My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response to my amendments and for his assurances on the way forward that he sees on these matters.
I would like to make two points. First, I appreciate entirely that consulting on every single regulation would be a very time-consuming process, and I have seen the extent of to-and-fro engagement that goes on behind the scenes with good will between civil servants on both sides of the border. It is obviously a matter that deserves reflection and I absolutely understand why the Minister would like to take more time to look closely at it.
Secondly, as far as common frameworks are concerned, it always struck me in dealing with this subject that it is a great misfortune that the language chosen to
identify them was not as readily identifiable as “internal market”. When you talk about the internal market everybody knows at once what it means but when you talk about common frameworks nobody knows what it means.
The Minister has obviously done some homework and has reassured me he understands the point, but the particular point about common frameworks is that it is a living process. It is perfectly true that there is a list of the frameworks—some 32 of them—but the prospect of having new ones is there all the time. One of the examples is that, in Wales, they are considering diverging from elsewhere on single-use plastics. I may be wrong but our products are developing all the time and each part of the UK might have an idea that it suits them to have a particular regime that they would like to discuss and introduce.
I ask the Minister to bear in mind that it is a living process and we have to make provision for the future. That is what my amendment seeks to do. I chose the words that were indeed the Government’s words in the internal market Act, so it is a system that they were prepared to accept. I am quite prepared to discuss this with the Minister further if he would like to and welcome his promise of future engagement before Report.