Seòmar agus comataidhean

Our next item is the committee’s inquiry into the United Kingdom internal market. This is the committee’s fourth panel on this topic. The committee will hear from Jonathan Scott, non-executive director and chair, Competition and Markets Authority; Rachel Merelie, senior director, office for the internal market; and Sheila Scobie, director, office for the internal market. I welcome you all to the meeting this morning and thank you very much for providing your written submissions. We will move straight to questions and I remind my colleagues to put an R in the chat if they wish to ask a question.

I will open with a question to Mr Scott. Can you please elaborate on the OIM’s role in providing reports or advice on specific regulatory provisions on the request of a relevant national authority? I am particularly interested in the transparency of this work. Will requests of a national authority or any advice given be made public, or will the parliamentary committees or parliamentary legislators be informed of such advice?

Good morning, and a very warm welcome to the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee. Our first agenda item is our inquiry into the Scottish Government’s international work. Today, we will hear from our fourth panel on the topic. We have with us Mark Majewsky Anderson, director of research and innovation at Glasgow Caledonian University; David Hope-Jones OBE, chief executive of the Scotland Malawi Partnership; and Lewis Ryder-Jones, deputy chief executive of Scotland’s International Development Alliance. Welcome to the meeting, and thank you for your written submissions.

We will move straight to questions, and I will open with a question for Mr Ryder-Jones. In your submission, you state that the Scottish Parliament should scrutinise the Scottish Government’s external affairs spending using

“a Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development ... approach”.

Will you elaborate a little on that? Are there examples of that in action elsewhere?

If we go to Jonathan Scott, I am sure that he will nominate someone.

I will ask a supplementary on that, which follows on from my introductory question. If advice was given to the UK Government or the Welsh Assembly, for instance, would the other Governments be made aware of that if it is not in the public domain? Would all Governments be informed of advice that had been given, and when and where it was given?

Thank you. We are at that time on a Thursday morning when I have to remind everyone we are pushing up against time limits. Please be succinct in questions and answers and answer only if you feel that you have something to add to what has been said. Unfortunately, that is because we have First Minister’s question time on Thursday.

I thank our witnesses and my committee members. It is obvious that the session has opened a number of areas in which further discussion might be helpful, one of which—for me—is about understanding the scope and number of memorandums of understanding that are in place and have been mentioned, at country and city level. We might write to you for some further information, and I will ask my committee members to reflect on the questions that we did not quite get to today. As Martin Johnson said, it is the first time that any committee has looked at these issues, and I am sure that it will not be the last. It has been a fantastic evidence session and I thank you all for your attendance.

This is the committee’s final meeting in 2021. I thank our clerks, the Scottish Parliament information centre and other members of the Parliament’s team who have supported the committee since we came back for this parliamentary session. I wish you all a very safe and happy festive period.

I am sure that you would. We have a question from Donald Cameron—very quickly, please.

Please give succinct answers, if possible.

Yes, I can see lots of potential issues. I emphasise that those are potential issues; I am not suggesting that they are particular risks at this time.

I see the Scottish Government very much taking a pragmatic approach in terms of leaving the common agricultural policy. We have a period of stability in which we have retained many elements of CAP but are now developing a future policy through an agriculture bill, which will come to the Scottish Parliament in 2023. That will implement the Scottish Government’s proposal of about 50 per cent of support payments being conditional on meeting outcomes around biodiversity, the climate and so on. We are 100 per cent behind that. We would welcome that very different pace of and managed change. Other parts of the UK are doing their own thing as well.

You mentioned alignment with the EU. The EU is also going through a process of agricultural policy reform right now. The EU operates on a seven-year cycle and it is just completing another round of CAP reforms. If we were just to pick up and paste into Scotland the EU’s current agricultural policy, that would be extremely detrimental to Scotland. That would stretch agricultural businesses to breaking point, in many senses, it would not be reflective of what we need in Scotland in terms of underpinning active farming and crofting to deliver the outcomes that we want, and it would not particularly suit Scottish circumstances, not least in the west coast of Scotland, where we have much more extensive agricultural systems on large holdings.

If that approach to keep pace with Europe was proposed, I would say to the Scottish Government, “Yes, we hear what you are saying about keeping alignment and keeping pace with Europe, but on that particular one, you need to be doing something that is far more bespoke to Scotland’s needs and you need to be sticking to a track that you have already set out to achieve.” If we simply duplicated the new CAP and imposed that on Scotland, I could see that being very detrimental to Scottish interests. I am not just talking Scottish agricultural interests; I am talking about Scotland’s interests.

Would England be unable to export to Europe if it uses glyphosate?