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Good morning, gentlemen. This entire saga has cast a dark shadow over Creative Scotland. In your opening statement, Mr Wilson, you suggested that it had caused “significant controversy”. I would suggest that that was the least of the situation; significant controversy is where we are with the application. The application itself and the public statements that were subsequently made differ—and we have been privy to lots of information over the past few days. The explicit nature of the project in itself made it significantly controversial.

Has an assessment been made of the reputational damage that the matter has created for Creative Scotland and the sector? Can you tell us what that damage is?

In your letter to the convener of 16 April, you stated:

“Rein was originally supported in the knowledge it would be a challenging, creatively ambitious piece of experimental performance art, with a clear storytelling narrative, strong sexual themes and simulated sexual performance”.

However, it was very much the case that the performance was not to be simulated. From looking at some of the information that we have seen from freedom of information requests, it is clear that, right from the start, genital contact and sexual performance was being indicated.

Why did you say that to us in your letter of 16 April, while knowing that the information was not correct?

Thank you. Mr Holmes, do you have any comments on that?

Good morning, panel. You have already touched on some of the report. We have talked about alignment and conformity, and we have also touched on rules of origin and how things can be progressed. We know the challenges that we face: the differences, the standards that we have and the key standards that need to be agreed. Are there any opportunities for the UK and the EU to negotiate changes to the TCA? How effective might any such negotiations be?

Mr Hamilton, would you like to pick up on that?

Good morning. You have touched on the sizes of the businesses that seem to manage to co-ordinate and cope. You have indicated, as others have done in the past, that larger businesses manage to cope much better in these scenarios, because they have the means to do so. Smaller businesses have had much bigger challenges, and some have chosen not to continue with the process as a result.

We have talked about some of the existing common frameworks, and you have touched on the data that you have collected and collated. It would be useful to get a flavour of how you see the situation progressing for businesses as a whole. Your scenarios and case studies provide us with examples of what has happened and what might happen in the future, depending on how things go. The data that you collect will give us a much better understanding of how things are progressing and a road map to ensure that we manage to collate information in the future. It would be useful to hear from you on where you see things going.

Is there more need for public participation in some of that? Government and industry have a role, but could we talk about creating a bigger role for a group or a focus to which we could bring people from different parts of society? It has a bigger impact on them as a nation; they do not seem to be part of the solution, but they can be looked on as a problem. Giving more potential for such public participation—creating some kind of opportunity—might be a way forward to dealing with some of that balance.

Thank you. Time is tight, so I am happy to leave it there.

You have identified possibilities that could be problematic for some sectors. You also said that if the data is not complete, so that we do not have a complete picture, that might give a skewed view as to how things will go in future.

It has been interesting to see that businesses have been resilient. In some of the areas that you have explored they have adapted so that they can progress towards what they see the future holding. However, there is no doubt that we are not sure what the end of the journey will be, depending on where we take this. If we do not have all the data packages for the future, then it becomes even harder to analyse how successful some sectors have been or how difficult they have found it to cope, depending on the information that you have to hand.

Oxfam has strong, well-documented views on some of those areas. What should we be looking at to find that balance and make that progress?