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Finance and Constitution Committee 27 February 2019

27 Feb 2019 · S5 · Finance and Constitution Committee

Item of business

Common Frameworks

Ian Davidson (Scottish Government) Watch on SPTV

We have had discussed this a bit in previous committee sessions. It is not that those areas in their totality are subject to internal market arrangements; rather, it is that, in each of those areas—this potentially applies to any of the 153 areas of intersection—there are aspects of policy in which there may be internal market considerations and in which there may, indeed, be considerations drawn from other parts of the principles. 09:45 I do not have before me the detail of those aspects, but some obvious issues come up, such as approaches to, say, food safety. There will be discussion about the extent to which it is necessary or desirable to have consistent regulatory regimes and consistent standards and approaches as well as about where there might be legitimate scope for divergence and what the reasons for that divergence might be. I will tell you a small anecdote. When we had a discussion in one of our early food safety deep dives, we discovered that water is not simply water: there is spring water, Highland water and tap water, for example. Various types of water are all possible under the existing EU regulatory regime. There has been an awful lot of what I would call myth busting in those discussions so far, so that people understand the extent of the divergence that already exists within the EU regime and understand what that tells us about the future. It is no surprise that there is a general degree of anxiety about what the future of those arrangements would be on leaving the EU. There is a sense that, whatever divergence there is now, at least there is the comfort and certainty of an EU regulatory regime sitting behind it. The process has been about trying to get to the heart of those areas where we need certainty that the Administrations will co-operate with each other, and those arrangements are a subset of the issues that come up under those areas. However, it is a very long and complicated discussion, to be honest, and an awful lot remains in dispute, with discussions on-going between the Governments about where consistency is necessary or desirable. There are also concerns about the impact on agricultural subsidy in the future. The four Governments have different priorities in relation to agricultural support arrangements into the future, which are entirely legitimate and driven by the conditions of agriculture in the different nations. Although all Governments accept that each Administration should have its own approach to agricultural support that is based on the conditions in the country, there is an anxiety about how those approaches rub up against each other, the impact on producers in different parts of the United Kingdom and whether there could be claims of unfair competition or subsidy regimes disadvantaging others. Those are very complicated arrangements, but we have sought not to leap to the conclusion that uniformity should therefore be imposed across the UK, because that would be a significant backwards step from the current arrangements under the EU.

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Finance and Constitution Committee 27 February 2019

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