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The cumulative impact issue that you raised will also be affected if the threat of a trade deal with the US continues to loom on the horizon, thereby opening UK markets to products that are produced in a much more deregulated fashion, which would create pressure in this country for further divergence from environmentally necessary policy.

I want to ask you about the European Environment Agency, because your written evidence suggests that there might be benefits from the UK being a member of that body, even though the UK is not a member of the EU. Will you unpack that a little bit? What do you see as being the attractions of being in the EEA for other non-EU member states, and what would be the opportunities if Scotland or the UK were to become a member?

Thank you very much. Can I just double check that I am unmuted?

I take that point, but if you will forgive me, I think that that is a stronger argument for saying that there ought, across all the UK’s Governments, to be a shared approach in order to achieve maximum alignment, unless there is particular reason to diverge, and for saying that what you are seeking would be better achieved or better accomplished by taking, in the other parts of the UK, a similar approach to the Scottish Government’s approach.

You can hear me—that is great. Good morning.

I was not going to get into the policy detail of individual examples of divergence, because it is probably for other policy committees to decide what is the right or the wrong thing to do with some decisions. However, on the overall policy of alignment it seems to me that we have a little bit of a presentational paradox, in that we have always known that some degree of divergence would start to emerge. The longer it goes on, the more it feels that it is a little odd to call it a policy of alignment, given that more examples of divergence are appearing.

However, if we ignore the presentational oddness, it seems to me that we have a policy that seems to be working more or less as intended. It is not hugely rigid—it does not say that we must have alignment to the greatest possible extent in every case, and it does not say that we must have divergence at every opportunity. It does not always place the emphasis on the economic interests of industry, and it recognises that regulation is often intended to achieve social or environmental benefits by constraining harmful things that markets might do. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why we want high-quality regulation.

However, the policy also allows the Government to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Therefore, do you think that the policy, in its overall operation, provides the necessary flexibility, and do you agree that a more rigid approach in either direction would have harmful consequences?

Okay, thank you.

If you read the Daily Express, yes.

At a practical level, though, you are looking to use the increased financial resource that you have and disperse it throughout the sector to support the funding of work. You have talked about strategic priorities such as sustainability, fair work, internationalisation and so on, but the organisations that you are funding are also dealing with their employer costs and the need to address accessibility and the new challenges around trying to regrow audiences post the past few years of chaos.

In what way can you have confidence that the allocation of funds to support more work on those strategic priorities does not get swallowed up by the increased costs that organisations face? That could mean that you do not achieve what you are seeking to do through that funding.

I will just butt in for a second and say that I get how that applies to some of the bigger organisations that know that they have an on-going relationship, but I am not sure that it cuts it for smaller organisations, for freelancers or for people who are applying for individual bits of project work through Creative Scotland. They are not in the position of being able to make those kinds of plans, but they are facing increased costs, whether that is for the staff that they are employing or for their energy costs and other costs that have risen.

Convener, is it in order for the member to misrepresent issues in that way?

I would like to follow up those points, including about the screen sector. You will be aware that some committee members have an interest in the games sector, too, with which there is a great deal of overlap with the screen sector in terms of some of the skills and infrastructure, for example. However, there is not a complete overlap, and there is a sense that the games sector has suffered a bit from a disjointed approach in terms of whether the Government supports it through enterprise or as culture and creativity—there is an element of both.

Is there a view emerging in Creative Scotland—given that it has engagement with the games sector but not at the level or degree of success that Screen Scotland has had in relation to film and TV—about what the future direction should be?