Chamber and committees

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I would have put a shilling in the meter and voted no.

The disruption to EE’s 4G mobile service, which my constituents in Uig have now been enduring for six weeks, has effectively cut off a huge geographic area from all broadband access and severely impacted on medical and other essential services. Given that, does the minister agree that EE’s response has been truly woeful? Will he commit to facilitating a meeting in Uig between the R100 team and the community?

The on-going coastal state negotiations are of the utmost importance to Scotland’s fishing industry. As others have pointed out, the results of those negotiations will dictate the industry’s short-term opportunities as well as fishing’s future in the longer term and they aim to secure sustainable management of fish stocks in the seas that surround us.

In a country with as rich a coastline as Scotland, it is little wonder that fishing remains a key part of our economy, not least in constituencies such as mine. During the on-going negotiations with neighbouring coastal nations over the strategic management objectives and approaches for shared fish stocks, the Scottish Government is rightly working to achieve the best possible outcome for Scotland’s fishers, coastal communities, the seafood sector as a whole and for our environment.

It is vital that the Scottish Government continues to respond to the key challenges facing Scotland’s fishing industry. There are many of them but I will name a couple of recent ones: the leap in fuel prices over the past year and the impact of labour shortages, which other members have pointed out. It is also important to recognise that the needs of the west coast, such as in my constituency, can differ radically from the needs that are specific to the east coast or northern isles fishing industries.

Inshore fisheries in particular, and the produce that they export, play a vital part in the local economy of the islands. There remains a strong demand for the export of high-quality Scottish fish and seafood, which accounted for an impressive 63 per cent of the UK’s total seafood exports last year.

However, all the available evidence shows us that, in fishing, as in many other areas of our lives, most Scots see Brexit as an extraordinary act of national self-harm to the UK’s economy, hampering our ability to trade efficiently with our closest neighbours. A number of small seafood businesses in my constituency have expressed grave doubts about whether it is now practical to export to the EU at all due to the increase in paperwork, delays and costs that they have experienced since Brexit.

Brexit has, of course, created myriad other issues. Almost every industry is having to contend with the shortage of labour across the country and fishing is no exception. The UK Home Office continues to refuse to engage its common sense on that matter as it clings to its damaging anti-immigration rhetoric at all costs while jobs across countless sectors go unfilled. That affects the long-term viability of many businesses, not least in the fishing industry, and crushes the potential growth that the UK Government insists that it is working to create.

For example, the requirement for overseas labour on many types of fishing vessel is now the norm. Much as we want to recruit from within Scotland, overseas labour is increasingly needed. Following amendments to immigration regulation after Brexit, transit visas have begun to be used regularly to employ fishers, mostly from Ghana and the Philippines, on boats around Scotland. The Home Office is now closing the loophole—as it sees it—that allows those visas to be used in that way and, more significantly, in response to allegations of human rights abuse aboard a handful of UK fishing vessels where transit visas have been in use.

It remains a mystery to me—as it clearly does to Fergus Ewing and to many others, I am sure—what the Labour Party’s position is on labour coming from other countries or, indeed, what it might be on Brexit more broadly.

In the time that I have left, I underline my hope that the Scottish Government will continue to engage proactively with the UK Government on such issues. However, the labour force issue is just one example of the avalanche of challenges that Scotland’s fishing industry currently faces. They provide a context for the negotiations that we are discussing in the debate. Such pressures affect all sizes of fishing enterprise and mean that the outcome of this year’s coastal states negotiations has never been more important.

When it comes to protecting our marine environment and ensuring the continued viability of the fishing sector in Scotland’s coastal communities, it is not a question of either/or; we must work to find the correct balance for both the fishing industry and the environment. The key role of fishing in Scotland’s rural and coastal economies must be preserved and encouraged and our marine environment protected. It is my hope that this year’s coastal states negotiations will be an opportunity to be proactive in ensuring the long-term sustainability of our seas’ fish stocks and of our fishing industry.

Cabinet secretary, I appreciate that we are here to talk primarily about the report but, in your opening remarks, you mentioned that, if Scotland was not carved out of the retained EU law bill, we would need to look at—I think you said—“totally new” approaches for keeping pace with some areas. Has there been any indication whatsoever from the UK Government whether it intends to do any such carving out? If not, what might be other options that the Scottish Government would have to pursue, and what would be the likely scale of the task?

I am not sure whether Oliver Mundell intends at any point to turn his attention to the report that we are debating, but does he acknowledge that that report, which we should be talking about, represents the views of not merely politicians but people who gave evidence from organisations such as the Law Society of Scotland and the Hansard Society, who said that a number of the UK Government’s constitutional developments of late represent something that is close to a constitutional crisis?

