Chamber and committees

Item 5 is an evidence session on the impact of EU exit on the rural affairs and islands remit. Members will recall that the committee took evidence from the cabinet secretary on the subject on 12 January 2022. We agreed that it would be helpful also to take evidence from the United Kingdom Government on the same issue.

I welcome George Eustice, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and invite him to make an opening statement.

On that point, we regularly hear from organisations such as the NFUS about the lack of a level playing field, but the point is somewhat unquantified and we do not know what figures we are talking about. Has the UK Government assessed the cost of the impact on producers who are paying the full costs of border controls to the EU? Is it your view that, overall, we are looking for a lighter touch on imports and exports, and do you believe that the EU intends that to be the case for products coming in and out of the EU, too?

Are we seeing the same level of cost increase for European imports? Are exporters from Europe also seeing a 1 per cent average increase in the cost of exporting to the UK? In other words, is it a level playing field?

Karen, can we have a question please?

Mr Eustice, we very much appreciate your time today. Thank you for giving us more of it than was originally scheduled—it has been most helpful. You will understand that the topics that we have discussed today are of great significance to the Scottish Parliament.

Thank you for joining us. I hope that we can meet you in the near future.

That is fine. We can write to the cabinet secretary asking for clarification on those points.

As there are no other comments, I will briefly suspend proceedings to allow our next set of witnesses to join the meeting.

I would like a brief response to my next question, because we have already discussed it. Where is the hold-up in the digitisation of import and export procedures? I know that the UK Government is keen to introduce that. Is Europe reluctant? Why are we not seeing that progressing a lot more quickly?

We will move on to the next theme, which is communities and the workforce in rural Scotland.

That concludes our public business.

Thank you. We will move to questions.

It is my understanding that 106 common frameworks have been developed between the four UK Administrations, eight of which fall within the remit of this committee. To date, the interaction of common frameworks in the UK internal market has not been clear. The committee has certainly had issues with the role of parliamentarians in negotiations and in future decision making on those. Will the common frameworks enable Scottish policy divergence within the UK internal market? Specifically, what is the interaction between agricultural support frameworks and the Subsidy Control Act 2022, and will that have a longer-term impact on Scottish ministers’ ability to make agricultural policy?