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Ministerial Foreword to the draft Arbitration (Scotland) Bill
I am delighted to present a Consultation Paper on the Arbitration (Scotland) Bill. In our 2007 manifesto we said that we wanted to encourage the use of arbitration in Scotland. The Bill is an essential pre-requisite to this process.
To support and develop domestic arbitration and attract international arbitration business to Scotland, we are developing a three pronged strategy for reform which we will take forward, in partnership with interests representing arbitrators and those who appear in arbitrations and other forms of dispute resolution. The approach is (a) to introduce an Arbitration Bill to modernise and codify the law in statute to bring it into line with up-to-date arbitral practices in other jurisdictions, (b) to develop a self-financing dispute resolution centre to which international arbitration as well as domestic dispute resolution business might be attracted and (c) to encourage representative bodies of arbitrators to improve quality assurance in the profession.
The Bill reforms and consolidates the law of arbitration which is currently outdated and incomplete. It will provide a modern framework, building on work done by the Scottish Advisory Committee on Arbitration Law in the 1990s, and subsequent work by the Scottish Council for International Arbitration and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (Scottish branch).
The Bill puts the vast majority of the general Scots law of arbitration into a single statute. The aim is that in future anyone in Scotland, or anyone seeking to do business in Scotland, will be able to find in one place the principles governing the law of arbitration in Scotland in language which can be readily understood. The same rules will apply in principle to domestic, cross-border (with other parts of the UK) and international arbitrations subject to the Scottish courts or based in Scotland.
If the reforms achieve all that I hope for them the rewards of having a modernised arbitration system should not be under-estimated. The Chartered Institute of Arbitrators has advised that arbitration services are the fifth highest earner of "invisible" earnings in the City of London and there is keen competition between centres such as Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore for international arbitration business. There is no guarantee that Scotland would immediately attract domestic and international arbitration business away from centres such as London, but reforming the law will put Scotland on an equal footing with other countries which have modernised, and mostly codified, arbitration systems.
I look forward to receiving your comments on the draft Bill.
Fergus Ewing, MSP
Minister for Community Safety
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