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I wonder to what extent you still have an eye on the European Union. Arguably, the EU is the world’s most successful single market, which manages a degree of regulatory divergence between member states in that market. Do you still look across to Europe to see how good practice is developed and how businesses are managing regulatory divergence in their sectors? What can we learn from that?

Is that advice fed into the common frameworks process? If particular issues come up relating to single-use plastics or anything else, would you offer advice? Have you been asked for advice?

You work with businesses, so are there particular scales or types of businesses that are more integrated in the European market and have more experience of working within different regulatory set-ups? In your report, you mention deposit return schemes. Different deposit return schemes operate across the member states in Europe. Some companies will supply to only one scheme, but some will work across the continent and will engage with different models. I am interested in which business sectors are particularly adept at working within that larger internal market and which have concerns about divergence if they are working in one particular market but not in others.

You talked about the need to return to a constitutional norm. The evidence that we had from retired former civil servants suggested that the situation that we are in right now is anything but normal. What does that path look like practically? Going forward, what does a renegotiation or a new basis or understanding look like, and how would you get to that point?

I am interested in the detail of how the additional procedural steps were brought in, because I do not think that that has been examined.

I will move on to another issue that the committee has looked at—the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. Cabinet secretary, you have previously voiced to the committee your concerns about the laws in schedule 1 to the bill that might be thrown off the cliff edge. One of them concerns air quality. When the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Net Zero and Just Transition spoke to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee this week, she said that a director general had declined a request to remove from the schedule the relevant laws in relation to air quality, and that she would be seeking to escalate a further request to her ministerial counterparts. She pointed to the fact that you will be leading the work on that. Can you give us a sense of what the process now is? You have made a request to retain the important laws that you do not want to be removed through schedule 1 of that bill. Where do you go now that you have had a flat refusal to retain those laws? What does that process look like?

I am glad that you mentioned WHALE Arts, cabinet secretary, because one of the themes that have come through in the inquiry is the power of such community creative organisations, which are driving and developing community and are hitting a lot of objectives around regeneration, education and inclusion. Those objectives would sit well within community planning partnerships, but another aspect of the inquiry is that we have found that there is a bit of a mismatch there. Cultural organisations and the cultural and creative sector are not always represented in the CPP structure. Do you recognise that? If you see creative organisations as being critical to the delivery of community in place and those wider objectives, how do we embed what the creative sector does much more into the planning structure, where discussions about funding, outcomes and partnership working can be taken at more of a strategic level?

You mentioned arts development officers, which might be called different things in different places. It seems that Creative Scotland has had to step in to provide some of the development work on the ground, with the Culture Collective being an example of that. Where does that balance sit now? Do you see more of a role for national organisations to provide the glue and the link between opportunities and what exists on the ground? Alternatively, should local authorities or partners at a local level be funding and supporting that?

Yes. Political will is a precondition, and that does not exist.

I will pick up on a couple of specific issues. On the deposit return scheme, you say in your response to the committee that

“the Scottish Government was following the agreed and published process to obtain an exclusion to the Internal Market Act ... when UK Ministers intervened and created new procedural steps that are not part of that process”.

Can you go into a little more detail on that?

What is the process? We have just heard that the process for the deposit return scheme was, in effect, being made up as we went along—not by the Scottish Government, but by the UK Government. Is there any certainty as to what the process is now? Is it about repeated meetings between ministerial counterparts who are all trying to win the argument? Is there a point at which things can be escalated, and to whom would they be escalated? Who leads on that? It feels as though we are running out of time with the bill. September is the real deadline, is it not?