A long time ago, Adam Tomkins asked a lot of questions. I am not sure that I will remember to answer them all, but I will try to deal with what I can. The RSE position relates to the development of policy and the development of the common frameworks. That is where we have reached an agreed position and I can speak to that. I will then speak more personally to some of your other questions.
In terms of the development of policy, the RSE is suggesting an independent secretariat made up of experienced civil servants from Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the UK. They would be appointed to speak for the UK in the abstract—not the UK Government—and they would bring to the table that range of expertise that is perhaps lacking at the moment. Nobody has brought that expertise together. That is point one.
The secretariat would probably be pretty small at first—let us not exaggerate its significance—and what with public expenditure priorities and all the rest of it, it will probably be a relatively small body. It should have some budget, with the costs shared across the UK Governments in an appropriate way—that is not for me to decide, but each of the players should contribute to the budget. Once the secretariat has a budget, it should have independence in relation to how that is used, but it would be free to commission research—it would go through the usual procurement process to get hopefully the best people to produce good research. The secretariat would have to decide the priorities for that research: some of it would be conceptual, some of it would be very technical detailed stuff.
Transparency is key. How do you have transparency? The key thing for the secretariat is to publish all the research that comes in and all the papers that it is producing on the broader issues. In my experience of negotiating in both the international and the European spheres, a degree of privacy is needed. You need areas where everything is not in the public domain. It is just sensible that you can have free and frank discussion at a certain level before you go into the public domain. Transparency should not be confused with everything being done in the public domain. That leads to bad rather than good decision making.
Transparency is about making public as much as you can so that you have an informed debate, but some of those debates need to be in private. Then you have transparency so that people can feed in. That is where Lloyd Austin is correct. The way you get good governance is if the people who really know about the subject that is being discussed have inputted all the relevant data. If you do not ask them, you do not get it. The advantage of an independent secretariat is that, hopefully, they will see their role as the European Commission does when it does its job well.
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It does not always do so, but when it does its job well it seeks out all the relevant expert input before it makes its proposal. Again, you would see an independent secretariat that would, at the early stages, be getting all the data before it made its proposal as to how to deal with some specific aspect of a common framework. That is learning from the best of the EU, rather than just mimicking it.
That takes me beyond what the RSE has agreed, to the other issues that Adam Tomkins asked about.
Should you have qualified majority voting or consensus? I have worked with both within the EU, and I have worked with consensus in an international environment. My personal preference is for consensus. I will be quite frank about that. Even in the EU, things initially had to be agreed on the basis of consensus. For the reasons that Michael Clancy mentioned and in my opinion—I am speaking personally—within the UK, a framework should initially be based on consensus. Therefore, if you do not have political consensus, you do not have a common framework. You go back to whatever the legislative position is under the current constitutional settlement, which of course runs a risk. I realise that if the UK Government and Parliament behave badly they can upset that settlement by driving legislation through without consent, on the basis that it is just a convention.
Of course, and again speaking personally, that would be a disaster from the point of view of the long-term UK constitutional settlement. One would hope—and indeed, speaking personally, pray—that the UK Government would not get into the habit of breaking the convention, that that would be only a very rare thing and that normally the provision would stick. If it did not stick, then the whole thing would not really work in the long run. That would undermine the whole system. If you have a sensible use of the current constitutional settlement, common frameworks can be developed purely on the basis of consensus and you rely on the normal operative rules if there is no consensus, but that should not be seen as an excuse for the UK Government to dominate the agenda because it has the trump card. If the UK Government gets into that frame of mind, it will undermine the whole system.
Do we need courts? That is a good question. Again, all the examples are that if co-operative federalism—if we want to use that dangerous word that the Germans use—is to work, it works, as the name implies, on the basis of co-operation rather than on the basis of legal frameworks, where you fight it out in the courts. I say again that if this is to move forward in a way that will be good for the UK as a whole, it should be on the basis of consensus and people making things work, like the Northern Ireland electricity network: making it work because there is a common interest in making it work, not because some court tells you that you have to do it. Courts are not the best people to determine these questions, in my opinion. I am a parliamentary sovereignty guy at heart and I think politicians need to be making the decisions, not courts.
What role for Parliaments? That is the last part of this question. Yes, there does have to be a role for the Parliaments. Parliaments should be the ones that try to make sure that the independent secretariat does its job properly, that it is not captured by any particular interest or interests, any particular lobby groups, that it does maintain an overall perspective on the difficult political questions where you are balancing different interests. The environment lobby, for example, is one very strong lobby group—it is very well represented in this meeting, by the way; that is interesting, is it not? The environment lobby group has its act together. There are other interest groups out there that do not have their acts together so well. Politicians need to be careful to listen to not just the strongest lobby voice. I have nothing against the environment, by the way, but there are balancing factors in a single market. Where are the business voices? Honestly, where are the business voices, and what about the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities? COSLA has excellent evidence, but where is it today?
It is the job of the politicians, in the end, to ensure that in making final decisions, the different vested interests are properly balanced. That is why it is not the secretariat that makes the decisions. The secretariat creates the framework. Some of our members have been involved in the JMC and the problem with the JMC is that it does not automatically meet; it does not have clear agendas; it does not have clear outcomes. If you have the system that we are suggesting, the advantage is that the secretariat makes sure that there are regular meetings of the ministers. The secretariat makes sure that those meetings are not just a talking shop, but are dealing with something concrete. There should be outcomes from those meetings. That is a whole different ball game from what the JMC is and has been.