Like others, I thank all those who made the committee’s report possible, including all my fellow committee members, the clerks and the many experts who gave evidence, as I mentioned. I will not be so unwise as to attempt to speak for all committee members, but I think that it was creditable that we managed largely to reach consensus in our conclusions.

I will try to restrict my comments to areas that the report covers directly, but it is worth adding some context by way of update. As we have heard, the committee has more recently taken evidence on the UK Government’s Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which is likely to have dramatic effects on the statute book in Scotland and on who gets to amend many parts of it.

It was difficult for us to find any legal or constitutional commentators who viewed the bill with anything other than polite but evident astonishment. The bill repeals, via sunset clause, 4,000 or perhaps 5,000 extant UK laws over the next 12 months. The exact number of laws that are up for the axe is not clear, as the UK Government recently admitted that it had only just discovered 1,400 more laws that it had forgotten all about.

Whatever the number, a great many of those laws—at present they are unidentified—cover devolved areas. Many such laws will become amendable by a UK minister, rather than by this elected Parliament, using proposed so-called Henry VIII powers. That name does an injustice, if such a thing is really possible, to a man who—thankfully—never managed to legislate in Scotland himself.

To quote our report:

“The Committee’s view is that the extent of UK Ministers’ new delegated powers in devolved areas amounts to a significant constitutional change. We have considerable concerns that this has happened and is continuing to happen on an ad hoc and iterative basis without any overarching consideration of the impact on how devolution works.”

As noted by the committee’s adviser, Dr Chris McCorkindale, Brexit

“has posed a number of significant challenges to the effective functioning of the UK constitution.”

In his view,

“territorial tension has been exposed and exacerbated by the relatively weak constitutional safeguards for devolved autonomy”.

All of that means that Brexit is testing to the point of destruction constitutional norms, including those that undoubtedly exist even in a state so bizarrely lacking a written constitution as the UK. The conventions were already under significant strain at a political level, given that UK Prime Ministers, however brief their tenure, have publicly stated that their aim has been to “ignore” Scotland’s Government.

Other members will, no doubt, speak today about the various other areas that we cover in our report, such as the UK-EU trade and co-operation agreement, the protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, the changing concept of retained EU law and broader intergovernmental relations. In concluding, I will concentrate on one particular area: legislative consent.

As the committee convener set out, there was a time when the Sewel convention—the assumption that the UK Parliament would not normally seek to legislate on devolved matters without the Scottish Parliament’s consent—went virtually unchallenged as an idea. However, since the Brexit referendum, there has been a complete breakdown of the convention. Notwithstanding the convention’s former political importance as one of the principles behind devolution, the UK Parliament has now begun regularly and routinely to ignore this Parliament when we refuse to consent to being legislated for.

Among the most notable examples of that are such enormously far-reaching pieces of legislation as the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, the European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020, the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and the Professional Qualifications Act 2022. Most controversially, and as has been alluded to, the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 was likewise passed without this Parliament’s consent. Now the UK Government shows similar signs of disdain for this Parliament’s view on the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, despite its potentially enormous implications for the question of who makes many laws in devolved areas.

Whether the Sewel convention actually still means very much is now open to question. Indeed, many of our witnesses expressed their doubts about that. One hopes that it still has a more binding force than other conventions that exist only in the sphere of the UK Government’s ministerial code, say, or perhaps the locally varying conventions around when to wave to other motorists on single-track roads.

Professor McHarg pointed out to us that

“The Sewel convention has been severely tested by the Brexit process and its ongoing legislative aftermath.”

The Institute for Government’s view is even more directly expressed:

“Brexit has exposed the convention’s limitations as a guarantee of devolved autonomy.”

That is not a trivial observation or question, and it is not just the many of us of who spent our youths campaigning for a parliamentary democracy in Scotland who are troubled by it.

As our committee’s report makes clear, those fundamental concerns about Westminster’s legislative intentions with regard to Holyrood, and the powers that Holyrood has in law to stop them, are questions on which, as parliamentarians, we would all do well to reflect.

The member has listed some of the areas that are within our control. Does she appreciate that many of us who are here today are angry because the UK is seeking to override the areas that are within our devolved control by legislating in those areas?

Will the member take an intervention?

On the back of that, can you take us through the issues that were considered in reaching an approach whereby there is a difference in the number of dogs that can be used for rough shooting and the number that can be used for other types of shooting, if that is a correct reading of things? Was the safety of wild mammals the primary issue that you considered when you considered this area of the bill?