Chamber and committees

Thank you.

The minimum unit pricing example leads on quite well to my final question, which is on the UK Government’s position—or at least, cabinet secretary, your understanding of the UK Government’s position.

As a Green politician, I am well used to having to hold fast to the true vision of what I believe in, while at the same time recognising that there will not be a majority for it and that I will have to compromise and figure out how close I can get to it. I am not going to suggest that you should not advocate for what is in your paper—in fact, I would probably advocate for a lot of what is in it with regard to the architecture that ought to be in place. However, we know that, in reality, the current UK Government seems unlikely to scrap the IMA and might not even make major changes to it.

Therefore, I would like to ask you about your attitude to some of the specific propositions for change that some of our witnesses have talked about. One proposition was for an explicit list of criteria for exemptions. Indeed, if we had had such a list, and if minimum unit pricing had been taking place under the IMA, we would have been able to argue that it aligned with a specific exemption criterion. Another proposition was for a shift in the burden of proof, so that the default expectation would be that devolved legislatures had the right to act, and the UK Government would have to come forward with a sufficient burden of proof if it wanted to constrain that. Those kinds of more modest changes do not go as far as I want—and they will not go as far as you want, either, cabinet secretary—but if they are achievable, what will be the Scottish Government’s attitude to them? Do you think that, politically, they are achievable, given the discussions that you have had so far with UK colleagues?

Thank you.

A ridiculous number.

That is very kind.

Thank you.

The point that I am making, though, is that Parliament needs to be able to do more than ask questions, and even more than get answers to questions. Although there is an agreement across the Parliament that the common frameworks architecture should be made to work, individual common frameworks are not put to Parliament for debate, scrutiny and amendment. Once common frameworks have been agreed between the Governments, that effectively constrains the ability of Parliament to legislate. Is there not a similar question to be asked about the common frameworks architecture and where parliamentary authority and the right to decide lie?

That is a little bit in the same sense that there is a massive unanswered question about the right of the devolved jurisdictions to decide in the context of the IMA.

I put on record my apologies for being a few minutes late and missing the cabinet secretary’s initial remarks.

It is probably not unknown for committee members to hear only the evidence that they want to hear. I am bracing myself for the sessions in which we agree a committee report, but I am confident that the majority of the committee will reflect the balance of the evidence that we have heard. I have heard people give evidence that supports the Scottish Government’s position and evidence that departs from it. We have heard a range of evidence, and I want to reflect on it all.

I want to ask two things: first, about the Scottish Government’s position, and then about your understanding of the UK Government’s position. I might regret saying this, but the latter is more likely to direct where we get to with the issue. You not only suggest that the internal market act itself is unnecessary—I am comfortable with that proposition—but that the common frameworks arrangements and architecture are adequate and that we should rest on those in order to ensure market access and so on.

I recognise that the internal market act constrains the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government’s power, but is it not equally arguable that common frameworks constrain the Scottish Parliament’s power, because they are subject to agreement between Governments? The internal market act might have offered a tolerable way forward if it had been co-legislated—if this Parliament had had an opportunity to debate and amend the bill and to decide whether it agreed to it. If that had been a joint piece of work between two jurisdictions, it might have been an agreeable way forward.

That has not happened with common frameworks, either. Do common frameworks not constrain the power of Parliament and give a little bit of unaccountable power to Governments? Is there a way in which you could see common frameworks evolving to ensure that the bulk of the authority and power rests with the Parliament, which is the body that the Scottish people ultimately gave that authority to when they created this place?

I am very grateful for the First Minister’s kind personal remarks, but I fear that his comments on the policy issue are complacent. He talks about the protections that I just described, but the point is that those protections ended this week—they are no longer there to protect people. Such complacency is similar to what we heard recently from the Minister for Housing. When those figures were put to him, all that he could say was that he was asking landlords to be sensible with these new, utterly uncontrolled powers.

In truth, there is now nothing to hold back a tide of unaffordable rent rises. The Scottish Government has not even published an assessment of the number of people who will lose their homes as a result. The protection that the Greens introduced succeeded in preventing eye-watering rent increases. Rents in Scotland are already too high—

—and with energy bills going up and social security under attack, people need a Government here that will be on their side. Will the First Minister think again, stop watering down the new bill and ensure that it can cut rents instead of locking in ever more rent rises for the future?

The new approach is clearly going to fail. This was one of the few areas of climate policy that the independent Climate Change Committee had praised, and it is being gutted. If there is one thing that we have learned about climate policy in recent years, it is that setting targets without decisive action to meet them is meaningless. The loss of the property purchase trigger will clearly result in a dramatically slower uptake of clean heating in Scotland. Given that the Government has chosen the slower path to heat decarbonisation, will the Acting Minister for Climate Action tell us which other sectors will work faster to cut emissions in order to make the new climate plan remotely plausible?