Top-level meetings will open door to better relations

A NEW cross-border body is to be created to settle disputes between Holyrood and Westminster, The Scotsman has learned.

Ministers are drawing up plans for a joint committee to arbitrate between the devolved administrations and the UK government on domestic matters.

The move is intended to clear the air between London and Edinburgh, amid an increasing number of acrimonious disputes between the Scottish Government and the Labour administration at Westminster since Alex Salmond became First Minister last May.

The most serious was in June last year when Mr Salmond accused Tony Blair, prime minister at the time, of ignoring the Scottish legal system by doing a deal with Libya over the possible transfer of the Lockerbie bomber to the North African country.

And just this week, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, provoked an angry reaction from Scottish ministers on two separate issues.

First, Holyrood ministers called on Ms Smith to clarify her anti-terrorism plans amid warnings that the Home Secretary was preparing to trample on the Scottish legal system.

Then she announced plans to deprive drug addicts of their benefits, without consulting the Scottish Government.

Privately, Scottish ministers were furious about both incidents, believing that the Home Office pays little or no attention to Scots law and devolved issues when drawing up its policy plans.

These were just the latest examples of spats between the two administrations, which have occurred frequently, and involved different departments, over the past nine months.

Four joint ministerial committees (JMCs) were set up in 1999 to provide a framework for policy disputes between the devolved administrations and Westminster but, because the Labour Party held power in almost all the centres of government, there was little need for them.

All but one – the European JMC – fell into abeyance.

The others, on statistics, inward investment and international affairs, all drifted into stagnation.

Mr Salmond has been calling for these committees to be recreated since he came to office last May and he now appears – with the help of his counterparts in Cardiff and Belfast – to have convinced ministers in Westminster of the need for some kind of forum to resolve policy disputes.

It is understood that UK ministers are working on a plan to merge the three committees that have been discontinued into one new JMC to look at all domestic issues for the devolved administrations and the Westminster government.

The European JMC, which has always operated, would continue, and both committees would meet regularly, probably on a quarterly basis.

A source at the Scottish Government said the idea of two joint committees, one to deal with European issues and one with domestic issues, had been suggested to the government at Westminster and had received "positive feedback" from UK ministers. "We have got reason to believe there is a positive view on this in the Westminster government," the Scottish Government source said.

A Westminster source said: "There are ongoing discussions about the JMCs," adding that the most likely option was for two committees, one for Europe and one for domestic issues.

Mr Salmond alluded to the progress he felt was being made on this issue when he said last week that he believed he was now "pushing at an open door" on the issue.

A senior Scottish Government insider said that, in general, Holyrood ministers had got on well with their UK counterparts, but there needed to be some sort of forum for resolving the disputes that did arise.

He said the Home Office appeared to have a particular problem with devolution, because it dealt with a lot of English-only matters.

That meant that, when the Home Office came to deal with UK issues, officials and ministers sometimes forgot about the Scottish dimension and made announcements that trampled across the Scottish Government.

The insider said: "They sometimes don't take account of the Scottish Government. The Home Office sometimes acts as an England-only office. There is communication between the administrations, there is no complaint about that, but sometimes there is a lack of awareness of the impact of certain policy decisions on Scotland."

In the latest row – over the Home Office's plans to cut benefits from drug addicts who drop out of treatment – benefits policy is reserved to Westminster, but the Scottish Government is in charge of justice north of the Border.

The Home Office could demand a halt to benefits but would need information from the Scottish Government to carry through the threat, the sort of co-operation that appeared unlikely yesterday, given the reaction of one exasperated Scottish Government official who said: "She (Jacqui Smith] could at least have consulted us."

A Home Office spokesman said Scottish ministers had been "involved in discussions" over the development of drugs policy and had been "provided with copies" of documents on drugs policy.

He went on: "We will cont-inue to work closely with the Scottish Executive to ensure that the measures in the strategy are appropriate."

Government insiders at Holyrood and Westminster said that, generally, ministers and officials from both governments worked well together but, when there had been disputes, these tended to cause more problems because the administrations were of different political persuasions.

They also pointed out that ministers who had public spats with each other sometimes got on well in private.

Bruce Crawford, the SNP's parliamentary business manager at Holyrood, has a weekly discussion with David Cairns, the Scotland Office minister, to co-ordinate parliamentary business on both sides of the Border. These phone conversations are invariably amicable yet, in public, the two have been engaged in public rows over the future of the Scotland Office, with the SNP wanting to close it and Mr Cairns arguing for its continued existence.

A UK government insider gave the same, generally positive account of relations between the two administrations.

He said: "There are frequent bilateral meetings – Kenny MacAskill (the Scottish justice secretary] is meeting a Home Office minister later this week. It's not an unusual thing. Relations are very good really."

