Chamber and committees

Item 3 is to consider documents that have been laid in connection with the powers in section 1 of the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2021.

I refer members to paper 2 in their packs. The committee considered the draft policy statement and draft annual report and reported its recommendations in November 2021. I thank the Scottish Parliament information centre for providing an analysis of the revised documents against our recommendations. I invite any comments from members.

Do members have any further comments? Is anyone not in agreement with the comments that have been made?

I think that the deputy convener’s suggestion that we write to the Government about our concerns is the way forward. If members are so minded, the clerks can draft that and approval of the letter can be left to me and the deputy convener, and we will take that forward on behalf of the committee.

On that note, we move into private session for our final agenda item.

I have a supplementary for Professor Christina Eckes. I am sorry if I have not pronounced your name properly—perhaps you could tell us how to.

From your comments on the Partnership Council in relation to the first theme that we discussed, I got the impression that you felt that Scotland and the other devolved nations were part of that process and involved in the council. I think that the PPA would be the body expected to scrutinise that work, yet the devolved nations have only observer status; for instance, we would not have access to breaking papers from the UK delegation. Is there a mismatch between the operation of the Partnership Council at Government level and the opportunity for the devolved nations to contribute to the PPA?

I thank our witnesses for their evidence, which has been extremely helpful to our deliberations. I suspend the meeting briefly before we move on to the next item.

Thank you, Professor Forrester. I should say that if our online witnesses can indicate in the chat that they want to come in, the clerks will pass the information on to me. I often miss it if somebody has their hand up at a particular time.

Our next theme is the accretion of executive powers resulting from the TCA.

We move to our second theme, which is on—[Interruption.].

Oh, Professor Barnard wants to come in.

Thank you very much, Dr McCorkindale. I ask those in the room to indicate to me or the clerks if they want to come in, and those online to put an R in the chat—that will be relayed to me by the clerks. We will try to get everybody in.

I invite Mr Ruskell to open questions from the committee.

Michael Clancy joins us online.

Although we were trying to stick to 20 minutes for each topic, we have already had quite a good mix of all four, so I am relaxed about that. A number of members want to contribute, however, so I will call Alasdair Allan and Donald Cameron and then bring in others from the wider group.

It is interesting that, if the PPA decides to go down the route of subgroups, those would likely be around policy areas and, although subject committees of this Parliament and the other devolved Parliaments would obviously have no role in that, the expertise would be there for devolved areas. We absolutely need to be working on that.