Well, Dirprwy Lywydd ‘dros dro’, as Steffan Lewis said, if this has always been a priority for the UK Government, then the failure to make adequate progress on something that has always been a priority is a pretty bleak sign for other, more difficult aspects of the negotiation. The Prime Minister’s obsession with the European Court of Justice is becoming a real barrier to making sensible decisions in these negotiations. Mark Isherwood is, I think, right to say that there are some intermediate solutions to this matter, but the quicker the UK Government recognises that and is realistic about it, the faster we’ll reach a resolution. There’s absolutely no doubt that in any trade deals that the UK makes, there will be an independent arbiter of those trade deals that does not reside entirely within the UK’s own domestic court system. That ought to be a solution that they can devise in relation to citizenship rights as well.

As far as the next round is concerned, I wrote jointly with Mike Russell, the Scottish Brexit Minister, for the second time, to the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union recently, proposing that the Joint Ministerial Committee mechanism should have a regular part in the monthly cycle of negotiations that the UK Government has now embarked upon, because that would give devolved administrations a guaranteed opportunity to come round the table with the UK Government, wanting to do it constructively, wanting to be helpful in the way that we can contribute to the negotiating position that the UK will take. But, without such a mechanism that is routine and guaranteed, we are left with a set of bilateral phone calls, meetings, letters and so on, which I think is a very unsatisfactory way of conducting inter-UK arrangements between the devolved administrations and the UK Government.