilitates better collaboration and better scrutiny, but as physical participation was already the norm, it believed that other benefits could be achieved alongside that default way of working by retaining the hybrid facility.

The committee's—and ultimately the Parliament's—support for retaining hybrid was in part based on a vision for the future. In making its recommendations, the committee felt that the Parliament would be out of step with the rest of society if it didn't embrace change and simply reverted to pre-COVID ways of working. It also took the view that future technology would likely support more optimal participation in parliamentary business and that completely abandoning hybrid now would inhibit and restrain the development of technology in that direction. Finally, the committee took a strong view that retaining hybrid would allow Parliament to engage with people in the way in which they are engaging in their everyday lives.

That's not to say the committee wasn't cognizant of the potential downsides of hybrid participation in parliamentary business. As mentioned, it felt that hybrid does not replicate in-person participation, considering that the dynamic in parliamentary debate is altered and informal contacts between parliamentarians are reduced. That being the case, the committee suggests that the impact of hybrid should be monitored over the longer term, particularly in regard to the extent to which it supports equal participation and promotes diversity.

Our next steps, in line with the committee's call for continuous improvement, are to roll out a new platform that supports remote intervention in debates and to launch a pilot of the proxy voting system.

On the former, I expect that to happen next week, and that the platform will enable interventions both to and from the physical and virtual space and therefore reintroduce some of the dynamic that is lost in remote participation in debates.

On proxy voting, the committee is currently consulting on what the scheme should include, with a view to launching a 12-month pilot in the near future.

As things currently stand, therefore, the Scottish Parliament is, to all intents and purposes, now a hybrid Parliament, albeit one in which the vast majority of contributions are made in person rather than remotely.

I'll leave my remarks there. I hope that helps the committee. I'll be happy to answer any questions that members have.