Chamber and committees

That would be very helpful.

I apologise to Colin Beattie. I should have brought him in a few moments ago when we were touching on the Sewel convention, but perhaps he would like to come in now.

10:15

We are coming to the end of the time that we have available. I want to ask a question that relates to the meetings that you said have been taking place, and that you anticipate taking place, among the four nations. As well as that, is there a separate track of bilaterals with the other devolved Governments, or do the devolved Governments proactively seek out time and space to discuss matters between themselves without the UK Government’s presence? They have a distinct relationship as devolved Governments. To what extent does that take place as part of the process of building relationships and trust?

Thanks very much, Deputy First Minister. We will start on transparency and accountability. When the committee met this time last week, just hours before the publication of the programme for government, we decided following our discussions that we should write to you to ask for an initial assessment of the intergovernmental issues that are raised by elements of the programme for government. I am very grateful that you turned around a response quickly, because I recognise that the request for information came at short notice. That initial assessment was one of the recommendations that our predecessor committee endorsed in relation to improving transparency and accountability.

I hope that you recognise that there is a set of unanswered questions about how those who make decisions in the intergovernmental space are held to account and how those decisions are scrutinised. I am particularly thinking about decisions that the Scottish Government makes in the context of the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 and common frameworks, as well as decisions that the UK Government makes on devolved matters, and how people who make those decisions are held to account.

Could you expand on the recommendations for improvements that our predecessor committee endorsed—the initial assessment was just the first of those—whether the Government intends to implement the recommendations and whether you have other thoughts about how we can improve transparency and accountability in intergovernmental relations?

Can you say a little more about how the process currently works? There might be areas for change or improvement, and I hope that we will continue the dialogue on that, but how does the Scottish Government figure out what are sometimes unclear interactions when it is beginning to undertake work? In developing a bill, when do you start to clarify areas where there are issues on which the UK Government might have a concern or an objection or where there is legal ambiguity?

We know that some of the intergovernmental interactions are vague and not clearly defined. For example, that is the case with the trigger mechanisms that apply under the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020. There has also been a concern that there is a chilling effect, in that there are actions that the Scottish Government might want to take but that are not taken, or not even initiated, because of the concern about intergovernmental interactions. How can we get transparency around actions that have been subject to that kind of chilling effect?

Transparency and scrutiny has been a common theme. You will hopefully be able to keep the committee up to date—not necessarily on the fine detail of the discussions, but on the broad outcomes and the rhythm of meetings and so on, so that there can be some degree of accountability around those discussions.

Thank you, cabinet secretary. I will begin by picking out a phrase in the programme for government that seems to have been worded to be deliberately open to a range of possibilities. You are going to

“Assess the potential to simplify the management of our national cultural assets.”

Will you unpack that for us a bit? What is the scope of the range of possibilities in that sentence?

I appreciate the important distinction that the Scottish Government does not interfere in individual employment matters, but the Government does have an overall responsibility for the organisation. Cabinet secretary, since taking on your current remit, have you reached a view not just about mistakes that may have been made on the internal governance of the organisation but about mistakes that may have been made by the Government in the run-up to what began as a bit of a bumpy road and ended up as a full-scale crisis for the organisation, which is still not resolved?

We will certainly keep an eye on that.

The Government is committed to a bill on culture, although it is not a year 1 legislative commitment. Pauline Stafford has some questions in mind on that theme.

We will have a couple of follow-up questions—one from me and then one from David Green—and then we will move on.

Any change in this kind of architecture includes possibilities of improvement or worsening—change can work well or work badly. I do not want to downplay the opportunity for improvement. However, is there a risk that, in this area, the UK moves away from a four-nations approach and begins to treat Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as though they were on a par with England’s regions? In that scenario, we would no longer see four Governments interacting on a four-nations basis; instead, we would see one Government effectively treating nations and regions as equivalents.

The worry is, though, that the arrangement relies on good will. That good will can change the next time the UK Government changes.