Thank you, convener. Good morning, committee. I thought it would be quite helpful to give the committee a little bit of background as to how the bill came about and why we need it.
Essentially, we need the bill because when—or indeed if—the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, the existing common agricultural policy rules will continue to apply across the whole of the UK, including Scotland, as retained EU law via the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. Without the primary legislation, Scottish ministers would not be able to make changes to retained EU law. In their report from May last year, the agriculture champions recommended a transition period of three to five years after the UK leaves the EU.
That informed our approach to the “Stability and Simplicity: proposals for a rural funding transition period” consultation that ran last summer, in which a period of stability, with little or no change to existing CAP rules, was proposed for 2019 and 2020, followed by a period of simplicity during which the overarching structure of the CAP would be maintained but with improvements made where possible.
An analysis of the responses to the consultation was published on the Scottish Government’s consultation hub in November 2018. The outcomes of that analysis are being taken forward by the simplification task force, which we expect to report very soon, and the 2021 to 2024 policy and delivery co-ordination group.
All that has helped shape the development of the bill. However, the timing has been driven by the prospect of leaving the EU, and specifically the scope of the CAP from 2021. In addition, following the recent developments in the laws around data protection—namely the Data Protection Act 2018 and the general data protection regulation—we decided to take the opportunity to update the legal mechanism by which the Scottish Government collects agricultural data. The current mechanism relies on powers under the Agriculture Act 1947 and is in need of updating.
There was an opportunity for a schedule to the UK Agriculture Bill to grant the Scottish ministers the necessary powers to do much of what is set out in this bill. However, as is set out in the legislative consent memorandum that was submitted to this committee at the end of last year, the UK and Scottish Governments disagreed about the reserved or devolved nature of three areas of the UK bill.
As the committee will be aware, the UK Agriculture Bill fell when the UK Parliament was prorogued in October this year. It was expected to be reintroduced following the Queen’s speech, but the early general election has overtaken those events. It will now be up to the incoming Government to decide whether to introduce an agriculture bill and what it may include.
As a result, the Scottish Government decided that the best option was to bring forward a bill to the Scottish Parliament, and that bill is the Agriculture (Retained EU Law and Data) (Scotland) Bill, which we are discussing today.