Chamber and committees

We should not overlook the fact that there is regular churn in the civil service. You will hear regularly about civil servants who are working to the Scottish Government moving on to the Department for Work and Pensions, as was the case with the previous permanent secretary here. There is movement throughout the grades of the civil service. There is a level of insight. Could there be more? At this point, I will pass over to Mr Mackie.

I am sorry, but I have a snippet of insight into that, which did not fall immediately to mind. Just to confirm to Mr Halcro Johnston, I have turned up to meetings at which I recognise my civil service colleagues who I normally deal with and been asked, “Oh, here is a colleague from whichever UK Government department who is shadowing—is that okay?”, to which I have always said, “Absolutely.” I give some assurance that there are different approaches being taken to make things work better. Do they ultimately help us with our challenges? Well, they can do, but not necessarily.

Convener, with your permission—am I in a position to answer the question?

No, I do not, because the current UK Government, having said before it was elected that it would repeal the internal market act, did not act on that commitment to repeal the act when it took up office and overlooked two votes in this Parliament for the repeal of the act. The position here is the same as that of the Welsh Labour Government. The issue is not about making the internal market act work; it is about repealing it and making the common frameworks mechanism work. That mechanism precedes the IMA, which is the Trojan horse in the devolved settlement. Since the new UK Government took office, we have seen it reviewing the internal market act. The formulation that it uses is that its preference is to “foreground” the common frameworks. I think that that is the UK Government’s way of saying that it would, as a matter of course, prefer to deal with these intergovernmental matters through the common frameworks route but that it wants to keep the internal market act in reserve. That position has been resisted very strongly by the Scottish Government, which still believes that the IMA should be repealed.

Convener, you have drawn attention to the fact that, in a letter that was sent earlier this month, a significant number of Labour members of the Welsh Senedd express the same view as we do. I am sure that the committee has seen the correspondence. They go into some detail in criticising the UK Government’s continuing involvement in areas of devolved responsibility and say that that is not what the UK Government should be doing.

I have always taken the view—I have given evidence on this to the committee—that where there is a willingness to make common frameworks operate, they can and they should operate, and the internal market act is a Trojan horse in the devolved settlement. It was a political project and it was there to undermine devolved Governments and Administrations. Sadly, it is being continued by the current UK Government.

Thank you for the invitation to discuss this and other matters.

There has definitely been a change since the last UK general election, certainly rhetorically. Immediately after the election, and for some time, UK Government ministers were very keen to stress their understanding of how suboptimally the predecessor UK Government had approached intergovernmental relations, how that was not sustainable and how there needed to be a change—and that they were committed to making it.

At the start, that often required little more than simply meeting. It was previously the case that, often, across a wide range of subjects, meetings never took place or were cancelled, or documentation was not provided for them. As for the contents of meetings when they were held, the process simply was not working. That was the view of not only the Scottish Government but the Welsh Government and Northern Irish colleagues. The incoming UK Government stressed that it understood that that was the context of intergovernmental relations and that it wanted to change that.

That led to a flurry of introductory meetings, which I took part in with the Secretary of State for Scotland and—from memory, in terms of my policy areas—ministers in the Cabinet Office and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. All of them said the same thing: that they wanted a reset in relations with the devolved Administrations and with the European Union, and that the UK Government was committed to resetting relations with both.

After the initial meetings, we began to see a pick-up in the meetings of the different formats of intergovernmental relations. I am sure that the committee is aware that the IGR structures include a format in which the Prime Minister and the heads of devolved Governments meet. Under the previous UK Government, it was more often than not the case that the Prime Minister did not attend at all. However, the incoming Prime Minister has attended and has continued to attend.

Those meetings have been held regularly with the heads of devolved Governments. There are also interministerial standing committees, finance interministerial standing committees and portfolio-specific interministerial groups. Those have all been meeting—some of them have been meeting for the first time—and that is a significant improvement.

That is step 1—rhetorical acknowledgement that things were not working well and a commitment to making them work better. The first part of that commitment is that we should be meeting. There is then a broad range of how well that is working, and perhaps we will come on to that as well.