But the Westminster source then lambasted the Scottish Government for "playing partisan politics" with anti-terrorism laws – a reference to the request from Scottish ministers for the Home Secretary to "clarify" the effect that her anti-terror plans would have on Scottish law.

When disputes occurred between Labour-led administrations in Holyrood and Westminster, they were usually sorted out through informal links between ministers. But even with Labour in charge in both Edinburgh and London, some disputes caused deeper divisions. These included rows over the cost of policing the G8 summit at Gleneagles and calls for the return of attendance allowances, withdrawn when free personal care for the elderly was introduced in Scotland.

A Scottish Government insider said he did not believe there were more disputes now, but with an SNP Government at Holyrood, disputes went public more quickly and were harder to resolve. That was why, he said, Mr Salmond had been pushing for the return of the JMCs.

Scottish Government's fights with Westminster further SNP's message of standing up for nation

ALEX Salmond came to power last May accompanied by warnings he would take every opportunity to pick fights with Westminster – and it did not take him long to prove his critics right.

On 7 June, barely a month after his election victory, the new First Minister used the platform of the Scottish Parliament and all the power of his new position to launch an unprecedented and detailed attack on Tony Blair, the then prime minister, who had recently returned from a ground-breaking meeting with Colonel Gaddafi in the Libyan desert.

Details had been kept from the public but passed to the Scottish Government. Mr Salmond went public with what he claimed was a secret deal which could see Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, allowed to serve out his sentence in North Africa, rather than in a Scottish prison.

Mr Salmond's carefully timed statement, just before 5pm on a Thursday afternoon, caused ructions across Whitehall, as the First Minister claimed the Scottish legal system and the Scottish Government had been ignored.

The later assurances from Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, that Megrahi would never be moved without Scottish approval hardly mattered; the First Minister had scored a palpable hit.

More was to follow.

The foot-and-mouth disease crisis last autumn should have helped to unify the two administrations against a common enemy.

It did, until Richard Lochhead, Scotland's rural affairs secretary, found himself in dispute with Hilary Benn, his Westminster counterpart.

The method here was more subtle. Aides let it be known that Mr Lochhead had called three times to speak to Mr Benn in the course of a week, to reach agreement on a compensation scheme for farmers.

The image of Post-it notes stuck all over Mr Benn's desk, being studiously ignored by the UK government minister, was an easy one to convey and a hard one for Westminster to shake off.

These two cases were opportunistic fights taken up by the Scottish Government, but others were planned and taken up formally with Westminster.

Almost every department of the Scottish Government has taken issue with at least one major policy position of the UK government, and each one has added to the impression that UK ministers care little about Scotland, while the SNP government is defending the country's interests.

DISPUTE RESOLUTION

DONALD Dewar was well aware of the potential for dispute between Westminster and the Scottish Parliament when he created the devolution settlement.

Together with John Reid, the then Scottish secretary, Mr Dewar drew up a series of concordats to act as the guidelines for disputes between all the administrations in the UK – Westminster and the devolved governments in Cardiff and Edinburgh. There was provision for this to be extended to cover Belfast if and when the Northern Irish agreed on devolution.

Central to the concordats were the joint ministerial committees, four subject committees and a joint ministerial council (JMC), chaired by the Prime Minister and which was due to meet once a year to resolve any difficulties.

Of the subject committees – inward investment, Europe, international affairs and statistics – only the European really worked.

It kept on going, meeting regularly and resolving issues which the UK, as the member state, needed to discuss in Europe, but which were also of relevance to Scotland and Wales.

The others simply stopped meeting, partly because they were not as directly relevant as the European committee and partly because Labour ministers in all the administrations could cut through the formal procedure to talk to their counterparts informally to clear up any minor problems.

By 2002, the other committees had fallen into abeyance. The Labour and Liberal Democrat administrations at Holyrood did not seem to mind, nor did the Labour minority administration in Cardiff.

However, when Alex Salmond was elected as head of Scotland's first minority administration in May last year, he started pushing for a new formal structure.

Mr Salmond knew there would be disputes with Westminster but he also wanted a forum where he could be seen as the equal of Gordon Brown, a place where he could be seen to be fighting for Scotland's interests.

Mr Salmond made a point of discussing the issue early with Rhodri Morgan, the Welsh First Minister, and with Ian Paisley, the Northern Irish First Minister.

With Nationalists in charge in Edinburgh and sharing government in Belfast and Cardiff, all three politicians realised that the cosy relationship with Westminster which had existed before had to change to something more structured. All three agreed to push for the change and their joint lobbying of Westminster now seems to have had an effect.

Mr Salmond remarked last week, after a meeting with Mr Paisley, that he believed he was now "pushing at an open door" on the issue.

Although no timescale has been agreed for the resumption of the JMCs, at least in a single domestic form, it does seem to be a question of when, and not if, the new body gets the go-ahead.