Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if he will provide funding for Northern Ireland institutions to hold discussions with the EU on developments in EU law relating to the Windsor Framework.

The UK reaffirms its guarantee that the First and deputy First Minister will have a seat at the table in the UK delegation for any UK-EU Joint Committee meetings which consider matters concerning Northern Ireland - a key request from across the Northern Ireland political spectrum.

Representatives from The Executive Office attend all meetings of the Joint Consultative Working Group, and they receive the same information as UK Government Departments about new EU legislation applicable in Northern Ireland (and at the same time).

We have established new structured expert groups to allow detailed UK-EU discussion of new rules applied under the Protocol across the full range of issues, including on goods regulation, the Single Electricity Market, customs, agrifood and subsidy control - with new commitments to engage earlier and more intensively to look at the implications of new rules.

We have also agreed to establish new mechanisms for stakeholder engagement within those structures, including business and civic society groups, to ensure their expertise and insight can inform discussions about how the agreement operates in practice.

We will set out more detail on these in due course.