Scotland will be outside of the EU regardless of the terms of the UK’s Brexit deal or whether Nicola Sturgeon wins a second independence referendum, David Mundell will tell MSPs this week.

The Scottish Secretary will tell a meeting of Holyrood’s Europe and external relations committee on Wednesday that there is “no set of circumstances” in which Scotland will stay within the EU when the UK leaves.

Even if there was a vote for independence, he will say Scotland would have to apply for EU membership from scratch and advised against making “easy assumptions” about how long this would take and the terms that would be offered by Brussels.

Despite the Brexit vote, Mr Mundell will say this meant the Nationalists would be “in exactly the same position” with regards the EU if there was a second independence referendum as they were during the 2014 campaign.

His intervention will come after an analysis published by two academics concluded that it would be take a minimum of five to six years after an independence referendum for Scotland to become an EU member state.

Kirsty Hughes, of the Friends of Europe thinktank, and Tobias Lock, of Edinburgh University’s Europa Institute, said a Scottish application could be progressed more quickly than normal thanks to the goodwill of the other 27 member states.