Meeting of the Parliament 09 January 2024
No, not at the moment.
The report also sets out a possible vision for tackling some of those challenges. It received input from the UK Government and the Scottish Government, and numerous stakeholders participated. I hope that ministers will be able to consider all the issues that were raised with great interest and in good faith.
Whatever devolution looks like in the future, it must allow disputes to be properly resolved. The continued success of devolution depends on that. Despite the number of disagreements between different levels of Government in previous years, the current formula for dispute resolution provides a new way of addressing them. In practice, the good and right thing to do when tackling such disputes has been to consider them at the lowest level possible. The UK minister talked about that.
Our committee also heard evidence that simply referring each disagreement to a formal process would provide good initiative for civil servants to work closely together. The introduction of a statutory footing in various aspects of intergovernmental relations needs to be raised, as disagreements between Governments have become more frequent since Brexit. We know that. Indeed, the possibility of some form of statutory dispute resolution process was first talked about long ago. However, placing those intergovernmental structures into statute could limit some of the dialogue between the different levels of Government. Any future devolution statement must have flexibility. Such flexibility could give us a real chance to move forward.
The convener mentioned our event at the University of Strathclyde yesterday. I commend and congratulate all those who attended it, because it brought a focus from not only academics but legal practitioners and politicians to talking about what we are doing and how we will go forward. Many of them came up with ideas and opportunities for how that might take place.