Hansard

Thank you so much, deputy convener, for inviting us here today. It is a pleasure to be working with the committee on your inquiry, and it is always a pleasure for me to come back to see former colleagues and friends in Parliament, particularly as we are in the Roberts Burns room, as I had the privilege of nominating him when we were naming the committee rooms. As I come from Ayrshire, that has special meaning for me. I will do three things with my opening remarks. I have been asked to keep them very brief, so I will try to do it all in about seven minutes. I know that you have an excellent briefing from Iain McIver of the Scottish Parliament’s information centre, but I will provide a little bit of anecdotal information about why we set up SAFE and what we have been doing since our formation, and then I will say a few words about the context of the TCA review. SAFE was set up in response to the establishment of the UK DAG. When established, the UK DAG’s membership was based on expressions of interest. The first iteration of stakeholders included me, in my SCVO role, Tom Sallis from the SWA and the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, so it was quite a limited group. A second iteration included the Scottish Council for Development and Industry. However, when I thought about it—when we collectively thought about it—we had a limited number of stakeholders to deal with an awful lot of issues on a wide spectrum. Therefore, we considered how we could put together an inclusive forum for those who had applied to the DAG but were not able to become stakeholders or those who had an interest in the TCA, as well as communities and civil society, to give them a role to input and to give a voice into the DAG’s work. A lot of bilateral discussions took place, not least of all with Anton Muscatelli, who had chaired the First Minister’s standing council on Europe, to sense check that there was, indeed, a gap. There was a general feeling across academia, the third sector and business that we were in a fragmented place and that, post-Brexit and post-Covid, we had not managed to get together in an inclusive forum. That resulted in SAFE being set up. Our membership sits somewhere between 35 and 40. It is very much a social partners approach, which is open to trade unions, the third sector, businesses and individuals. We have that whole range of representation across those stakeholders. Our membership is increasing. Recently, we recruited Enable Scotland, which, as members will know, is a very powerful organisation speaking on behalf of people with disabilities in Scotland. We have also recruited Health in Mind, the trade union sector, a number of individuals with an interest and so on. We have agreed our terms of reference, which was a big first step. As I said, essentially, we have taken a cross-sectoral social partners approach. We are independent; we are impartial; and we are non-political. We prepared an information report for the DAG, which went to it in September 2023. That was a collection of our stakeholders’ views on the TCA and some early thinking on what we felt the DAG should be considering. We held an all-nations conference in conjunction with one of the sub-groups of the DAG. I know that your SPICe briefing mentions that the DAG has five sub-groups. I convene the sub-group on nations and regions, with sub-conveners in Wales, Northern Ireland and England. We held an all-nations conference in Edinburgh last November. I am happy to share a conference report with the committee if it is of interest, deputy convener. There was a lot of complementarity around issues that we felt were important and the chair of the DAG spoke about mutual areas of co-operation. We hosted a visit in November by the president of the European Economic and Social Committee, Oliver Röpke, and we signed a memorandum of understanding with the EESC, highlighting particular areas of mutual interest on topics such as young people, green energy and citizen wellbeing. We have inputted to the work of sub-group on nations and regions and its report will go to the DAG, probably towards the end of February, and will form part of a general report by the DAG that will include the work of all the five sub-committees. Our strapline is “Conversations, co-operation and partnership”. I thought it worth my while to mention that we have very close co-operation with the delegation of the European Union to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is based in London. We have participated in a number of joint events. It held a youth engagement and youth mobility event in London last October. As chair of SAFE, I chaired three sessions, where we had young people from across the UK, including a strong cohort from Scotland, talking about their ambitions for youth engagement and how they want to participate and be involved. We were also involved in a citizens’ rights conference that the EU delegation set up last December. I feel that there might be an opportunity to have more such events, where Scotland can participate and Scottish stakeholders can be involved. So far, the topics discussed have been youth mobility and citizens’ rights. I would quite like there to be an event on trade and small and medium-sized enterprises, but that is up for discussion. Moving to the TCA, I would like to think that we bring to the table today not only a wide range of participants and stakeholders but a citizen and community perspective to the work. As you will know, frictionless trade is important to the economy, growth and jobs, but it is also important to communities and to the people whom we collectively represent. At the end of the day, this is about the supply and availability of medicines in our pharmacies, the cost of food in our supermarkets, the availability of fresh produce and the safety of goods in our shops. If we look at some of the stark figures around inequalities in our communities, we find that, in areas of inequality and highest deprivation in Scotland, one in three food outlets is a fast-food outlet, whereas in our least-deprived areas, the figure is one in five. Some stark statistics support the importance of frictionless trade for consumers and communities. Finally, what would a revised TCA look like? That is quite a difficult question to answer. The answer that we give today could be different from the answer that we would have a year from now. Last night, I reread the review article, article 776. It says: “The Parties shall jointly review the implementation of this Agreement and supplementing agreements and any matters related thereto five years after the entry into force of this Agreement”. In a way, you could drive a coach and horses through that if you wanted to. Although it is titled “Review”, not “Revise”, what does the article mean to matters beyond implementation? It is very hard to predict that. There is no doubt in my mind that, at this point, the European Commission would like to take a very narrow view on and strict interpretation of the article, because it certainly believes that we have a very good agreement and is very happy with it. I do not get any strong sense of desire to expand or revise the agreement. However, that could change. That is about how the EU and the UK look to the future. Obviously, this is a year of uncertainty, with UK, EU and US elections, and all that could change the climate in which revisions to the TCA would take place. We are trying to take the broadest possible look at the agreement, as things could be different in a year’s time, and at the key areas that we would want to flag up outwith a very strict implementation of some of the articles of the TCA. We have a variety of views across the membership, and I think that that is a good thing. I will stop at that, deputy convener. Thank you very much.