I'd like to thank Joyce Watson for her comments here today, and I sympathise very much with the comments that the Member has made. And what I would say in reply to that is that the issues that Joyce Watson has raised today fall mainly under the code, the code of conduct, which was subject to significant consultation and discussion in the latter half of the last Senedd, and the review that was made of the code then. This committee intends to allow that code time to bed in and to review it at a later point in this Senedd, to ensure that it remains fit for purpose, which is, of course, good practice, and to address any issues that may have arisen. And I note the Member's comments, and they can be fed into that review.

And, as Joyce Watson has correctly identified, the appeals process was never really intended for the way in which Joyce would have liked to have had the opportunity to have used it. In fact, any appeals could previously only have been made on very narrow procedural grounds, and were conducted entirely on the written representation of the Member who was complained about and existing papers related to the complaint. In fact, we found, in the fifth Senedd, that when the appeal process was utilised for the first time, concerns were expressed about how costly that appeal process was and, actually, that it had the potential to be abused by Members seeking to delay the outcome of the process. The most recent appeal, for example, took 11 weeks from the Member having received the committee's report to receipt of the decision on the independent, legally qualified person to be received. And, as the right of appeal was unqualified at the point of commencement, there was no sanction for making an appeal that is without merit. The process could potentially have been used by a Member, not in the way that Joyce would have liked to have used it, but actually to delay a final decision, for example, in the case of a complaint arising towards the end of a Senedd term. And I would end by saying also that just under half of the respondents to our consultation agreed that that appeals process should be removed, and there's also no appeals process in Scotland.