Chamber and committees

Good morning. I give a warm welcome to the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee’s 19th meeting in 2022. Under our first agenda item, do members agree to take item 3 in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Our second agenda item continues our work on Scotland’s census. We are joined remotely by two members of the National Records of Scotland international steering group. I warmly welcome Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the national statistician, from the UK Statistics Authority, and Professor David Martin, a professor of geography at the University of Southampton and deputy director of the UK Data Service. Good morning to you both.

I will begin with a couple of questions. When the Office for Statistics Regulation wrote to the National Records of Scotland on 17 August, it said:

“The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the change in both timing and mode of data collection to digital first mean that the context of this census is noticeably different from previous ones.”

That was not covered in your group’s response to the committee, which we thank you for, but you are very close to the topic. Will you elaborate on the context for the census and its differences from previous ones? I invite Sir Ian Diamond to go first. [Interruption.] We cannot hear you.

We are fine now.

Does Professor Martin want to comment?

Mr Billington, do you have any comment on how the dynamic alignment is working or not working?

Item 2 is consideration of the subject of retained EU law. This is the fifth and final session in a series of meetings focusing on post-EU constitutional issues.

I welcome Professor Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at the University of Cambridge, and Michael Clancy OBE, director of law reform, Law Society of Scotland, both of whom are joining us online. In the room, we have Dr Tom West, researcher with the Hansard Society; Dr Emily Hancox, lecturer in law at the University of Bristol school of law; and Kirsty Hood QC from the Faculty of Advocates. You are all very welcome. I hope that we can manage a panel with this number of people online. Our colleague Mark Ruskell is also joining us online.

We have four themes to cover. Our first theme is how best to understand retained EU law as a category of domestic law and the significance of the status that is attached to it. I will invite Professor Armstrong to start us off.

I will go to Kirsty Hood first and then we will try to come back to Professor Armstrong.

Good morning and a very warm welcome to the 18th meeting in 2022 of the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee. I apologise for the slight delay to the start of the meeting. We have received apologies from Maurice Golden MSP. Mark Ruskell MSP joins us online. I welcome those who are joining us online.

Our first agenda item is the implementation of the Northern Ireland protocol. This is the fourth in our series of sessions focusing on post-European Union exit constitutional issues. We are joined in the committee room by Stuart Anderson, head of public affairs, Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Dr Lisa Claire Whitten, research fellow, post-Brexit governance Northern Ireland, Queen’s University Belfast. Joining us online is Declan Billington, chief executive, John Thompson and Sons Ltd. We are also joined in the committee room by our adviser, Professor Katy Hayward, from Queen’s University Belfast. I welcome you all to the meeting. We have received apologies from John-Patrick Clayton, policy officer with Unison—we had hoped that he would be able to join our round table this morning.

We have four main themes that we hope to look at in turn. We will spend about 20 minutes on each theme. I refer members to paper 1 in our briefing papers.

Our first theme is the Northern Ireland economy. The most recent economic analysis in Northern Ireland shows that output seems to be outperforming that in the rest of the United Kingdom. What is the panel’s view of the impact following Brexit on Northern Ireland in comparison with other areas of the UK? I will go to Dr Whitten first.

That is very helpful.

I do not see any indications of further questions from the committee, which leaves me to thank you all for your contributions and for your briefings for today’s session. I also thank our adviser Katy Hayward for being with us today. The session has been really helpful. I am sure that we will return to the issue so we might see you again in the future.

I suspend the meeting for five minutes to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

We will move to questions from the committee, the first of which is from Donald Cameron.