I acknowledge that there are areas where there is good and improving dialogue. The Government minister that I speak with most often is Nick Thomas-Symonds of the Cabinet Office, who has responsibility for negotiations with the European Union. He has been the lead UK Government minister dealing with the UK-EU agreement. I met the previous Secretary of State for Scotland, and I have met him again in his new role at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Not long ago, I met with Michael Shanks, who is one of the UK energy ministers. I will stop there, because you will, no doubt, want to get on to how those meetings and processes work, and I can perhaps share some insights on that as well.

I totally agree. Riffing off the point about different departmental realities, joining those two things together is key. I gave the example of trade agreements and the absence of meaningful interaction in areas in which there would be very significant interest or devolved locus, which is a problem in governmental terms and a matter of political discourse. We are told, “Foreign affairs are reserved, so you cannot have any external affairs,” which, as we all know, is total nonsense. However, that reflects the very same point, which is that there is a lack of understanding. However, although we are living in an asymmetrical union, our main public service broadcaster still thinks that it is accurate to report, every single day, that “the Government” is doing something or other.

Indeed. It talks about “the Government”, when there is more than one Government in the United Kingdom. That would never happen in Germany, Austria, Belgium and so on. If we want to circle back to the main points that we have been discussing, it is about an attitude towards how things can work.

If we are coming to the end of this agenda item, convener, I want to stress again that we will do everything that we can to try to make systems work and that I am very open to systems being included for transparency and accountability. However, with regard to the bigger picture, we need to understand that we are dealing with an attitude that has not changed that much through devolution. That is the point that Mr Brown has made, and he is correct.

Yes. I think that the call lasted less than 10 minutes. I asked what I imagine most of you would have wanted to know in relation to Erasmus+, which is how it will work in the context of Scotland’s different funding structure for universities. Mr Thomas-Symonds did not know but undertook to get back to me.

Again, the interaction is good, but it would probably be better if we could do it before things are in the newspapers. I am somewhat surprised—that would be the diplomatic way of saying it—that we could not get an answer at that stage on things that are self-evidently and obviously of devolved interest and responsibility. Scotland’s funding structure for universities and students is not a secret. However, having a constructive tone and wanting to be in touch are common priorities for both the Scottish Government and the UK Government, which both want accession to Erasmus+. There is no criticism of that, but we still need to understand some of the details thereof. There is a bit of colour to how all of that works.

I am putting that on the table because it will lend itself to consideration of how we, as a Government, can report to you about those meetings in those different formats and how we can conduct our meetings with you in a way that is content rich but that does not undermine our ability to have intergovernmental discussions. As I have already said, although domestic and international custom and practice around those meetings is that they are private, we must, at the same time, get the balance right so that we can be held to account for what does or does not take place as part of those processes.

Convener, I am giving an answer to Mr Halcro Johnston’s observations.

Mr Halcro Johnston said an interesting thing when he talked about Lorna Slater and others saying that a vote for the Scottish Greens—and, by extension, the SNP—was not, of itself, a mandate for independence. I agree—what it is, though, is a mandate for a referendum. Both the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Green Party, which make up the majority in this Parliament, were elected on a manifesto commitment that there should be a referendum. I would never ever pray in aid somebody voting for me in Edinburgh Central to keep the Tories out—because it is a two-horse race there between the SNP and the Tories—and say that a vote of a Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green voter who wanted to keep the Tories out was necessarily a vote for independence per se. However, I am very clear that, when a party says in its manifesto that it is committed to, and that its MSPs will vote for, a referendum taking place, it is a mandate to have that choice.

We do not need to go round the houses again on this, but it would appear that the salient point here is being lost by some. There is a difference between having the right of self-determination—and having an agreed route as democrats to be able to do that—and the pros and cons of independence itself. Nobody on the no side of the constitutional argument has been prepared to address that gap.

Mr Halcro Johnston will not, I am sure, be surprised to learn that I am a democrat and that the Scottish National Party is a democratic party that believes in the democratic process. Therefore, the plan is based on those principles. We are standing for election to this Parliament, and if we are elected, we will pursue an independence referendum.

In any other country, or in any other circumstance, it would not be considered a strange proposition that the party that wins with a manifesto commitment to do something actually does it. In fact, in most normal countries, Opposition parliamentarians would be jumping up and down, talking about delivering manifesto commitments—