Scottish Independence Referendum II (Scotland)

Scotland’s First Minister has today written to the UK Prime Minister to begin early discussions to allow a referendum on Scottish independence to take place.

It comes after the Scottish Parliament voted to give the Scottish Government a mandate for a Section 30 order under the Scotland Act 1998 to enable a referendum. An independence referendum held in 2014 gave a result in favour of remaining in the UK Union. 

The letter that has been sent is published on the website of the Scottish Government, and is located here. 

It is already possible to subscribe to Scotland EHS Legislation Registers and Law Checklists, as part of Cardinal Environment Limited services. In the event that this second referendum results in Scotland exiting the UK Union, then any subscriber to Britain EHS Legislation Registers and Law Checklists will be offered subscription to Scotland, England and Wales as separate systems (and Britain will be discontinued). Northern Ireland is only offered as a separate system. 

Exiting the EU (UK & EU)

Further developments yesterday and today are set out below :

(1) the UK will also exit the European Economic Area (EEA) – this involves Article 127 of the EEA Agreement – a White Paper is expected on this. This is in addition to exiting the EU and Euratom.

(2) the European Parliament issued a draft Motion for a Resolution on the negotiations with the United Kingdom – this document is here.

(3) the European Council issued draft Guidelines for the negotiations, these were issued to 27 Member States and will be finalised at the EU27 meeting on 29th April – these Guidelines are here (curtesy of the Irish state broadcaster RTE).

On foot of these further developments, Email Alerts to subscribers to Cardinal Environment Limited EHS Legislation Registers and Law Checklists will be sent on Monday.

Exiting the EU (UK)

The UK Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) has today published its Great Repeal Bill White Paper “Legislating for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union”. 

The White Paper is here. 

Email Alerts will be sent tomorrow to Subscribers to Cardinal Environment EHS Legislation Registers and Law Checklists.

The proposed changes are substantive: some 1,000 statutory instruments are expected, as well as up to 15 bills. The actions will :

(1) Repeal the European Communities Act

(2) Convert EU Law to UK Law (directly applicable EU law is not written out in UK Law because it didn’t need to be)

(3) Create powers to make statutory instruments to correct UK Law

Exiting the EU (UK & EU)

Today the UK notified its trigger of article 50 withdrawal from the European Union. In addition, the UK is also withdrawing from Euratom. 

In line with our company decision, communicated in an earlier blog post, to split the company operations into UK/Ireland and Overseas/European, the IT works for this are well commenced. To keep costs at a minimum, through what is a costly change in the UK EHS regulatory regime, we will not base the International/European operations in Canary Wharf. We will instead run these, at least for the moment, from the company’s registered office. 

Since the Republic of Ireland is not exiting with the UK, we will handle its work as part of International/European. The UK work will continue to be handled in Watford. Any changes to invoice arrangements will be communicated to relevant persons, as and when necessary. For now there are no changes to invoice handling.

We will be following the specifics of the exiting process on the website of the Taskforce on Article 50 negotiations with the United Kingdon that is set up by the European Commission for the purpose. 

The European Council statement and the UK Prime Minister notification letter issued today are found in here.