Chamber and committees

The second suggestion is the one that you alluded to. What we need, in part, is a change in the procurement approach. Is there a possibility that, rather than only changing the narration of what is going on in procurement—which is what the report would do—there could be a change in the structure of the procurement that is undertaken by local authorities and other public bodies? The structure could require them to do some initial work to explain their procurement requirements, either for particular procurement exercises or more generally, and it could require them, in their work on how bids are assessed, to think in particular about social value, as that is a permitted reason for granting and awarding contracts, over and above simple financial value.

I will ask the daft laddie question. We have had LCMs on the bill in front of us a number of times and I think that we are into the realms of some very technical aspects of both legislation and intergovernmental relations. Could you outline what precisely the bill will do and what the Government is concerned that it will not be able to do, with some examples? I understand that metrology is essentially about the regulation particularly of measures and metrics around product standards. Could you explain to me in broad terms, so that we can recap and be clear about what we are talking about, what that is and give some examples of the Scottish Government’s concerns?

I understand that in broad terms, but we are talking about a bill that is about regulating how those products are packaged and the information that is presented to consumers or purchasers, because quite often, those sorts of products will be commercial. In an earlier answer, you stated a concern about divergence on that point from EU requirements, and we can see that we would not want to have fundamentally different packaging with different measures that gets in the way of selling products into those markets. If that is true for European markets, is that not also true for wider UK markets?

Are the points that you raised on the concerns about divergence from the EU not equally applicable to divergence from UK standards? Is that not where the balance that the UK Government and the Scottish Government are seeking to address lies? Is there not a common thread between your concerns about EU divergence and perhaps some of the UK Government’s concerns about internal market divergence?

Thank you, that is really useful clarification. Is there a missed opportunity here to fine tune some of the powerful levers, as you described them, that we already have? To give context to that, I was involved in an attempted community asset transfer that failed, largely because the public body that the community was seeking to transfer from did not disclose until the last moment that there was more than one title involved. That is, they were not candid and they certainly did not facilitate or make it easy for the community. It strikes me that with greater degrees of candour and facilitation from public bodies to do that sort of thing, the bill could have been an opportunity to tweak, polish, amend and improve what is already there. Is that a fair observation?

Picking up on that, earlier the representative of the FSB on our first panel of witnesses said that the reporting mechanisms that many councils use, which involve not specifying spend below a certain threshold, such as £50,000, mean that we do not get clarity on what is being spent among SMEs and local businesses. I can understand where that approach came from, but, in 2025, most of the SMEs will be using software that would allow them to track such spending, so it strikes me as odd that councils cannot do that.

Forgive me, you are slightly putting words in my mouth. Equally, if we had fundamentally different standards for weights, measures and product information from the rest of the UK that made it difficult to sell to the rest of the UK, there would be an outcry among those self-same people. There is a balance to be struck, partly because withdrawing from the EU has meant that there is a broad range of market regulation that now exists at UK level that was previously at European level. More importantly, as much as I believe in devolution, I also believe that we want common market standards and as big a market as possible, including at UK level. All that I am asking is whether there is not a balance to be struck and whether divergence is not a concern regardless of what market you are talking about. Is it not about how those competing interests are balanced?

I understand that. Basically, I think that there is a balance to be struck. Given that the bill was essentially inherited from the previous UK Administration—and I think that we are still in a new world in terms of understanding market regulation in a post-EU context—has the Scottish Government made an approach to the Cabinet Office seeking a broader set of principles and understandings, so that devolution is front-loaded into its thinking? It appears that we have found ourselves in the position of having to think about devolution after legislation has been drafted. If the Scottish Government has such concerns, is it trying to be proactive about finding new approaches to these issues?

Have you formalised that in any way, by trying to seek a more systematic approach?

This question is for Adrian Sargent. In much of what community wealth building stands for, you can see the threads of development economics. Central to that has been a focus on building actual capital—financial capital—through looking at micro-loan systems and how they can evolve and how communities can organise. Is there sufficient focus on how capital can be built? Regulation of financial providers is obviously reserved, but the level of assistance is also a factor. Could more be done to look at how to set up credit unions or organisations that use peer financing, especially commercial peer-to-peer financing? Could the question of how to provide greater assistance to the creation of those sorts of organisations be explored further?

It has been a really interesting discussion. I will more or less do a series of supplementaries and pull on some of the threads that have already been discussed. I will start with Matt Pearce. Is a fair summary of what you are saying that there is a risk of there being a bit of a top-down exercise and that we need to think about how we facilitate engagement from community organisations and whether we need to compel councils to do that? Do you agree with Stacey Dingwall that if it is passed as it is, the bill will create a set of reports, but with a danger that not much will change? Is that a fair summary?