Llywydd, can I thank the Member for all those observations? Can I begin by just expressing my regret that Members have not actually seen the amendments? They had to be laid in the House of Lords by 4 o'clock this afternoon. With your help, Llywydd, we scheduled this statement for 4 o'clock here—that was our best way of trying to ensure that those amendments would have been available to Members. It's not in our own hands, as you can see, but we have done our very best to engineer things so that Members would have seen the amendments. They will see them, of course, now, and Mick Antoniw is quite right to say that the amendments have to be seen in their interrelationship with both the memorandum of understanding that we have agreed and the inter-governmental agreement.

Can I just say to the Member that, in negotiations, there are, as he will know very well, trade-offs always between what different parties require? We required the UK Government explicitly to commit themselves to not normally refusing to do things in the way that we would expect, and, in return, they wanted us to commit to not unreasonably refusing to give consent. He may well be right that when you burrow beneath the words both of them are statements simply of the way things are always done, but that's the way that negotiations are conducted. If you want to gain something, you sometimes have to give something too.

He made three very important points, Llywydd, that I want us to deal with. Parity of esteem is not simply parity between Governments, it's between Parliaments as well. A very good point was made to me in the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee yesterday that if information is to be supplied to this legislature in relation to frameworks, for example, then that should be the same level of information that is available to Parliaments elsewhere, that there should be parity of treatment across the United Kingdom to make sure that no Parliament is treated less advantageously than anywhere else, and there is a real and necessary pressure to conclude new inter-parliamentary arrangements to ensure that the rights of Parliaments are fully observed.

He made a very important point, Mick Antoniw, about legislation that will follow the withdrawal Bill. Another reason why we were convinced that we needed to come to an agreement is that everything that we have agreed here, everything we have agreed about consent and so on, will cascade forward into the Bills that the UK Government will now bring forward, such as the Trade Bill. So, this is not simply about gaining ground in the withdrawal Bill, it's about permanently securing the advances we have made here in all the subsequent EU Brexit legislation.

And, finally, let me give him that assurance that if any further refinements can be obtained to the agreement that take it further forward and can secure Scotland's participation then anything that is secured will be secured as a result of the three Governments working together, and all of those advances would apply equally to us.