Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener, and good morning to the committee. It is good to be here in the James Clerk Maxwell committee room, given that, after this, I am speaking at a joint event held by the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh—I will mention that I was in this room this morning.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to update you on our position on the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill. As I outlined to you all last December, it is primarily a framework bill that will provide powers to the United Kingdom secretary of state to regulate products in a range of sectors. The Scottish Government was previously unable to recommend that the Scottish Parliament give its consent to provisions in the bill being introduced. Our primary concern at that time was the proposal to grant broad powers to UK ministers to regulate products in certain devolved areas without the oversight of the Scottish ministers or the Scottish Parliament.

In March 2025, a supplementary legislative consent memorandum was lodged. That followed a Government amendment in the House of Lords that extended the scope of the powers. As the amendment did not address the Scottish Government’s fundamental concerns with the bill, our recommendation at that time remained unchanged. My officials and I continued to engage with the UK Government to secure changes to the bill that would allow us to change the recommendation.

As a result of our engagement, I am pleased to say that the UK Government has now introduced a consent mechanism to the bill. That amendment means that regulations made under the powers in the bill cannot materially change devolved law without the prior consent of the Scottish ministers. Of course, I would have liked the UK Government to have gone further, for example by granting concurrent powers to the Scottish ministers or by removing devolved product categories from the scope of the bill. However, it remains the case that the amendment removed our primary concern and, as such, represents a significant improvement on the bill as introduced. The amendment allowed us to lodge a second supplementary LCM on 29 May, which recommended that the Scottish Parliament provides consent to the bill.

The UK’s product regulatory framework is largely inherited from the European Union, and it is mainly assimilated law, which was formerly known as retained EU law. As a result, the Scottish Government expects that, subject to the agreement of parliamentary authorities, statutory instruments made by UK ministers under the bill would fall in the scope of the agreed SI protocol on scrutiny by the Scottish Parliament. That means that the Scottish Parliament will have important oversight of the Scottish ministers’ consent decisions under the mechanism. The committee might be interested to note that both the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly have consented to the bill.

Thank you again for inviting me. I look forward to any questions that you may have.

You are saying “apply to the whole of the UK”, but we are asking for devolution to be respected. The purpose of the exercise is that regulations should not automatically apply to the whole of the UK; they should take into account devolved responsibilities. If our consent was sought over changes affecting devolved responsibilities, we would expect our decision to be respected by the UK Government. That is what the law will say.

Yes. The bill that we are discussing today is a framework bill, so, if any secondary legislation were to be introduced by the UK Government, we would have to wait to see what was being addressed by those bits of secondary legislation.

My understanding is that the UK retains the right to diverge from the EU, but that it has indicated that it would want to align with the EU on environmental law and in some other cases—I cited one example earlier. I guess that it will treat matters on a case-by-case basis.

I agree with your concerns. I can only assure the committee that there are wider conversations taking place between the Scottish Government and the UK Government about a lot of the issues.

That may well be so in some cases. Clearly, in a case whereby the UK Government came to us to seek consent on any secondary legislation impacting devolved issues, we would have to look at the merits of that. We do not know what would come in the future because it would be through future secondary legislation at UK level. We cannot just leave an open door, however, because there may be some occasions on which the regulation was not appropriate. The principle that we are trying to adhere to is that we cannot just say, “Even though this is impinging on devolution, maybe it is in our interests to have the same products across the UK.” You have to safeguard against the fact that in the future that may not be in our interests, so we have to make sure that we are consulted. If you were right and the regulations were uncontroversial, we might give consent—who knows?—but the point is that we should have the right not to give consent.

I will reiterate the Scottish Government’s position on the 2020 act, as you would expect, which is that we are wholly opposed to it, because it interferes with the principles of Scottish devolution. We are still looking for the relatively new UK Government to address Scottish concerns about that. It is the elephant in the room, to a certain extent.

We are opposed to the internal market act, because we could have this legislation that deals with product standards but who knows what would happen in the future if there was a divergence? If we used our own environment or environmental protection legislation—you know the background to this—we would, in theory, potentially have to deal with the threat of the UK Government using the internal market act to override decisions taken by this Parliament. It is difficult to answer on how that will interact in the future, but that is the backdrop that affects a lot of these issues.

Thank you for the question. Our preference, because we could not see why the UK Government should object, was to ask for three things: the consent of Scottish ministers for any changes; devolved issues to be excluded from the bill, to reflect the Scotland Act 1998; and the potential for concurrent powers to allow us to take decisions under the legislation in Scotland. Of those three, the main one was to get consent given to Scottish ministers for any changes that affected devolution. There is a backstop in the Environment Act 2021 and the Environmental Protection Act 1990 for developing our own standards, which was used, for instance, for the banning of single-use vapes. Our preference would be to have concurrent powers, but we have a backstop in other legislation. As I said before, the other reason is the fact that the main thing for us was to get consent for Scottish ministers.

Only in relation to devolved responsibilities.

That is part of the debate, is it not? You could argue that the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 is the legislation that is used to ensure that regulations are adhered to across the whole of the UK, rather than the particular bill that we are discussing today. The 2020 act is so controversial because the purpose and theory of the act is to override devolved responsibilities, whereas, here, we are talking about a particular bit of legislation on product regulation.