My Lords, I shall address Amendment 54 in my name. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said in moving her amendment, it harks
back to debates we have had on the mysterious absence of common frameworks from the Bill. As your Lordships will know, common frameworks are a way of doing business that is supported by the CBI. The amendment would insert a new schedule into the Bill. It may look arcane, or like an obscure pub quiz question, so perhaps noble Lords would like to answer the question: what unites ozone-depleting substances and Caerphilly cheese? The answer is that the list in the schedule is the list of subjects where all four Governments in this country have agreed that legislative common frameworks are necessary. However, this is not intended as an exhaustive list. It would be possible to add to this by secondary legislation if new areas emerge that require a common framework.
I concede that it would not have been necessary to have such a schedule if the dual carriageway with the brick wall in between the two approaches that the Government are taking—this Bill and the common frameworks—were guaranteed to coincide and meet. Both approaches are progressing and have the enthusiasm of the Government behind them. This amendment would be a way of ensuring that those approaches coincided and met. The amendment would help, since it identifies common frameworks without using the name.
One of the more striking aspects of the Bill, as noble Lords and Ministers keep telling us, is that common frameworks on their own cannot guarantee the integrity of the entire UK internal market. They are sector-specific and not intended to address the totality of economic regulation. In answer to every question asked, there has been a real silence from the Government, who have failed to identify any areas where the integrity of the internal market might be threatened that are not covered by common frameworks. We had reference to the threat to the sale of barley from English farmers to Scotland, which has proved an issue already resolved by the common framework. There is also the wholly hypothetical example of a devolved Government wishing to legislate for additives to flour, which is already in one of the common frameworks on nutrition.
We therefore have to manage this problem of having two-track approaches to the internal market. The amendment proposes a way of creating that gateway between the two and ensuring that there is a link between them, so that we know that we are on the same course for a functioning internal market.