Chamber and committees

That is very helpful. Do any other witnesses want to come in on the issues of accountability and transparency?

I appreciate that, convener; thank you. I have a quick supplementary question for Dr Zuleeg. You talked about the issue of the PPA and how it actually works. This is clearly about the UK and the EU, but what is the diplomacy for other European countries such as Spain and Germany, which have very strong federal systems? How do they ensure that their Governments and federal systems, which have decisions taken at sub-national level, are properly represented in the PPA, so that there is consistency and transparency of the type that we are looking for?

I want to ask about accountability at the parliamentary level with regard to the UK Parliament and the devolved Parliaments across the UK.

Paul Craig’s paper for the European Law Review is strong on the discretionary nature of the Partnership Council, and it also makes the point that it was a very last-minute agreement. Witnesses have been talking about how long the agreement is, but the fact is that it was not effectively scrutinised by UK parliamentarians or legal scrutineers. That is a real issue.

Witnesses have also highlighted the agreement’s thinness. How do we begin to retrofit accountability and parliamentary scrutiny into the processes so that not only we but our stakeholders can find out what is happening? There is also the question of how the treaty links into the issue of where goods are made, which witnesses have also talked about.

Those are just a couple of questions for our witnesses. I invite Professor Christina Eckes to kick off, given that she talked about how the urgency of agreeing the TCA excluded any alternative scenario with regard to how national Parliaments might be involved in and reported to as part of the process, and the lack of transparency in that regard.

That is helpful, because Maurice Golden has just triggered the point that I was very keen to get a response on. I thought that point 6 in the Institution for Government’s recommendations, about dispute resolution, was interesting. Maurice Golden has suggested an interparliamentary body as one way of holding Governments to account and you have suggested an independent advisory panel established as a standing body to consider the competence issues that arise in disputes. I would be keen to get your view, and maybe also Michael Clancy’s, about different ways in which you could do that; what are the pros and cons?

I want to formally thank the witnesses for all the submissions that we received in advance of the meeting—it is useful to get different perspectives, even when you are saying similar things. It is still good to go through the high-level issues that you have raised and the detail.

The issue that I want to follow up is: what do we do about this? Even from the previous hour, you will have detected a difference in emphasis and thoughts among committee members. To go back to the points that Professor McHarg made about the age of the convention, the issue of clarity, what we mean by normality, and the whole issue of political consent and context, there is an issue about lessons learned from 1999 to 2022, and with the 2016 legislation, and what we think now as a Parliament.

I am interested in the two sets of potential solutions and changes from Professor McHarg and the Institute for Government. There is an issue about accountability, which was clearly not designed in by Sewel. At the UK level, ministers can initiate a piece of legislation and not be accountable at that level—there is no structure for that. There is also an issue about how we hold the Scottish Government to account on secondary legislation and how the UK Government is held to account on secondary legislation. However, at a higher level, with primary legislation, there is no accountability.

The Institute for Government and Professor McHarg have made some good and clear recommendations. Will you give us a quick summary at a high level and mention some practical changes?

That is very helpful.

Is a gendered analysis taking place to review that work? That is one of the suggestions that has been made by JustRight Scotland, given the particular experience that we are aware of in terms of trafficking and of sexual abuse that people might have experienced in-country before they leave.

I have a follow-up question for Pat Togher about supporting people once they have arrived. Again, it is using the experience of previous refugees—in particular, people from Afghanistan and Syria whom I met recently. They still have challenges in accessing national health service support.

It is not just about post-traumatic stress disorder or trauma from the experience of having to become a refugee. In particular, some of the Ukrainian refugees are older people or people with underlying health conditions that they had before they became refugees, so there is an issue about how to provide support in the short term through access to medicines and the immediate and on-going medical support that somebody needs. They might not have had that support for four weeks. How do we then get them fitted into our NHS system, which is already under pressure? Are the processes clear for that? People have expressed concerns that it is difficult for people, linguistically, to work out what they are meant to do and how to get that support once they have arrived.

Pat Togher made the point that, initially, people might not say exactly what their circumstances are, so this is about how we connect with them afterwards and having translation capacity. Hazel, how are you moving ahead with that? I presume that it will be quite a challenge.

It has been really good hearing the answers to the questions thus far from members of the panel.

I will ask about support for people who have made it to Scotland. It is complicated for many people to arrive here. As one of the witnesses said, we have 18,000 expressions of interest from people who are prepared to host refugees from Ukraine. I am conscious that a lot of the people who have been in touch have already improved or decorated their housing and bought new furniture to be ready for people.

One of the witnesses said that there is an issue with what happens when the match is not right. I want to explore that. It will not be easy for everybody to do the work of hosting a family once they have arrived. What follow-up work is being done to check that matches have worked? If they do not work for whatever reason, the family or person does not automatically become homeless. I have spoken to Afghan and Syrian refugees recently, some of whom are still homeless years after arriving, particularly Syrian refugees.

I ask Gayle Findlay to pick up that question from an overall COSLA perspective first.