Chamber and committees

Does Mhairi Snowden want to come in on the points that Mr Ruskell raised?

There are no more questions from committee members. I thank Professor Kenneth Armstrong and Mhairi Snowden for attending. It has been a helpful evidence-taking session.

I suspend the meeting briefly to allow the new witnesses to come in.

I welcome that clarification on that particular issue, by way of an example of what might happen. I am not sure that it will be as easy for everything else.

Thank you very much for your attendance, cabinet secretary. I also thank your officials from the Scottish Government.

Mr Cameron will ask the final question.

We were talking a lot about transparency issues. I wonder whether you, too, want to respond to Mr Ruskell.

I have a supplementary question, which is mainly for Alison Douglas. We have talked a lot about new innovations that we might want to introduce post-Brexit under the new common frameworks. You have also mentioned that you are concerned about the erosion of the impact of some of the existing innovations. If we take minimum unit pricing of alcohol as an example, Professor Kenneth Armstrong, who was an adviser to our predecessor committee, highlighted in a briefing paper that a modification of the policy, such as ensuring that the price increases in line with inflation, will not be dealt with under the EU laws as were and the Scottish legislation as was but will now come under the new frameworks. Do you fear that that could open up the possibility of further litigation against the policy, and that we could end up with our current policies on minimum unit pricing and smoking going backwards?

Please talk about that, Mr Thomson, because it is relevant to where we are going with the questions.

Welcome back. Our second panel will also be giving evidence on the UK internal market. The committee will hear from Michael Clancy, director of law reform at the Law Society of Scotland; and Jess Sargeant, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government. I welcome you both to the meeting. We will move straight to questions from the committee.

I will open with a general question about the impact of the UK internal market and of agreeing to UK common frameworks on the Scottish Government’s commitment to align with EU law. Could we start with Ms Sargeant on that?

Yes.

Thank you. We will move on to questions from the committee.