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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?

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.

When the OIM representatives were before the committee, it seemed to me that it does not have any real powers at all.

My only other question does not necessarily require a response from everybody. I think it unlikely that political parties thirled to a centralised unitary state in the UK will cede this power voluntarily—that is probably hoping for too much—but, to me, one of the issues seems to be a political one. A UK Government will not want to be overtaken on the outside by Wales or Scotland doing something that is innovative and which takes them ahead of the game. It will not want that for political reasons, and it will dampen it.

More crucial, though, is the point that has been made about business. The one thing that businesses always say, and would say if they were here today, is that they do not like uncertainty. Indeed, Professor Horsley made that point. It is a bit like the planning system; for years, I used to rail against planning officials in my council, because all they would do was wait until somebody put in a design for a house or a development and then say no. Instead of engaging with them and saying, “This is how you can get what you want”, they would just say, “Try your best—and then we’ll usually say no.” That seems to be the space that we are in here, and if that is the space that we are in for businesses or anybody else who is trying to innovate, innovation and ambition will die. That uncertainty, given the sunk costs that one has to take on in order to develop something, is not going to be seen by people as a good prospect.

Is there any other change over and above those that you have already outlined that might help to address that uncertainty for business, even if we are stuck with this regressive legislation? Is there anything else that occurs to you, or have you covered everything already?