Chamber and committees

Professor Forrester, could you elaborate on a couple of interesting points that you made? First, you talked about the thinness of the TCA. Can you say a bit more about why you feel that it is so “thin” and what that means?

I am interested in that point about there being a sense of movement away from things that may have been needed to cope with an urgent Brexit situation. Professor, McEwen, in your written evidence, you mentioned about a similar point. You talked about how, initially, the “not normal” reasoning was used around the Brexit deal because it was an urgent emerging situation, but you drew a contrast between that and things such as the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020, the Professional Qualifications Act 2022, the Subsidy Control Act 2022. Do you have a view on whether there is a contrast to be made between urgent emerging situations and pieces of legislation that do not meet that requirement, in your view, when it comes to using the phrase, “not normal”?

Convener, I am glad to hear that you are relaxed about us wandering from subject to subject.

I wonder whether people watching—if there are any people watching—are curious, as I think a lot of people are, about the extent to which constitutional practice rests on conventions. I am conscious that that word is used in different ways, but I am interested to know—perhaps from Professor McEwen, perhaps from Professor Tierney as they are both sitting next to me—where the Sewel convention sits in the food chain or the hierarchy of conventions, if there is one. At one end sit conventions that have not been challenged for a long time, such as the convention that the Queen has to appoint a Prime Minister who has some support in the House of Commons. At the other end, there are conventions such as Sewel, which the UK Supreme Court seems to characterise as a political convention. Where does Sewel sit in that hierarchy for those of us, myself included, who find the whole idea of the British constitution mysterious and sometimes offensive?

That may be the case in some areas, but, in others, workers from Eastern Europe have made the difference between local schools and other services existing or not existing, and they have been well integrated into the community. With that observation rather than question, I will allow us to move on.

The UK Government has spoken about bespoke solutions for rural areas when it comes to migration policy. Did we not have that when we had freedom of movement for workers across Europe?

I asked because the visas to which you refer do not appear to be meeting demand and, more generally, because I wonder whether the UK Government appreciates that Scotland has a particular demographic issue in that our overall population has barely gone up in the past century. Our challenge has been outward migration. Is it perhaps time to reconsider the proposals in relation to rural and other areas of Scotland that the Scottish Government put to the UK Government again and again for tailored visas of the kind that exist, for example, for the Canadian provinces, so that you can meet the demographic and labour needs in Scotland more accurately?

Again, I do not understand the comparison. You are making a comparison with the kind of constraints that existed when we were in the EU, but we are no longer in the EU and, since 1998, agriculture has been virtually entirely devolved. We have already heard about GM crops; many people ask about the ability of the Scottish Parliament to legislate on GM crops in the future. Another example is bodies that speak up for people with alcohol problems, who have questioned whether the Scottish Parliament would be able to legislate in the way that it has done on minimum unit pricing for alcohol, if the internal market act and the other laws that we mentioned are to stand in future. Do you understand those concerns?

Has the UK made any specific assessment of production costs for businesses in Scotland as a result of having to bear the cost of the border controls that we have just touched on?

I have to stop you there, because I am not asking you whether the NFUS has any concerns about the Scottish Government’s policy; rather, I am asking you how you respond to its concern—as expressed to other parliamentary committees—that measures such as the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 constrain the future ability of the Scottish Parliament to make its own policy on agriculture.

That would be helpful. I suspect that the costs are more difficult to bear for smaller businesses. I will briefly quote a couple of examples from my constituency. Donald Joseph Maclean of Barratlantic said:

“The new export systems mean it doesn’t make economic sense to send smaller individual deliveries to Europe like before, as these now cost the same as large consignments to process ... As a result, we now bundle smaller orders together in the same consignment ... The costs of Brexit are astronomical and I feel for smaller suppliers who are struggling.”

Another constituent, Amber Knight of MacNeil Shellfish, said:

“it has added a lot of extra pressure and workload that was created overnight. Most businesses going through that level of organisational change would not manage. It’s tough keeping it up and staying consistent, and it has added huge costs.”

You acknowledge that there is likely to be a degree of variation, but do you appreciate the concerns of smaller businesses such as those about trying to cope with all this?