Chamber and committees

I wonder whether Donald Smith wants to come in. You mentioned visitor hesitancy after Covid in relation to festivals, but there is also the cost of living crisis. What do we need to do more of to enable festivals to be more successful? We have already lost the Edinburgh Filmhouse and the Belmont Filmhouse, which is impacting on the film festival.

That is very helpful, because I do not think that that issue has been raised in the committee before. I know that there are issues about changing ticket prices as the date of an event gets nearer. You mentioned a ticket price of £60, and I have seen much bigger prices than that, and there is a question about where all that money goes. That has been really helpful in our thinking about the stark issue that there is not enough money. There has not been enough funding for a long time, but there will be a crisis this year and going forward—I appreciate that.

Is it possible to get a sense from Chris Sherrington of what kind of money we are talking about in terms of business rates? I think that he said that only 10 organisations got support but I presume that it is not a massive amount of money. The challenge is that, to go back to Donald Smith’s point, local authorities then have less income.

We would need a weekly update, but what I was thinking—

It is very rare that I agree with the cabinet secretary on a huge number of issues. The bill is unprecedented; it feels dangerous as well as ill thought out. The evidence that we have heard, which Jenni Minto has already mentioned, was on public health, food safety, animal safety, business, the environment and workers’ rights. Another issue that was striking is the legal impact, which will lead to massive uncertainty. It cuts right across everything. You have made points about devolution and the Sewel convention that I very much agree with. I was struck by the evidence that we had from the head of the Northern Ireland civil service, who said that there was potential for an untenable legislative burden as well as a diversion of resources to ensure a functioning statute book. This Tory Government is acting without any thought as to the range of dangerous impacts of the bill.

My question follows up on questions that my colleagues have asked. Have you or other Scottish Government ministers had parallel discussions with UK Government ministers? You have already mentioned DEFRA, which is clearly a massive issue for us. There is also the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which will be important in terms of regulations and businesses in the future.

One of the things that I found disturbing in what we have heard is that there is evidence that the impact is already happening. It is not a theoretical issue about what happens next December. Part of the evidence that we heard was about how local government regulates safety and the sense that some businesses are already shifting because of the uncertainty.

There is the issue of what will happen in the future. How do you build that piece of work in the Scottish Government, which will be a huge legislative and civil service burden, and manage the risk assessment to continue to highlight the dangers of the bill and get in place measures for the dangerous worst-case scenario that you have talked about? It could happen this time next year. Can I take you to the January issue? Do you think that the UK civil service will identify all these areas of legislation by January?

Seriously, what I was thinking is that it goes to the issue of stakeholders. We need to have transparency and to be able to highlight things on the web in the same way as you do, so that we are up to date. It is partly about scrutiny by us, but it is as much about other parliamentary committees and stakeholders.

What is your expectation of our capacity to scrutinise that as a Parliament—not just this committee, obviously, because most of the other Scottish Parliament committees should scrutinise it—if the process goes through as you currently expect it to?

I have a quick supplementary question as a result of the convener’s question. Is it possible to get an update on the work that the Scottish Government has done? You last gave us evidence a few weeks ago. It would be quite helpful to get a sense of the progress that you are making or the issues that you are identifying.

I welcome that. In our first evidence session on the issue, the people round the table were all of the view that it would be far better to retain EU law and then decide what we do not want rather than, as you say, upend the entire process. I cannot remember, as a committee member, an evidence session where we have not heard evidence that disputes the approach. That is really unusual, given the range of organisations that we have had.

On how the Government responds, there is parliamentary accountability to us. I presume that, at UK level, there has to be a parallel to the work that we are doing and the work that is being done in Wales. The Northern Ireland Assembly is not in place at the moment, so there will be no scrutiny by elected representatives there, which must be an issue.

In your work and in the support from the civil service, do you have a ranking in deciding where to start? You mentioned biosecurity. We are not out of the pandemic yet, and there is an issue about transparency and safety, because this approach is potentially, without thought, putting people’s safety at risk.

That would be helpful.

I have one final minor question, which is on work across the UK. Is the work on the common frameworks still going on and does it have any relation to the bill? I am thinking about how the current Tory Government is operating, because it is a whole set of different ministers.