European Affairs Committee
28 April 2026
No chapters available yet
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
European Affairs Committee House of Lords
00:07 - 01:40
Speaker 1
Good morning, and welcome to this session of the House of Lords Select Committee on European Affairs where we're taking evidence for our inquiry into the issue of dynamic alignment. We're delighted to welcome as our witness today, Lord Beau, who is emeritus professor of Irish politics at Queen's University Belfast, professor Joe Hunt, professor of law, Cardiff School of Law and Politics at the University of Cardiff, and joining us online, doctor Liza Clare Whitten, research fellow of the School of Law at Queen's University Belfast. This is a public session. It's being broadcast. There will be a transcript made of the session, and you will be provided with a draft so you can correct any errors that you find.
And we hope to be done within broadly one hour. We've got quite a lot of ground to cover, so to keep within that time scale or thereabouts, if both questions and answers could be reasonably succinct, please, I'd be very grateful. And let me get us started by offering by asking a sort of general question of all three of our witnesses. And the government is negotiating three new agreements with The UK, an SPS agreement, an emissions trading scheme linkage, and then perhaps in rather slower time, potential UK participation in the EU internal electricity market. The obvious question, will these agreements engage devolved competencies?
If so, which competencies and of which devolved nation or nations? Professor Hunt, would you like to start us off?
01:40 - 02:01
Speaker 2
Yes. Indeed. Thank you very much. I'll speak to the system I know best, that in Wales, but I can also make comment about the Scottish system as well. And the Government of Wales Act, which governs devolved powers to Wales, had a very different starting point to the Scottish legislation, the Scottish Act, but they have definitely moved closer together.
The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers
Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.
The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.
Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.