My Lords, while I am grateful that the Minister has confirmed to me that a piece of legislation that has been made fully compliant with our single market—the deposit return scheme—will now come into scope under this legislation, because it is not yet in force in Scotland, that will be of very significant concern to Members of the Scottish Parliament, who legislated in good faith in a perfectly legal way. This Government have now said that that will come into scope, contrary to the market access principles, because it will not be able to be afforded protection if it is challenged in court because of the lack of environmental objections. I take the Minister’s point that he believes that it will be brought under the scope of market access principles, so I would be grateful if he could write to me to explain how indeed that will happen. If it is under a framework, we are back to exactly where we started, which is that the best approach on all these aspects is a framework.
That leads me to the question that I wish to ask him, because he did reply to the question that I asked about the status of the agreement made between the UK Government and the devolved Administrations on the framework agreement. In the document of September 2020 on the framework analysis, the Government repeated what that agreement was. I will quote from it again for the Minister: it was to
“maintain, as a minimum, equivalent flexibility for tailoring policies to the specific needs of each territory, as is afforded by current EU rules”.
The document goes on to say:
“These principles continue to guide all discussions between the UK Government and the devolved administrations on common frameworks.”
What is the basis of that document and that commitment, given what the Minister has just said in responding on this group: namely, that that is an ill-fitted set of agreements because we are now out of the EU? What is the status of the agreement that was made over the frameworks?