Kicker: Common frameworks published
By Ewan Pate
THE Internal Market Act will render a Scottish ban on single use plastics such as silage wrap ineffective, Scotlands Environment Minister Mairi McAllan has said.
Ms McAllan was speaking after the latest series of Common Frameworks for rural affairs and the environment were published last week (February 3).
The frameworks have been agreed by the four UK nations and are intended to enable collaboration and manage policy divergence following Brexit.
They covered agricultural support, organics, animal health and welfare, air quality, plant varieties and seeds, best available techniques, fertilisers, plant health and chemicals and pesticides.
But the Scottish Government has warned the Internal Market Act, which established a mutual recognition regime which requires standards in one part of the UK to be automatically accepted in others, will undermine the common frameworks.
Ms McAllan said: A ban on single-use plastic products is exactly the sort of action that is needed to deliver on the promises made last year at COP26 in Glasgow.
Yet the Internal Market Act will render it ineffective against plastics produced in or imported via another part of the UK, so we have called on the UK Government to exclude the Scottish regulations from the Act.
The Scottish Government is much keener than the UK Government to shadow EU policy as closely as possible.
To meet our world leading climate targets, and protect our environment, we may have to move further and faster than our UK neighbours, Ms McAllan said.
Common frameworks are a good way of managing different policy approaches across the UK in a way that respects the devolution settlements.
It is therefore extremely frustrating that the UK Government is undermining common frameworks with its unnecessary and damaging Internal Market Act.
Imposing this Act without the consent of the Scottish Parliament is a clear breach of the Sewel Convention, the constitutional rule that the devolved parliaments powers should not be altered without their agreement.
