– in the Scottish Parliament at 2:30 pm on 7 June 2000.
Before we begin I will run through the stage 3 procedure, as it is still fairly new to members, although they should be becoming familiar with it.
We will deal first with amendments to the bill and will then move on to debate the question that the bill be passed. For the first part of the debate, members should have the bill, SP Bill 6A, as amended at stage 2—not the original bill—the marshalled list, which contains all the amendments selected for debate, and the groupings, which I have agreed.
Amendments have been marshalled in the order to which they relate to the bill; that is, all the sections in order followed by all the schedules in order. Amendments will be debated in groups, where appropriate, where that has been indicated on the groupings sheet. Each amendment will be disposed of in turn. An amendment that has been moved may be withdrawn with the agreement of members present. Amendments may also be withdrawn before they are moved.
The electronic voting system will be used for all divisions. The chair will allow an extended voting period of two minutes for the first division on each section of the bill. The only other announcement that I have is that unfortunately the stopclocks are still not working. I do not know whether that is anything to do with the General Assembly. We have a stopclock on the desk and will be keeping a close watch on time. As Donald Gorrie has just indicated, the timing for each group is tight, so we will need to stick to the speech time limits.