Lilah Howson-Smith:

Of the measures introduced as part of the Bill, the petition of concern measures were the most discussed in the talks. I do not think they were necessarily controversial, but there was a disagreement or divergence of views between the parties on how far they wanted to go on that. It was not necessarily about any single party having a strong view on how they conceived the petition of concern being used in future, but there was a broader acknowledgment that the petition of concern had been used too much in the past, there was a need to reduce its use and therefore a need to signal that as part of the agreement.

Where the agreement landed and where the Bill is representative of that agreement is roughly where there was the most agreement between the parties, in that it could not be used on Second Reading votes and on standards motions, and that there is now a 14-day cooling-off period. That was all about basically making parties and individual MLAs consider whether it was an appropriate use of the petition of concern and whether it was the best way to do policy making, in terms of building credibility and trust between the parties.