Chamber and committees

We all have our own subjective experiences. On Monday this week, I went to a secondary school—Lornshill academy in Alloa—where three young men with remarkable innovative ideas were putting together an engineering project for a competition. That afternoon, I went to Abercromby primary school. Both schools are in areas of very high deprivation, but what struck me was that almost every child in the class asked me a question. I have been doing this for 18 years and that is not the norm. On Friday, I will go to Strathdevon primary school, where the pupils are doing a Scottish Opera production. So, intuitively, it seems to me that things have developed.

However, I want to ask about setting the target in the first place. You mentioned that we are moving towards 2026, which is an election year, and all the parties will want to make commitments. Is there something inherently flawed about setting a target when the Scottish Government—any Scottish Government—cannot guarantee the outcome? There will be external factors, such as austerity, Liz Truss’s budget or a pandemic. We would probably not have thought of a pandemic, but we know that there will always be certain levers that are not at the Scottish Government’s disposal. This is a cross-Government issue. Is it sensible to set targets when you are not in control of whether or not you will achieve them?

Accountability is surely an issue because, if what I have said is the case, it becomes much more difficult for the public to ascribe responsibility to anyone for a failure to achieve a target.

Cabinet secretary, I will take you back to the point that Willie Rennie made about the initial progress that was made up to 2016, whereby the attainment gap was reduced to 7 per cent, but there was only a 3 per cent improvement once the attainment challenge was established.

You mentioned the pandemic, although that came towards the end of the period in question, and you also mentioned austerity. I suppose that reducing welfare and other budgets will have a grinding effect over the years, and I accept that that might have increased in the latter period. However, is it the case—I genuinely do not know the answer to this—that the more progress you make, the more difficult it is to make further progress? Is the fact that you have harder yards to make to reach people in deprived areas another part of the reason for the reduction in the rate of improvement?

All of that is an argument for all parties to provide a more nuanced description of what they promise before an election. We have heard some very positive comments from previous witnesses about achievements in relation to the attainment target. The progress that has been made has been mentioned a number of times, as has the fact that progress has gone slightly backwards. However, there is now a real expectation that things will improve further again. In many respects, what has happened is quite remarkable. Very often, you would not think that from the committee’s deliberations, but there has been a remarkable change over that period, which is looked upon with some envy by other parts of the UK.

However—this is not a trite point; it is quite a serious point—as well as learning lessons from the challenges, including about the things that you still have to do, if you learn lessons from what has succeeded, that includes things that have succeeded unintentionally, if you follow my drift. The Government has achieved certain things and wants to go further, and the committee has discussed how we can better measure what it has achieved, for example, through free school meals. Has the Government done work to learn from what has succeeded, so that you can do more or tweak it? If progress is going to become more and more difficult, because of the numbers that are left to bring up to the required level, what has the Government learned from what has gone well?

Thank you for that. This raises the question of why members in this Parliament would give away the opportunity to legislate in this area and would have others legislate on their behalf.

I am conscious, Mr Hall, that there are a number of things in your organisation’s written statement that coincide with what was said by a witness on the previous panel. For example, you said:

“It is the clear view of NFU Scotland that the principles embedded in the UK Internal Market Act (IMA) 2020 pose a significant threat to the development of Common Frameworks and to devolved policy.”

You also said that the internal market act

“appears to limit the devolved administrations’ ability to act if any standards were lowered and give the UK Government a final say in areas of devolved policy.”

We were told in 2014 that we were going to be the most powerful devolved Parliament in the world and that the Sewel convention was going to be enshrined in law. Within a couple of years, the UK Government said that the Sewel convention was merely a “self-denying ordinance” and that it could choose whether or not to use it.

Given that change, and that UKIMA has reversed-engineered devolution—that term has been used—as well as the fact that the current UK Government does not want to repeal it, is the exercise that we are involved in likely to effect the changes that you want to see? Given the massive changes in the devolved nature of the Parliament, should there be something bigger and wider than a very limited review of UKIMA to address your concerns? In 2015, we had the Smith commission. In my view, the public should be involved in deciding on the Parliament’s powers.

Thank you.

Does anyone want to add to that point?

I want to come in on that last point. I know that it is difficult, and I understand that you do not want to talk up or to give more oxygen to a potential challenge—maybe I am wrong, but that is my impression—but is it not at least hypothetically possible that, in this so-called internal market, one area might object to what it sees as greater Government support being given to another area? It is a viable concern that the current support for Scottish farmers—or, indeed, the support for farmers in any part of the UK in the same situation—could be undermined on that basis.

It is interesting that the last point that Mr Kerr made is the complete opposite of what he said at the start of his questions about there being unanimity and consensus among the four witnesses.

In my view—I am speaking as a politician, but I realise that you guys are not—UKIMA was introduced for reasons of sheer political vindictiveness. It was a power grab that involved the reverse engineering of devolution. If people do not believe that, they have to consider what the rationale was.

We have talked about the asymmetry. It is hard to believe that there are people in this Parliament who are happy that England is set above the rest of the UK in the way that it is. Gene editing was the example that was given. You would think that the fact that the UK can legislate for England without needing to get any exemptions would trouble people in this Parliament, but it does not trouble all of us, which is unfortunate.

The UK internal market also sets itself against classical market theory, because it depresses ambition, aspiration and innovation. That is the effect that it is having—the chilling effect has been mentioned.

Therefore, there is no rationale for what has been done. UKIMA is a power grab. It is like when, after Brexit, the money that had come to Scotland from the EU was taken back by the UK, and it has disappeared ever since. I realise that that is my point of view, but it is interesting to see Brexiteers trying to wrestle with the contradictions of what they have created.

I realise that UKIMA’s repeal seems to be off the cards because the UK Government likes having power over Scotland that it did not have previously, and the new UK Government has gone back on the position of Welsh Labour and Scottish Labour, which advocated repeal. We can, however, do an exercise in our heads. If UKIMA were to be repealed—we have had indications that it might be replaced by a stronger legal framework—how would you envisage the so-called internal market within the UK working better? What would be the architecture if we were to do away with UKIMA? Is it just about building up legal structures that serve the same purpose? I ask Professor Horsley to answer first.

Are there any views on structures that are different from the one outlined by Professor Horsley?

But it would, like the Commission, have to be something that was not an interested party. At the moment, the UK Government has both political and territorial reasons for advantaging one area over another, so that approach would not work. In the past, we all had a say in the Commission, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament—now we do not. This sort of thing is decided at the caprice of the UK Government.