Draft Organics (Equivalence and Control Bodies Listing) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Dave Doogan Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 General Committees

[Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Stringer. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I also cannot help but notice the asymmetry in Committee. As an SNP Member, I am vexed regularly by the asymmetry in this Parliament and nowhere more is it manifest than in here this morning.

As the proposed amendment concerns the importing of food into the UK, and therefore into Scotland, it is therefore material to the devolved areas of competences, including food standards, plant health, agricultural standards, animal welfare and the environment. The Minister would expect the SNP to highlight that fact.

In January 2021, when the SI was originally to be tabled under the title “The Organics (Amendment) Regulations 2021”, it would have covered essentially the same issues. At that time, the Scottish Government stated that the SI would fall under the scope of devolved competence. I heard the Minister say that she had discussed the SI with the devolved Administrations, and that has been warmly welcomed, but there is a substantial and material difference between warm words and legislative consent. Furthermore the updated SI before us today has been criticised by the Welsh Government on the grounds of covering devolved issues without the UK Government seeking a legislative consent motion from the devolved nations.

Can the Minister confirm for the record whether the UK Government did in fact receive legislative consent from the devolved Governments? If they did and the consent was acquired, I will be able to go away contented from today’s session. If not, and it is shown that consent was not sought by UK Ministers, or sought but not granted, the Minister has a real problem. It is a not a problem of maths, of course, because whatever the Minister wants to get through this morning, she will achieve, but it demonstrates once again that DEFRA, essentially a quasi-English Government Department with very limited scope across the UK, has sought with the SI to hold the devolved nations in a form of contempt, again. The UK Government have sought, in a wholly transparent manner, to exploit the frontier element of the regulations, which deals with the importation of organic foods across territories, and extrapolate that across a whole suite of competences such as food standards and so on.

DEFRA has established what it thinks is right for England in organics equivalence and control and is now seeking to smash that into the statute of the devolved nations without the dialogue necessary to maintain the pretence of a Union of equals within the United Kingdom. In her introductory remarks, the Minister referenced “our organic standards”. Whose are those standards? I do not want to be unnecessarily abstract about this, Mr Stringer, because organic producers in Scotland of course want to export to the UK market, and the English market in particular, given it scale. There will be a significant degree of overlap and conformity in those standards, but it is about the process as much as it is about the outcome.

In the absence of legislative consent, the SI is another clear example of the UK Government seeking to wrest control of an EU-regulated matter as it returns to UK jurisdiction, despite the fact that it should clearly fall to devolved competence under the established principle of that which is not reserved is invariably devolved. I look forward to the Minister’s clarity on this issue.

[The Chair]

It is your turn now, Minister.