Seòmar agus comataidhean

I work with a number of communities that are building up business cases for line reinstatements or bringing back stations on existing lines. They have been successful in getting money from the local rail development fund to do that. Those communities are concerned about the escalating costs of reopening railways and of capital projects on the rail network.

Michael Clark, why have we seen cost estimates, particularly for station reopening, double in recent years? I do not see where the additional costs are coming from.

Across Europe, Governments are waking up to the fact that we must end our dependency on oil and gas in order to create a safe and secure world. Does the cabinet secretary agree that the UK Tory Government needs to invest urgently in renewables and insulation instead of listening to the likes of Liam Kerr and Nigel Farage, who would rather plunge households into poverty and lock us into a future of volatile gas prices and climate breakdown?

What needs to change, then? Should there be a duty on local authorities, a commitment through community planning partnerships or something else to state that this has to be addressed, rather than it being dependent on, as you say, a good relationship between one officer in a council and an organisation?

There seems to be a difficult balance between ensuring that you have the conditions for creativity without overformalising it to the point that it is stifled. My final question relates to that issue and is about monitoring and evaluation. Is there capacity in the wider social enterprise and creative sector to articulate what the sector does in language that NHS and other bodies, which have harder targets, can understand, so that they say, “Oh yes, I can see that that is saving X thousand pounds”? I know that that is a bit dry, but the chief financial officers of those organisations need to see that stuff.

There is obviously a big and intricate national picture; there is also the local picture. That leads me to the question about who leads on strategy and development. Are councils able and willing to do that? Is there inconsistency across Scotland? We heard last week about Renfrewshire Council, I think, doing good work on social prescribing. Is it a bit of a postcode lottery as to how social or cultural enterprise organisations—however we wish to define them—are supported? Is there good practice to point to from community planning partnerships or elsewhere on how to do this work effectively?

How do we map out the good work that is happening around Scotland? We heard in evidence last week that Creative Scotland is doing some of the mapping but that it perhaps excludes those organisations that are working with the NHS. How do we get to grips with the extent of the work that is happening around Scotland? Do we approach that from a Creative Scotland point of view or from a SENScot point of view, or are there other organisations that should be taking the lead on making sure that we understand everything that is going on and the value of that?

That makes a lot of sense.

The Greyhound Board of Great Britain has finally released injury data from greyhound racing at Shawfield, which reveal that injuries in 2020 doubled in comparison with 2018. Given the growing evidence of the systematic abuse of greyhounds, including doping, does the cabinet secretary agree that it is time to explore all options for further regulation of that brutal industry?

I welcome this committee debate, which reminds us again of what we have lost by leaving the EU. Not only did we leave the world’s most successful peace project, but we left the world’s most successful free-trade project—a union that was literally forged in post-war reconstruction. The Schuman declaration of 1958 gave birth to the European Coal and Steel Community and started the long process of dismantling barriers to commerce. As we grew closer as a bloc, our differences in geography and politics did not become barriers to trade or regulatory innovation. Subsidiarity ensured that, within the EU internal market, a level playing field of common rules could still be flexible enough to meet the needs of individual nation states.

As Europe grew, and movements of citizens won new rights to protect their lives and environment, the EU found ways to involve them directly in the development of laws to protect people and planet. That is what we had and what Scotland was forced against our will to give up. The UK Internal Market Act 2020, as a central part of the post-Brexit landscape, threatens the laboratory of devolution that has been so successful in ratcheting up progressive policies across the UK in recent years.

The committee heard wide-ranging concerns from witnesses that the act, in the words of Professor Weatherill,

“contains a structural bias in favour of market access, and against local regulatory culture.”

Other academics stated that the act

“arguably creates a powerful disincentive to engage in legal reform or policy innovation, in response to changing social and economic”

preferences.

Meanwhile, non-governmental organisations that work in environment and public health fields laid out concerns that the act could lead to a “race to the bottom” rather than a “race to the top” in standards.

NFU Scotland raised the concern that even moves to buy local could be challenged and struck down—something that would have been absolutely unthinkable under our membership of the EU common agricultural policy.

I fear that much of the subsidiarity and trust that we had as part of the EU has now been replaced by tension. As the committee report lays out, not only do we have tension in the devolution settlement; there is a fundamental tension between open trade and regulatory divergence. As a result, there could be a growing tension between Parliaments and their Executives should they become lost in opaque common framework negotiations. On that point, much of this is uncharted territory for us as parliamentarians. We might know that 26 common frameworks exist, but only four of them have been scrutinised by the Parliament, and eight have yet to be published.

In the area of waste and the circular economy, we know very little about the position of the UK Government in relation to a Scottish ban on single-use plastics, including whether the ban could be challenged and how the common framework in that area is working in practice.

The Parliament’s founding principles are really important here: the

“sharing of power between the people of Scotland, the legislators and the Scottish Executive”

should be reflected, and the Executive should be fully

“accountable ... to the people”.

To achieve that, the Parliament

“should be accessible, open, responsive”

and participatory. It is clear that Parliaments across the UK will have to work harder to hold all their Governments to account by learning together and collaborating.

We have barely begun to count the cost of leaving the EU, but there are more than 40 years of progress still to defend. The 2020 act should concern all those who value the powers and the work of the Scottish Parliament and the value of the devolution settlement.

Is the cabinet secretary aware of the issue of people who have received the first and second doses of vaccine elsewhere being unable to update their Scottish vaccination record to reflect that? People have been advised by the vaccination helpline that their record could be updated by their general practitioner, but have subsequently been told that their GP only receives vaccination records and cannot update them. The booster that they received in Scotland is showing on the vaccination app as their first dose.

It seems to be a bit of a guddle, so can the cabinet secretary look into the matter and ensure that any glitches in how vaccination status is recorded and updated can be resolved and communicated clearly to the public?