Chamber and committees

Do you think that this is more accidental mission creep as opposed to deliberate power grab? I am trying to be generous here. There are degrees of disagreement with LCMs. The Infrastructure Bank Bill looks more straightforward, but this one is so important because it is about procurement and we need to get it right. Is there something that you can try to resolve at ministerial level to get us back on track with the common framework agreement?

There is an important message there. There is value in having something that provides a sustainable sector for individuals in the workforce—which has a knock-on effect on retention, which has a cost value itself—and that provides investment in growth instead of addressing just the short-term, immediate issues around energy costs. If there were Barnett consequentials—it is not obvious that there will be—in the business sector area, would business rates be your priority?

We are getting down to brass tacks, looking forward to the budget for 2023-24.

Thank you for your written evidence. You have set out clearly what your asks and expectations are. We understand from the Chancellor f the Exchequer that there are likely to be departmental cuts at UK level. We do not know what that will mean for Barnett consequentials—that will depend on which departments are involved—but, this year, we are very likely to face a budget that is tighter than previous budgets.

What would you prioritise to be kept? The question is not about additional spend; it is about prioritising keeping in the budget what is important to your sector that is already there.

I will come to Bryan Simpson: What would you expect to see in the budget? If you want anything new, you might have to say what you would prefer not to have. Do you think it is more important to keep some of the good, progressive policies that are already there to help in the skills sector or to make progress in different areas that we have heard about in previous evidence sessions? Or is there something new that needs to be done? What is missing from the response so far, not just from the Scottish Government but from the UK Government as well?

I have to say that I am being generous; I do not expect the UK Government to undermine the Scottish supply chain, but without our consent or our being able to monitor and have scrutiny of this, things could happen by accident rather than by design. We in Parliament have a duty to scrutinise these things, and the problem is, if the UK Government can do this sort of thing in future legislation without even having to check with us, the door could be left open to unintended consequences. Is that a fairer representation of the situation?

I will ask another question that is more for clarification about how procurement is working. You talked about the Sustainable Procurement Bill and how in Scotland there is a desire—and this committee has also looked at this in its supply chain inquiry—to use procurement in a positive way in areas such as net zero, the living wage and gender. If the Department for Work and Pensions in Bathgate, in my constituency, was conducting its own procurement locally—obviously, a lot of DWP procurement will be centralised and be part of UK-wide common frameworks—would we be expecting it to be subject to the conditionalities that we have or would it be part of what should be happening as part of the UK-wide common frameworks, because the procuring agency is reserved? We do not want the freedom that has been given to the reserved agencies in their procurement to compromise what is done in devolved areas. Some practical clarification would be good.

Thank you for your very direct but also thoughtful responses.

I turn to Lloyd Austin. We know that, whether we are talking about UK Government or Scottish Government bills, there will be a lack of detail until regulations are granted. However, concerns have been expressed by English NGOs about what might happen. We have a new Government at the UK level, one of the first announcements of which was that, as of Monday, businesses with fewer than 500 employees will be exempt from reporting requirements and other regulations. It also said:

“The changed threshold will apply ... to all new regulations under development as well as those under current and future review, including retained EU laws.”

The UK Government is saying that there will be non-regression as far as environmental law is concerned. If the UK Government were to clarify that non-regression will apply in this context, that would give an early indication that non-regression will stand. Do you share that view?

Early clarification by the UK Government of what it announced on Monday would at least give us some certainty about what might or might not happen.

So, that comes back to consent rather than consultation.

David Melhuish, you talked about the importance of enabling infrastructure investments and developments. I am also interested in whether, if the environmental outcome report is in the jurisdiction of the secretary of state, with a duty only to consult with the devolved Administration, that will enable or hinder developments. We actually want to make things happen, but there is a question of the speed of decision making, and the issue is whether those decisions are better made more locally. However, land-based decisions would quite clearly be more devolved, unless they involved a big energy project such as a nuclear facility, for example.